“Wuthering Heights”: did a Valentine release date miss the point?
Emerald Fennell’s new film, “Wuthering Heights”, starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, was released on 13 February in cinemas, the day before St. Valentine’s Day. Dr Danielle Marian Dove, lecturer in Victorian Studies at the University of Surrey, looks at why the romantic release date is a strange choice for an adaptation based on a novel that horrified Victorian readers and reviewers with its violence, cruelty, and transgressive morality.
In 1848, The Examiner described Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel as ‘wild, confused, disjointed, and improbable’ (21), while a later published review of 1852 called it a ‘wicked book’ (New Monthly Magazine, 1852, 295). While many reviewers acknowledged the power and intensity of the work, most were united in their horror over Brontë’s portrayal of Heathcliff in particular. Far from the misunderstood romantic hero of the new film adaptation, Brontë’s Heathcliff is cruel and vindictive. In the novel he returns to Wuthering Heights not to reclaim Cathy but to exact his revenge on Edgar and Hindley. He torments his wife Isabella, whom he marries to spite both Cathy and Edgar, and he extends his campaign of retribution onto the next generation (a fact the film, which focuses only on the first part of the novel, curiously overlooks).
While Fennell’s filmic offering presents Cathy and Heathcliff’s relationship as a steamy Hollywood love story, the relationship in the novel on which it is set is largely unerotic. Cathy and Heathcliff’s pseudo-incestuous relationship which begins when they are brought up together as siblings is never, as far as the book tells us, actually consummated. In fact, despite her famous declaration that Heathcliff is ‘more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same’ (81), Cathy chooses to marry Edgar Linton instead of her childhood playmate, because ‘he is handsome […] And he will be rich, and I shall like to be the greatest woman of the neighbourhood’ (78). Her choice is not driven by financial necessity but pride and practicality. As she explains to Nelly Dean: ‘It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff’ (81).
That this is Fennell’s own version of the novel is apparent in her use of double quotation marks in the film’s title, “Wuthering Heights”. This is not, then, a film that is concerned with strict fidelity to the novel on which it is based, but rather a film that rewrites Brontë’s Wuthering Heights into a tragic love story instead of the Gothic tale of obsession, revenge and manipulation that it represents.
“Wuthering Heights” was released in cinemas Friday 13 February 2026.
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