Why ‘Wuthering Heights’ Still Matters—On Screen and in Scholarship
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The Love Story… Just in Time for Valentine’s Day?
A new film adaptation of Wuthering Heights starring Margot Robbie as Catherine Earnshaw and Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff is arriving in cinemas Valentine’s Day weekend, a prime release date for romance, windswept declarations, and tragic devotion.
Nearly 180 years after Emily Brontë published her only novel, the story of Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff is once again being framed for modern audiences as one of literature’s greatest love stories.
But readers and scholars have long known it’s not quite that simple.
Long before the latest film release researchers were asking why Wuthering Heights keeps returning to our screens, stages, and syllabi. What is it about this novel that makes every generation want to tell it again, even when its vision of love is as destructive as it is passionate?
What is Wuthering Heights About, and Why is it Still Relevant?
Set between the remote farmhouse of Wuthering Heights and the more refined Thrushcross Grange, the novel follows the intense bond between Catherine Earnshaw and the orphaned Heathcliff, whose relationship shapes and damages two generations.
On the surface, it’s a story of love thwarted by class and circumstance. But it’s also a gothic tale of revenge, inheritance, cruelty, and emotional extremity, played out across the wild landscapes of the Yorkshire moors. Heathcliff has been read as everything from romantic anti-hero to embodiment of obsession and rage; Catherine as passionate rebel, social conformist, or psychologically divided heroine.
This richness is part of why the novel endures. It refuses to sit neatly in one genre. It is a romance, a ghost story, a social critique, and a psychological drama all at once, which means every adaptation must decide which Wuthering Heights it wants to show us.
Why Every Generation Reinterprets Heathcliff and Cathy
Each new adaptation asks familiar but unsettled questions:
Is Heathcliff a brooding romantic hero or a figure of vengeance and emotional violence?
Is Catherine a tragic soulmate, or someone torn between desire, status, and self-preservation?
How should their relationship be portrayed in an era newly alert to power, gender, and social inequality?
Contemporary adaptations often spark debate about how Heathcliff’s outsider status and social marginalisation should be represented on screen, and how modern audiences interpret a relationship that can look as troubling as it is intense. The same story that once epitomized grand romantic passion may now provoke very different emotional and ethical responses.
That tension is part of the novel’s power and a key reason it remains so adaptable.
Wuthering Heights Across Cultures
This adaptability isn’t limited to modern screen versions. Scholars have shown how Wuthering Heights has been reshaped across radically different cultural and historical contexts. In ‘Nationalist Discourse in Wartime (1937–1945): Wuthering Heights in China,’ Li Min notes that “the tragic story of Wuthering Heights resonates strongly with the fate of modern China,” as the novel’s atmosphere of suffering and emotional extremity was reinterpreted to reflect national crisis.
Another study, Immortal Love, explores a Turkish film adaptation that relocates the story to a new cultural landscape while preserving its core of destructive, all-consuming passion. Together, these examples show how Brontë’s novel travels across borders and eras, continually rewritten to speak to local histories, audiences, and emotional realities.
What Scholars Mean by “Adapting” Wuthering Heights
For researchers, adaptation is about more than turning a novel into a film. It includes stage productions, literary rewritings, translations, and reinterpretations in different historical and cultural contexts.
Scholars explore how:
Different eras emphasise romance, horror, or social critique
Film and television reshape narrative voice and structure
Cultural context changes how characters like Heathcliff are understood
Audiences’ changing ideas about love, morality, and identity throughout different generations shape each new version
In other words, adaptation is not just repetition—it’s reinvention
Why Scholarship Matters Alongside the 2026 Adaptation
A Valentine’s Day film release may spotlight the story’s legendary romance, but Wuthering Heights has never meant just one thing. Every new adaptation adds another layer to an already complex work of art, one that invites argument as much as admiration.
Scholarship helps us understand why we keep returning to this novel, why its characters still unsettle us, and how each retelling reflects the values and anxieties of its moment.
Exploring Wuthering Heights Through Open Access Research
For those curious to explore these questions more deeply, Taylor & Francis has made a special collection of research on adapting Wuthering Heights free to read until the end of April.
The collection highlights just how far Wuthering Heights has travelled across forms and cultures. Essays explore adaptations for radio, stage, film, and even opera—from early British screen versions and mid-century radio dramatizations to international reinterpretations by filmmakers such as Luis Buñuel, Yoshishige Yoshida, and Metin Erksan. Other studies place these adaptations in their political and historical moments, from wartime China to postwar European performance traditions, while one article traces the enduring cinematic image of the “hilltop lovers” shaped by Hollywood. Taken together, the research presents Wuthering Heights as a global cultural text that is endlessly reimagined, yet never fully detached from the emotional intensity of Brontë’s original novel.
For students writing essays, researchers working on adaptation, or educators teaching the novel alongside film, the collection offers a chance to see how a single 19th-century text continues to generate new questions and new meanings.