Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights is controversial – but Emily Brontë’s classic novel has been shocking people for 178 years

If you've been anywhere on the internet in recent months, you'll notice that Emerald Fennell's new adaptation of Wuthering Heights has caused its fare share of controversy. But it's worth noting that this is a story that has outraged and intrigued people ever since its initial publication in 1847.

Speaking to RadioTimes.com, Juliet Barker, author of The Brontës, Lucasta Miller, author of The Brontë Myth, and Claire O’Callaghan, Editor-in-Chief of Brontë Studies – the official journal of the Brontë Society – talked us through the shocking past of the text.

"The scenes of violence, they’re so graphic that they almost go beyond realism," explained Miller. "Which is why I don’t think they can really be represented on screen unless it became a Tarantino-esque cartoon.

“If you imagine literally portraying on-screen a grown man rubbing a child’s wrist up and down on a broken window until the blood runs down. People would be running out of the cinemas.”

The 2026 movie – out in cinemas today – retains an element of that shock factor.

O’Callaghan, who works closely with the Brontë Parsonage Museum, explained: "The hyper sexualisation of the film right now and the controversy that that’s created is a complete echo of the controversy that came about when Emily published the book.

“In many respects, the fact that it’s pushed everyone’s buttons is actually really in keeping with the original reception of the text and it shows us how culture has changed.

“It shows us how we have very different attitudes to what’s provocative and what’s not. What the mistake with some of that though is to assume that Emily didn’t write a book filled with erotic tension because she did.

“There are really provocative scenes in the book. We can’t get away from that, even if it’s written in code. She’s working within Victorian conventions and alluding very, very strongly to just how comfortable and connected these two characters are with one another. And that’s the way the Victorians wrote about sex and desire and eroticism.”

She added: “One of the most famous reviews was ‘Read Jane Eyre, burn Wuthering Heights’. I haven’t seen anyone calling for people to burn Emerald Fennell’s film.”

First reaction to Wuthering Heights

When Wuthering Heights was published, reviewers were shocked by the violence.

Brontë biographer Barker explained: "It’s the fact that it’s amoral. There’s all this casual violence in it, casual cruelty. Heathcliff setting the trap over the lapwing’s nest, completely unnecessary.

“When he hangs Isabella’s dog. There’s all these incidents of casual cruelty, and the way he treats Isabella when she’s his wife. You’ve got all this awful cruelty that’s completely casual and brutal.

“The same thing with Hindley Earnshaw and the way he treats Heathcliff, too. There’s this theme of unnecessary violence. Reviewers were particularly alarmed by that. One reviewer said there is not ‘a single character which is not utterly hateful or thoroughly contemptible’.” (The reviewer is from The Atlas, 22 Jan 1848)

Among the reviews at the time, Douglas Jerrold’s Weekly Newspaper printed on 15 Jan 1848: “The reader is shocked, disgusting, almost sickened by details of cruelty, inhumanity and the most diabolical hate and vengeance.”

Controversy around Wuthering Heights has stood the test of time and O’Callaghan remarked it remains “one of the most provocative books”.

Miller added: “The ways in which Wuthering Heights is shocking and it certainly was found shocking by its first critics who reviewed it when it came out in 1847, and it’s still shocking today. But it’s not shocking because of the sex, because there is no sex. Clearly some sex has to be going on offstage because these children get born.“

Reaction to Emily Brontë’s secret

One of the most shocking revelations pertaining to Wuthering Heights came when its author’s true identity as a woman came to light.

"The fact that the Brontës wrote under androgynous pseudonyms fuelled the speculation about, and criticism of, the sex and morality of the author," Barker explained. "Bad enough that 'violent and uncultivated men' might have written the Brontë novels, but far worse if the authors were women!”

Once it was discovered the author was in fact a woman, Miller noted the “moral reactions” towards Wuthering Heights “got much harsher”.

It was even suggested that Emily Brontë’s brother Branwell had written Wuthering Heights, where some people claimed a woman couldn’t have conjured up a story of unbridled passion and obsessive love.

“It was because a group of Branwell's friends claimed (after his death) that he had read some of his novel to them and they thought it was Wuthering Heights,” Barker said. “In fact it was likely the beginning of a story with a similar setting which Branwell had started but never finished.

"The claim was seized upon by those who couldn't (or wouldn't!) believe that a woman could have written such a book and received a lot of mileage.”

