Searching for redeeming features in Emerald Fennell’s ‘Wuthering Heights’, I could only feel grateful the film gave me an excuse to read Emily Brontë’s book for the fourth time. Wuthering Heights, devoid of the coy inverted commas is, without doubt, one of the greatest novels in the English language. Written by a 27-year-old virgin who would die at the age of 30, it’s a book in which sex and death inhabit every chapter. Although the author spent all but a small part of her life in a lonely parsonage on the Yorkshire moors, she left us a tale that is just as strange and powerful today as it was on first publication in 1847.
One of the definitions of a classic is that one may return to it again and again, always finding something new. Wuthering Heights is that kind of book. At the other end of the scale, Fennell’s sexed-up, celebrity vehicle for Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi is the definition of trash.
At the risk of sounding too portentous, I’d go even further. This film is not simply a travesty it’s an act of desecration. It takes what has always been for me, and I’m sure for countless others, a sacred book and turns it into a soulless extended video clip in which everything that Emily Brontë created is systematically vandalised.