Readers say Wuthering Heights is a ‘masterpiece full of nuance’ – but films rarely do it justice

As Emerald Fennell’s hotly anticipated Wuthering Heights adaptation arrives this week, our community said the novel is meant to unsettle rather than seduce – and that its cruelty, complexity and discomfort are precisely what make it one of the greatest works of fiction ever written

Helen Coffey’s forthright takedown of Wuthering Heights, published ahead of Emerald Fennell’s hotly anticipated film adaptation, has prompted a robust response from Independent readers.

Many argued that Emily Brontë’s only novel was never meant to be a conventional romance, despite decades of film and TV adaptations portraying it as such – and expressed concern that the same might be true of this latest interpretation.

Many criticised modern takes that cast Heathcliff as a brooding romantic hero, rather than encountering him on the page as a deliberately unlikeable, abusive and morally corrosive figure.

Others defended Brontë’s craft, pointing to the novel’s exploration of class, race, gender, inheritance and cycles of violence, and arguing that its discomfort, cruelty and structural complexity are the point rather than a flaw.

A recurring theme was that Wuthering Heights often reads differently with age: what feels romantic, melodramatic or alienating when younger can later be understood as a bleak study of obsession, abuse and legacy.

While some accepted that the novel is demanding and not to everyone’s taste, many pushed back against the suggestion that admiration for it is performative or disingenuous.

Here’s what you had to say:

Wuthering Heights is absolutely not a love story

Wuthering Heights is absolutely not a love story and quite frankly isn’t trying to be.

Brontë wrote this book in an attempt to highlight the tensions involved in the oppression of race, class and women, and how this affects generations to come. If this was a love story, why on earth would Catherine die in the first half?

The entire latter part of the book is about the fallout and the repeating cycles of abuse and violence in subsequent generations. Heathcliff is deeply, deeply unlikeable – and yet he is meant to be. This is a story of how a marginalised outsider became one.

I am baffled how anyone thought Brontë accidentally made an unlikeable character. He is meant to be such, to showcase the lasting impacts of oppression and otherness in a society with a strict social class code.

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It’s a book about domestic violence, the pressures placed on women, legacy, property and the hoarding of wealth by men, and how they try desperately to keep it. It’s a genius piece of work, and the only novel Emily Brontë wrote.

So many women, myself included, find comfort in the fact that another woman writing generations ago was so ahead of her time.

Sigh

A deeply odd book

It is a deeply odd book, especially if you come to it from the social realism and more conventional structure of the works of Charlotte and Anne Brontë. I found it a very uncomfortable read when I first encountered it, but have found it more approachable when rereading it in later life.

I think a lot of people assume that it is a great romantic love story and find it very jarring when they discover that it isn’t – it is a narrative about a destructive obsession and a string of abusive relationships.

It isn’t terrible – it is a very extraordinary achievement, especially given that it was written when there were huge barriers in the way of female writers – but it tackles some very difficult themes and definitely isn’t an easy read.

Tanaquil2

A great novel and a great story are not the same

A great novel and a great story are not the same thing, which is always a problem with screen adaptations.

But how could you dislike a novel that contains: ‘How strange! I thought, though everybody hated and despised each other, they could not avoid loving me.’

ChristineofBradford

Finally, someone read the same book

Finally, someone seems to have read the same book I did. The brooding hero I had heard about is little more than a serial abuser, and Cathy, as I recall, is a piece of work too.

Julz

Reads ‘differently’ as you age

I think Wuthering Heights is one of those books that reads ‘differently’ as you age. Teenage girls love what they often see as ‘passion’. Mature women understand the book for what it is – a story about child and spousal abuse.

It’s not only Heathcliff who is an abuser – Cathy is too. And Hindley, and, in his own way, so is Edgar Linton.

The only character (outside the younger Catherine Linton and Hareton) who seems to eventually see the pack for what they are and has the good sense to escape every one of them is Isabella Linton. And she’s always portrayed as a weak, entitled brat.

Justicia

On a par with Shakespeare

For me, Emily Brontë’s language is on a par with Shakespeare’s – she shows us very clearly love’s darkest aspect.

Jane Eyre is an excellent novel, of course, but Wuthering Heights is something much more. It bursts the bounds of its fictional premise because it is ultimately a message from the universe.

The message is: love will destroy everything that is not love.

Mimnermos

One of the greatest works of fiction

One of the greatest works of fiction the world has ever seen – and likely ever will. All the more amazing for being written in an age when women had to use men’s names, and there was no TV (Love Island?!!!), internet, etc, to shape one’s mind.

Mike

From obscure and dull to masterpiece

First had to read it for my CSEs in 1975, when I was 15 – no York Notes or teachers’ help sheets in those days. You were left to make of it what you would.

Obscure and dull then, but now I think it is a masterpiece. The destructive nature of love gives way to compromise and compassion at the end.

Lovemycountry

Full of nuance

This is not a simple book, easy to categorise as an example of common genres, e.g. romantic thriller.

F. R. Leavis called it a ‘sport’, i.e. a one-off without antecedents or descendants. Whether true or not, it can be helpful to read assessments from literary critics who, of course, do not always agree with each other, but probably do agree that, whatever its faults, it’s a masterpiece full of nuance, difficult issues, toxic masculinity, feminist views and much more.

Geejay

Catherine is never Cathy Heathcliff

Catherine is never Cathy Heathcliff, except when she doodles the name to road-test it. She’s Cathy Earnshaw, and becomes Cathy Linton when she shuns Heathcliff to marry Edgar Linton, which creates the whole conflict of the novel.

I agree that Heathcliff is a monstrous character, but that’s the whole point, and it’s one of the reasons we’re still talking about it. It’s partly a study in sadomasochistic relationships. His character was partly based on Lord Byron’s alluring ‘rock-star’ infamy.

Jsn

It is about soul

It is set in a different era. It paints an accurate picture of that bleak, remote area and of the social mores of the day.

But that is the least part of it. It is about soul. It is about passion. It is about exploring the limits of human existence. That is where we find great art in any medium – when the artist is privileged to be inspired by the sublime. Emily was.

OkTed

Transgressive literature

Wuthering Heights is not supposed to be the epitome of romantic literature, if you imagine romance in a 21st-century idea of healthy relationships.

The 19th-century idea of romance was that it involved inherently unstable individuals whose self-destructive passions challenged the staid orthodoxy of acceptable society.

You are not meant to admire any of the characters or identify with them. Through the violence and sociopathic behaviour in the novel, Emily Brontë was allowing her deep frustration with her life, cooped up in a lonely house, to express itself through transgressive literature.

shegelu

A deliberate literary device

The recurring names are not confusion for confusion’s sake – they are a deliberate literary device.

Emily Brontë uses them to emphasise the cycles of passion, revenge and inheritance. This structuring is one of the reasons the book is such a masterpiece.

Musil

Some of the comments have been edited for this article for brevity and clarity.

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