Two Terrible Children on a Windy Hill: A Rereading of Wuthering Heights
In 2026, Wuthering Heights has become synonymous with Jacob Elordi’s finger appraising Margot Robbie’s gag reflex. Before that, I only knew Emily Brontë’s book through what had reached me via its cultural reputation. A grand love story. Gothic, yes, but ultimately romantic. Just the Yorkshire moors and two people too beautiful for the world, destroyed by it.
Intrigued by Emerald Fennell’s vision of red vinyl, breasts underneath shimmering, see-through organza, and billboards shouting ‘Come undone’, I was finally persuaded to pick up this British literary classic. What has struck me, reading Wuthering Heights for the first time, is how little of what is held in the cultural memory actually exists in the book.
I didn’t really enjoy Wuthering Heights. I had to force myself to finish it. It is a novel that relies heavily on obsessive, unhealthy attachment sold as love, characters defined more by intensity than by depth, and a closed, melodramatic world with its own warped logic. I do, however, appreciate it for what it was in its time. Brontë, a young woman working inside a narrow, restrictive world, did shake things up with this feral, amoral and structurally distinctive tale.
First point of order: Wuthering Heights is not a love story. Second, there are precisely zero sex scenes. No one puts their finger in anyone’s mouth at any point, although a pedant should probably fact check that. Sex is barely implied at all, except through pregnancy and women dying in childbirth, and fashion choices on the unforgiving moors seem fairly basic. It is not romantic. The characters are not nice, or nice to each other.
A lot of this can be explained by the fact that for much of the novel, Cathy and Heathcliff are children, between six and fifteen years old, growing up in an insular world of hierarchy, cruelty and neglect. When the dialogue sounds overwrought or the behaviour implausible, it reads differently if you remember that these are not reflective adults but children trying to navigate a world they have experienced as profoundly skewed. Emily Brontë herself was only twenty-seven when she wrote the book, and much of her sense of the wider world came through reading rather than direct experience. This helps explain the novel’s heightened, almost airless intensity.
Emerald Fennell has said that Wuthering Heights left its greatest impression on her at fourteen years old. That explains a lot about the direction she is taking in her film adaptation, and to her credit she has called it “Wuthering Heights”, quotation marks intentional. I wonder what my interpretation would have been if I’d read it at fourteen. Alas, I can only tell you how I interpreted it at forty-one, feeling a little world weary, no longer susceptible to the charms of beautiful men who behave badly.
The emphasis that culture places on romance flattens what Wuthering Heights actually is. Gothic passion distracts from what feels much more unsettling, which is how systemic violence is transmitted across generations and through storytelling itself.
For me, this is a novel about memory, mythology and obsession. Almost everything we know arrives third hand, filtered first through Nelly Dean, who has clearly told this story many times, and then again through Lockwood. We never have clean access to events, only retelling, judgement and heavy self-justification from Nelly.
We are all aware of Heathcliff and Cathy, in large part thanks to Kate Bush, but this novel is as much about Nelly Dean as it is about anyone else. The whole world that Brontë created revolves around her. She is not just a witness but an editor. She decides what to include, what to highlight and what to explain away. Whole lives reach us filtered through her irritation, her loyalties and her sense of her own importance. What looks like a story about Heathcliff and Cathy is also a story about how Nelly wants to be seen.
Brontë’s characters do not behave like well-rounded people so much as caricatures. And this could be because everyone is being remembered rather than known. Heathcliff and Cathy feel less like two co-dependent children and more like a local legend that has grown more distorted with each telling.
Seen this way, Wuthering Heights starts to feel more like folklore. It is a closed, insular rural world where everything is linked, grievances are not forgotten, houses and land carry memory, and the past never really stays past. Love, if it exists at all, is almost incidental.
The Yorkshire moors are far more central to the story than love ever is, and I appreciated the way Brontë treats landscape. Despite how they are often viewed, the moors are not a romantic backdrop or a source of consolation. They are exposed, harsh and often difficult to live with. Nature does not heal anyone. It isolates, exhausts and hardens them. The way the moors are misread as romantic is a small example of a larger problem. Over the years, this book has been depoliticised into just a love story, and nowhere is that more obvious than in how Heathcliff is read.
