Wuthering Heights Was Not a Swoony Romance. Then Hollywood Got Involved

When Sam Hirst teaches Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel Wuthering Heights, they often find the students who end up hating it are the ones who go in expecting it to be a love story.

“They come in thinking it’s a romance,” says Hirst, who lectures in English literature at the University of Liverpool and teaches courses at the Brontë Parsonage Museum. “And then they’re like, ‘This isn’t a romance, this is domestic abuse. This is a nightmare.’”

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Victorian critics agreed. Early reviews of Wuthering Heights found it disturbing and violent. In fact, the first known movie adaptation—a (now lost) 1920 silent film—advertised itself as “Emily Brontë’s tremendous Story of Hate.” So why do so many modern readers expect it to be a romance?

“You really see a change in the way in which Wuthering Heights is understood with the release of the 1939 film with Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon,” Hirst says. This film adaptation cut out the second half of the book, downplayed the violence committed by Olivier’s character, Heathcliff, and played up the romance between Heathcliff and Oberon’s character, Cathy.

Since then, there have been several feature film adaptations of Wuthering Heights, including the 1954 Mexican film Abismos de Pasión, the 1966 Bollywood musical Dil Diya Dard Liya, the 1970 British adaptation starring Timothy Dalton, the 1985 French film Hurlevent, and the 2011 movie by Andrea Arnold. Like the 1939 film, all five of these movies adapt the first part of the novel by focusing on Cathy and Heathcliff’s romantic (if destructive) feelings for each other, while excluding the second half of the novel in which Heathcliff exhibits some of his worst behavior.

In keeping with this tradition, a trailer for Emerald Fennell’s 2026 adaptation starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi calls the novel “the greatest love story of all time.” The director has said that the book is such a “gargantuan masterpiece” that she focused more on the feelings it inspired in her than capturing every beat of the story. The movie is, rather unsubtly, set for release on Valentine’s Day weekend, with already sold-out costume screenings around the U.S. 

But even if we allow filmmakers creative license, the critics have a point when they say that excising half the book and softening Heathcliff’s behavior results in leaving a lot of the novel’s most significant themes on the cutting-room floor. Here’s what to know about the plot and themes of the novel that didn’t make it into the new film.

Wuthering Heights is about cycles of abuse

Wuthering Heights is a multigenerational saga set between 1771 and 1802. Though Heathcliff and Cathy’s relationship is a significant part of the story, Cathy dies at age 18 halfway through the book. Heathcliff spends the rest of the novel carrying out a revenge scheme that involves torturing everyone around him, including his own son, the son of a man who abused him, and the daughter Cathy gave birth to just before she died.

Film adaptations like the 1939 version often leave out this second generation of characters. But without them, “you lose that sense of a cycle of violence,” says Murray Tremellen, a curator at the Brontë Parsonage Museum.

As a child, Heathcliff’s main tormenter is Cathy’s brother, Hindley, who physically abuses Heathcliff and forces him to work in the stables as a servant. Later, after Heathcliff mysteriously earns his fortune, he takes revenge on Hindley by gaining financial control of Wuthering Heights and forcing Hindley’s son, Hareton, to work as a servant in the manor he was supposed to inherit.

The fact that Cathy marries her wealthy neighbor Edgar Linton instead of Heathcliff fuels a lot of Heathcliff’s anger, and he takes it out on his own wife and child. Heathcliff has tricked Edgar’s sister, Isabella, into marrying him by pretending to love her. Once wed, Heathcliff immediately turns abusive, killing her dog by hanging it from a tree and trapping her at Wuthering Heights. Isabella runs away while pregnant to raise their child alone; but after she dies, Heathcliff calls their sickly son, Linton, back to Wuthering Heights to abuse him and use him in his ongoing revenge plot.

This leads us to Cathy’s daughter, also named Cathy. When the younger Cathy is a teenager, Heathcliff kidnaps her and forces her to marry the younger Linton (her first cousin), while simultaneously preventing her from seeing her dying father. This allows Heathcliff to gain full possession of Edgar’s estate after Edgar and Linton die.

Wuthering Heights isn’t really a love story

For the reader, Heathcliff’s horrific actions raise questions about the nature of his supposed love for the deceased Cathy.

“I mean, he abducts the daughter of the woman he’s said to love, and forces her to marry somebody,” says Claire O’Callaghan, a lecturer in English at Loughborough University and author of Emily Brontë Reappraised. “His bad behavior is not only because she chose somebody else, but because of the things he chooses to do as well.”

The highly acclaimed 1939 adaptation of Wuthering Heights doesn’t include any of Heathcliff’s actions toward the children, because it doesn’t include the children at all. Instead, it ends by fast-forwarding from Cathy’s death to Heathcliff’s death many years later, and then showing the ghosts of Cathy and Heathcliff happily walking together on the West Yorkshire moors. The 1954, 1970, and 2011 adaptations only include Hareton (“Jorge,” in the Mexican version) as a young child, and don’t portray Heathcliff or Cathy’s children.

Eliminating the second generation of characters and Heathcliff’s treatment of them “allows you to ignore that who he is persecuting are the innocent,” Hirst says. “You can’t think of it as a love story if you actually honestly portray that part of the story,” because “what his love actually looks like is this horrifying toxic nightmare of a thing.”

Early media coverage of Emerald Fennell’s 2026 adaptation has noted the film’s deviations from the novel, including Cathy’s age (Robbie is 35 whereas in the novel her character dies before 20); the casting of Elordi as Heathcliff, whose racial and ethnic identity in the book is ambiguous (characters frequently describe him using a slur for Romani people); and the film’s ahistorical costumes and sets.

Additionally, the new movie does not tell the second-generation characters’ stories following Cathy’s death and, in fact, overwrites some of their existence. In Fennell’s version, Cathy’s brother is dead by the time her father brings home a selectively mute boy, whom Cathy chooses to name Heathcliff after her deceased brother. The new film also doesn’t include Heathcliff or Cathy’s children.

All of which makes sense. It’s hard to spin a film as a Valentine’s Day movie if the romantic hero kidnaps the heroine’s daughter.