She added: “Everybody always asks, where does Heathcliff come from? Did Emily have a passionate love affair? Of course, she didn’t. And this isn’t a love affair.”

What made the revelation of Brontë’'s identity even more astonishing to the Victorians was the fact she was a clergyman’s daughter.

“The Bell brothers, who were then discovered to be women, and not just women, the daughters of a clergyman, absolutely shocked the Victorians,” O’Callaghan said.

“Emily as a writer, when she is discovered to be a woman, there’s a question mark over why and how are young women, the daughter of a clergyman, writing material like that? And not layering in any kind of moral agenda.”

The Oscar-nominated 1939 Wuthering Heights film influence

Wuthering Heights has fascinated audiences since its first retelling on-screen in the silent movie in 1920, which has been lost.

“The first adaptation on film, actually billed it as Emily Brontë’s great novel of hate, and that was the silent film that came out," explained O’Callaghan

“But one of the things that’s happened increasingly over the years, particularly with Hollywood, and I guess we’re seeing that again now, is this focus on the passionate elements of the narrative, and the bond between Catherine and Heathcliff and how that is positioned as a love story above all else.”

It was Laurence Olivier’s Oscar-nominated version (1939) that controversially spun Wuthering Heights into a tragic love affair. “You can date it all back to that film,” Barker said.

“The really interesting thing about the Laurence Olivier version [is that] it turns Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff in particular, into a romantic figure. And it becomes a romantic love story.

“It’s so far away from the book that it actually turns it into a tragic love affair, which it very much isn’t. That is a seminal moment, when that film comes out. I saw somewhere somebody described Heathcliff in the book as being an all-American hero.

“He goes away, he comes back and he’s a wealthy man. And that’s the American story.”

She added: “It’s a really difficult book to put on screen. It has to be in your head because if it isn’t, there are bits of it that are so over the top that they do become ridiculous.

“That’s why I’m sure they sanitised it for the 1939 version. So many people talk about it as a love story but that’s not really what the book is about. It’s about destructive passion and about what happens when that passion spills over.”

There have been many retellings of Wuthering Heights onscreen and on-stage over the years, including Andrea Arnold’s 2011 movie version.

Miller said: “[Arnold’s version] is completely the opposite of what this new Hollywood blockbuster is doing. It’s very gritty. It’s very downbeat. It’s no make-up, no music.

“Candlelight, with a hand-held camera. It works well. It doesn’t mean a completely different take is going to work. No single version is going to get the full Wuthering Heights.”

Wuthering Heights now

A point of controversy with some of the adaptations — including Arnold’s 2011 take, the 1970s film starring Timothy Dalton and Olivier’s Oscar-nominated movie — is they miss out the second half of the book. This is a choice which Fennell herself has also taken, and one that has often proved unpopular with Brontëites.

“It doesn’t make sense in any way,” Barker said. “The whole second generation is the redemption. And the redemption comes through education, because there is the second generation Cathy, Catherine, teaching Hareton, who has been brutalised and treated like Heathcliff had been.

“She teaches him to read. And that’s how it ends up. He builds her a garden up at Wuthering Heights. That whole sense of redemption comes through in those really important chapters.”

Nearly 200 years after the book was published, Fennell’s Wuthering Heights could prove to be the most controversial adaptation thanks to her many bold directorial decisions.

But Miller said: “I don’t mind if Emerald Fennell wants to put lots of sex in it. As long as she makes a good film. It’s impossible to do a version of Wuthering Heights that is faithful to the text… I’m going to judge it on whether or not it works on its own terms.”

The 5 most scandalous novels of all time

Claire O’Callaghan unearths the five most scandalous books in history:

The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall (1928) – The subject of a high-court trial for obscenity because it includes lesbian relationships and ultimately banned.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D H Lawrence (1928) – Subject of a famous scandalous trial for obscenity and also because of its explicit sexual content.

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (1856) – Flaubert’s book was charged with being an outrage to public morality and religion for depicting adultery.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (1847) – With its portrayal of outspoken children, a governess who falls in love with her employer, a hidden wife in the attic and attempted bigamy, Brontë’s novel was accused of fostering rebellion and being unchristian.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1847) – Shocked the Victorians because of defiant immorality, extreme violence, class and social disruption, and destructive passion.

Wuthering Heights is now showing in UK cinemas.

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