Wuthering Heights is at its heart a story of class and race. Emerald Fennell has got it all wrong | Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett

. UK edition

Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie in Emerald Fennell’s film of Wuthering Heights.
Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie in Emerald Fennell’s film of Wuthering Heights. Photograph: 2026 Warner Bros. Ent/PA

By turning the novel into just a corset-heaving love story, the director has stripped it of what made it so boundary-pushing, says Guardian columnist Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett

It’s difficult, when watching Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights”, not to imagine what Emily Brontë would have made of it. Before I get into it, I feel obliged to state that although I love the book I am not a purist. I often relish creative reinterpretations of classics. Admittedly, this one came with a fair few red flags, from the casting of Margot Robbie (simply too old, Cathy is a teenager) and Jacob Elordi (simply too white, Heathcliff, while his origins are uncertain, is described as darker skinned) to the unhinged marketing and crass brand tie-ins.

Nevertheless, I was still excited to see it. So why did I leave the cinema not only bored, but feeling a little bit sad? Fennell said she wanted to make the film she imagined at 14, the age at which many of us read the novel in English class. Fennell focuses almost entirely on the “love story” at the expense of almost all of the novel’s other themes. Of course, if you’re a teenager in love, the doomed connection between Cathy and Heathcliff does captivate, although as an abuser who hangs a dog, Heathcliff is not exactly fanciable. I do understand the impulse behind Fennell’s fan-fictiony desire to have them consummate their love, when Brontë, who probably never touched a man her entire life, left all that desire unrealised. Horniness at the expense of all else, however, can feel terribly hollow.

Even at 14, most students understand that the novel is not really a love story, let alone “the greatest love story of all time”, and is about far more besides. Namely: revenge, class struggle, power, whiteness, the violence of a system that worships it and generational trauma. Heathcliff is a child, likely of foreign origin, who is plucked from the streets of Liverpool by Cathy’s father, only to be horribly neglected and abused and, he thinks, rejected by Cathy – because of his poverty and his brownness. He spends the second half of the novel exacting his revenge on the next generation of Earnshaws and Lintons. Whatever Heathcliff’s origins, Wuthering Heights is a novel about racism, power, abuse and its legacy.

When asked about the casting of a white actor, Fennell said: “You can only make the movie that you sort of imagined yourself when you read it.” It felt telling to me that she couldn’t imagine a dark-skinned actor even though he is described as a “gypsy” and a “lascar” in the book. That Fennell, at 14, was living a life of privilege cannot go unmentioned. I think it’s part of why I left the cinema feeling so downcast. I am tired of consuming art by people whose understanding of class struggle is limited to the paranoid notion that the rest of us are all plotting to topple them. Fennell showcased this worldview first in Saltburn and now with her version of Nelly Dean, whose machinations destroy Cathy and Heathcliff’s love, and whose cruel inaction causes Cathy’s death. The director’s nod in the film to Romeo and Juliet and how its tragic outcome is essentially caused by servants feels almost like a tacit acknowledgment of this idea. You just can’t get the staff.

There’s something outrageous about the stripping away of the politics of Wuthering Heights, but not in the rage-baiting way that I think the director intended. Class and racial inequality aren’t just themes you learn about in English class, something to be dispensed with in favour of zeitgeisty BDSM, fish fingering and boarding-school pranks with eggs. They are the mood music of life, a barrier many teenagers are already wrestling with. As for the violent abuse of Isabella, Fennell makes her complicit in a game of BDSM and plays her for laughs. In the novel, a pregnant Isabella escapes Healthcliff’s abuse, throwing her wedding ring in the fire – a groundbreaking decision by Brontë at a time when women were the legal property of their husbands.

Fourteen is a formative age, one at which we feel things deeply, which is why all this feels personal. To me, studying it under a brilliant English teacher in a rough comprehensive, the class and racial dynamics of the novel were simply impossible to ignore. Reading that book is partly why I became a novelist interested in how class struggle can exist in the body, and the violence that that feeling can provoke.

The real takeaway from this film, for me, is about who gets to make art, whose voice matters, and what they choose to disregard, in this creative climate. For all its attempts to be shocking, Fennell’s film has stripped away all that is radical about Wuthering Heights, and even aesthetically her attempt to out-weird a Brontë falls flat, feeling to me like a two-hour-16-minute-long perfume advertisement for watered-down eau de Tim Burton. The novel’s stranger, more gothic aspects – the ghost, the digging up of Cathy’s grave – the products of the mind of a young writer whose life had been tragically marred by consumption, were also abandoned.

Ultimately, the film was an act of cynical co-option by someone who didn’t understand the molten core of this novel and its groundbreaking approach to class, race and gender, or chose not to. And that’s why it made me feel so bored, and sad.