From Wuthering Heights to Bridgerton, how did period dramas get so sexed-up?

It’s been clear for some time that that Emerald Fennell’s upcoming adaptation of Wuthering Heights has an overtly erotic tone. Last August, test screenings of the film reportedly included a public execution where “a condemned man ejaculates mid-execution” and a scene where “a woman is strapped into a horse’s reins for a BDSM-tinged encounter”.

Writer-director Fennell went on to confirm that her film is a “primal” and sexual” retelling of Emily Brontë’s Gothic novel, while the release of the trailer in December, which featured some strangely suggestive breadmaking and the sliding of fingers into a dead fish’s mouth, led to the movie being dubbed a “50 shades of Brontë”.

It’s not the only period drama to have made the headlines for its raunch in recent years. We’ve had ITV’s Harlots (2017-19), Hulu’s The Great (2020-23), and Netflix’s Bridgerton (2020), to name just a few, all of which have offered sex-charged reimaginings of bygone eras.

These titles certainly seem to be a far cry away from the BBC’s adaptation of Sense and Sensibility (2008), or Pride and Prejudice (1995), in which Colin Firth’s Mr Darcy emerging from a lake in a soaking white shirt was as raunchy as things got. So, how did period dramas get so sexed-up?

Dr Faye Woods, associate Professor in Film and Television at the University of Reading, points out that period dramas have always been “raunchy for their day”. She points to the Gainsborough melodramas (1940s) and The Thorn Birds (1983), a miniseries centred on a forbidden romance between a woman and (the original hot) priest, as examples of bodice rippers were scandalous upon their release.

What has changed, she says, is that “we’ve gone through a period of increased interest in sensuality – women and queer versions of sensuality I would say – in television, and period drama has reflected that.”

Indeed, while Regency-set Bridgerton does contain a lot of raunch, it steers away from showing sex and romance through the male gaze and puts female desire centrestage. “We have a lot of sex on the show, but nothing is gratuitous…” Bridgerton showrunner Chris Van Dusen previously told Esquire. “What was our approach from the beginning? This is Shondaland, and I had a room full of primarily female writers … leaning into the female gaze is what makes Bridgerton what it is.”

The show’s director Julie Ann Robinson has also spoken about how she wanted to depict desire from a female perspective. Talking about season 1’s female lead Daphne (Phoebe Dynevor), whose experience of sexual awakening is conveyed through her desire for the Duke of Hastings (Regé-Jean Page), Robinson told Deadline: “I think that it’s impossible to talk about female gaze without exploring issues of sex and power. So I was very interested in Daphne’s journey in the episodes, and seeing something that is normally told through one set of eyes, seeing it through another set of eyes.”

Nudity and sex are also central to 18th century-set Harlots, but the show, which had an all-female creative team, presents them through the eyes of the female characters. “Everything from the whore’s eye view” was the rule on the show, producer Alison Owen told press. And the same is true in Hulu’s The Great, which centres on a young Catherine the Great’s (Elle Fanning) sexual and intellectual awakening as she navigates a misogynistic Russian court in the mid-18th century. “Sex is a really big part of Catherine in the show. It’s her sexual awakening,” Fanning has said.

Meanwhile, period dramas such as Gentleman Jack (2019-22), which is based on the real-life Anne Lister’s 19th century diaries, and Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a lady on Fire (2019), an 18th century romance between a portraitist and a woman she has commissioned to paint (the plot itself a meta commentary on the female gaze), have put queer women’s desire centre stage.

Margot Robbie has also claimed that Fennell’s adaptation of Wuthering Heights, in which she stars as Cathy, is specifically tailored to a female audience and perspective. “This movie is primarily for people in our demographic… epic romances and period pieces aren’t often made by women,” she told British Vogue.

And while reviews for the film have been mixed, one critic said: “Wuthering Heights has been reinterpreted more to stir souls than to shock and titillate”, adding that it is “truly for the girls and our desires; the female gaze is evident – and welcome.”

The rise in sensuality in period dramas can also be attributed to a rise in the adaptation of romance novels on screen, Woods says. She notes that we saw this with Heated Rivalry earlier this year, an adaptation of the second book in Rachel Reid’s Game Changers book series, which explores “another prong of romantic fiction” through its focus on male/male relationships.

Indeed, the likes of Bridgerton, Outlander and Poldark are all based on historical romance books – stories that are fantasy versions of the past and feature raunchiness that we wouldn’t expect to find in literature from the eras in which they’re set. “It’s no secret that we're based on a series of really delicious romance novels,” Van Dusen previously said of Bridgerton’s source material – a series of Regency romance novels by Julia Quinn. “From the beginning, we were definitely excited to lean into the sensuality and sexuality.”

But what about literary adaptations, why have they got so sexed-up? Jeremy Strong, Professor of Literature and Film at the University of West London, says that “one of the things we see with adaptations of literary works, particularly canonical literary works, is that they don’t just get adapted, they get readapted”, roughly every generation, or “20 to 25 years”.

And each adaptation has to get the balance right between “offering us something familiar”, which might be “certain scenes, certain trajectories of plot”, and “promising something new”. And this might be with big casting hooks, which “might take the form of some statement, like Margot Robbie is Cathy”. Or by sexing it up.

He notes 1995’s Pride and Prejudice as an example of this, which is largely faithful to Austen’s novel, barring the famous lake scene, which contributes to the “sexing up” of the adaptation (for its audience back then).

“And the interesting thing about a lot of the canonical texts that have been around is you can enter into a different relationship with those stories, you can watch multiple versions of then and have a debate about what they focus on,” he says. “Often they kind of lean into the concerns of their own time, perhaps more than the time in which they were written.”

Sex scenes in adaptations of romance novels – however historically inaccurate – such as Bridgerton typically cause less of a stir “because they’re from a genre which isn’t tied to recreating the past”, Woods says. And this is also typically the case when it comes to screen adaptations of neo-Victorian novels, or period dramas which aren’t based on any pre-existing text but loosely based on historical figures and broad events.

Conversely, adaptations of literary texts are more likely to make audiences “twitchy”, Strong says.

This is certainly the case when it comes to Fennell’s Wuthering Heights, which has drawn much criticism for its overtly sensual slant and sex-charged reimagining of Brontë’s novel which, written within the constraints of a Victorian society, was more of a tragedy focusing on doomed lovers than a love story and certainly didn’t contain any explicit sex scenes.

But when the novel was first published in 1847, many critics found it disturbing and depraved. “In some respects, Heathcliff was for readers at the time quite a shocking character, and I think it’s difficult for us to step back into that moment and experience what readers did at the time,” Strong notes.

In defence of her adaptation, Fennell has said she wanted to lean into the source material’s provocative nature. "I wanted to make something that made me feel like I felt when I first read it, which means that it's an emotional response to something,” she told the BBC. She added: "There's an enormous amount of sado-masochism in this book. There's a reason people were deeply shocked by it [when it was published]."

And for Strong, reinterpretation isn’t vandalism. “For Fennell we get the type of Wuthering Heights that we should have expected and that can be perfectly enjoyable. It’s her Wuthering Heights. It’s a Wuthering heights. It’s not the Wuthering Heights,” he says, referencing the 1996 stage musical that starred Cliff Richard and attempted to expand on story elements regarding Heathcliff.

“And in a sense one can’t help thinking that, unless you’re going to do something interesting with it, then why do it at all?"

Wuthering Heights will be released in cinemas on Friday 13 February 2026.

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