Whether it is right or advisable to create beings like Heathcliff, I do not know: I scarcely think it is. But this I know: the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master—something that, at times, strangely wills and works for itself.
—Charlotte Brontë, Preface to Wuthering Heights (1850)
She played gaily with words, speaking about broken eggs, and then broken eyes, and her arguments became more and more unreasonable.
—Georges Bataille, Story of the Eye, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (1928)
I once believed, I once believed I was free
—Charli XCX, “Altars,” Wuthering Heights (2026)
Writer/director Emerald Fennell has enclosed the title of her new Wuthering Heights adaptation in quotation marks. As she explains,
“I can’t say I’m making Wuthering Heights. It’s not possible. What I can say is I’m making a version of it.”
Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel thematically depends on the irony of its narrative viewpoint, a distinctly literary technique usually elided by filmmakers. The violent romance between Catherine Earnshaw and the foundling Heathcliff in the titular estate on the Yorkshire moors, its severing by her later marriage to the wealthy Edgar Linton of neighboring Thrushcross Grange, and this love triangle’s consequence for their progeny—all this obviously lends itself to dramatization and spectacle. But the story is told not by a third-person narrator or by one of the main participants in the action. Instead, it’s narrated by an outsider named Mr. Lockwood, a tourist fleeing metropolitan life for the putatively Romantic charms of Northern England.
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