The Story in Brief
A tenant at Thrushcross Grange is snowed in with his unsociable landlord, Heathcliff, and asks the housekeeper to tell him the house's history. What follows is one of English literature's most volatile love stories — less romance than obsession, less tragedy than punishment. Heathcliff, a foundling raised by the Earnshaw family on the Yorkshire moors, and Catherine Earnshaw grow up in a bond so consuming it transcends class, marriage, death, and sanity. Emerald Fennell — who made Promising Young Woman and Saltburn — brings her characteristic sexual candor and unease to the material, with Margot Robbie as Catherine and Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff.
Key Differences
The narrative frame
Brontë tells the story at double remove — a tenant narrates what a housekeeper told him, giving everything a quality of rumor, unreliable memory, and deliberate distance. The novel refuses you direct access to its characters. Fennell works in a more linear, visually immediate mode; the distancing effect that makes the novel's moral ambiguity possible is necessarily reduced on screen.
The second generation
The novel's second half follows the children of the first generation — young Cathy, Linton Heathcliff, Hareton — as Heathcliff pursues his revenge across decades. This subplot occupies nearly half the book and is essential to understanding what Heathcliff actually becomes. Fennell compresses it significantly, which makes the film more immediately focused but loses Brontë's long view of how obsession destroys everything downstream.
Heathcliff's class and race
The novel leaves Heathcliff's origins deliberately ambiguous — he is described in ways that Victorian readers would have coded as racially other, and his outsider status is fundamental to how he is treated and how he retaliates. Fennell updates the class dynamics for a contemporary reading and reportedly foregrounds Heathcliff's outsider status more explicitly, which changes the story's historical texture while sharpening its contemporary resonance.
Catherine's interiority
Brontë gives Catherine some of the most extraordinary self-aware speeches in Victorian fiction — her description of her love for Heathcliff as being "like the eternal rocks beneath" while her feeling for Edgar is "like the foliage" is a precise account of a woman who understands herself perfectly and chooses wrong anyway. A film can show what Catherine does; only the novel can show you how clearly she sees herself doing it.
Fennell's erotic register
The novel implies rather than depicts the physical dimension of Heathcliff and Catherine's relationship — Brontë works through atmosphere, possession, and absence. Fennell, coming off Saltburn, brings a more explicitly erotic lens to the material. This is a genuine reinterpretation rather than a simple faithfulness failure — the sexuality the novel implies, she makes visible.
Should You Read First?
Yes — though Wuthering Heights is a more demanding read than its reputation suggests. The famous opening chapters are deliberately disorienting; Brontë is making you work. Push through and you'll find one of the strangest, most structurally controlled novels in the English language. The Penguin Classics edition with Pauline Nestor's introduction is a good place to start. Read it first to understand what risks Fennell is taking.
Brontë's novel is a structural and psychological achievement that Fennell's provocative adaptation can gesture toward but not replicate. The film is worth seeing precisely because it takes real risks with difficult material — Robbie and Elordi are a compelling pairing. But the book is doing something only a book can do, and you should know what that is before you watch someone translate it.