I had heard the rumours that Heathcliff was brown and, based on the tone of those discussions, I assumed this was one of those literary debates. Something implied, maybe intuited. Subtext argued over in seminars by white men.
But now I’m not sure how it ever got twisted.
Heathcliff’s race is not ambiguous. It is not subtle. It is not subtext. Emily Brontë is doing everything short of stopping the novel, addressing the reader directly and saying so.
Heathcliff is described again and again as dark-skinned. Not as a metaphor, but dark in actual appearance, explicitly contrasted with the whiteness of the Earnshaws and the Lintons. He is found by Mr Earnshaw in Liverpool, at the height of British imperial trade, including the slave trade. He is called a ‘dark-skinned gipsy’ and a ‘Lascar’, a sailor from India or south-east Asia. Nelly Dean tells him his father could be an Emperor of China and his mother an Indian queen. I find it odd that for so many years people talked about the craft of this book, the skill with which Emily Brontë employed so many literary devices, and then ignored the fact that the details of Heathcliff’s race are not vibes but deliberate exposition.
What interests me is not whether Heathcliff was meant to be brown, because the book answers that question very clearly, several times. What interests me is why so many British readers have insisted on treating this as debatable, and why in so many screen adaptations of Wuthering Heights Heathcliff has only been brown once.
The novel is good on class. Brontë clearly knows exactly how to write class cruelty. But what she is doing with Heathcliff is different and it is racialised. His appearance is used, relentlessly, as evidence of corruption and inferiority. We are extremely comfortable talking about the violence of class in Wuthering Heights, but the moment race enters the picture, everything becomes oddly evasive. His ‘darkness’ becomes mood. Liverpool becomes just any old place, apparently famous only for docks, shipbuilding and a surprisingly great quality of cotton. Any insistence on ambiguity does not come from the book. It comes from the reader. And that has been a multi-generational effort. Over decades, the conversation has always come back to ‘well, we cannot really be sure, can we’. We can. Emily Brontë was sure. The characters are sure. The only uncertainty seems to appear in the hands of white readers.
It feels as though what endures most about Wuthering Heights is not the novel itself but how it exists within the cultural memory. And within that cultural memory, this book is a love story between two white people.
It is much easier to hold this book up as a story of doomed love than as a story about generational trauma and racialised exclusion. Romance shrinks a world of cruel power and vicious hierarchy into two individuals who were hurt and damaged simply by loving too much. No one mentions Liverpool. No one mentions empire. Extreme abuse is reduced to personality. Everything that might have made it political has been made aesthetic instead. This is a long tradition that Emerald Fennell seems poised to add to.
You’ve made me glad that I’m someone who often refuses to watch films of books I love. I love your reading of WH and this is similar to how I read it too at 17. But I was growing up somewhere claustrophobically rural and racist, I was aware of Liverpool from studying the civil rights movement and visiting the museums there, I was naive and rural but bookish like you describe Emily to be. And at the time I was unaware of all the romantic culture around WH. I too find it frustrating how it has been reduced to a sickly love story- which erases all the class and racism and religious trauma and cruelty of the story. Thankyou for this - spot on. I have still never watched a WH film despite now living in Brontë country.
Love this. Ideas about race in previous exchanges but also what you say about the landscape is true, and I hadn’t really noticed the direction adaptations had taken it in. There was a good century and a half when a truer understanding of the novel fed into the “grim up north” cliche, which northern writers still sometimes struggle to escape from. But more recently, the Sun seems to be out more than it rains, and gentle zephyrs supplant the howling gales Wuthering Heights has been built to withstand. In the novel the moors are never safe. If it’s not the weather it’s the prospect of running into Heathcliff and ending up kidnapped. Cathy and Heathcliff’s wildness is impressed in them by the moors. Even when Isobel escapes across them, she’s running for her life to the other side, not seeking refuge in them. All this feeds into interpretations of Heathcliff. His name is not coincidental, and Cathy’s disquiet about agreeing to marry Edgar comes from her dream in which she dies and begs the angels to let her out of heaven (always connected to Thrushcross Grange) to go back to the moors, where she arrives weeping with relief. Heathcliff is nature, and nature is harsh, but she knows how to live there. Tame the moors and you lose the foundation for their characters - perhaps essential for turning the unrelenting gothic turmoil of the novel into the vaguely emo romance of the 2026 movie.