How ‘Wuthering Heights’ Pushed Victorian Boundaries

When Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights was published in 1847, it was not met with wide acclaim. Critics found it violent and immoral; readers struggled to reconcile its raw emotional force with Victorian sensibilities.

Yet, the poster for Emerald Fennell’s February 2026 film adaptation appears not only idyllic, but hotly romantic; like one of those 1970s Harlequin romance novels you might have found at your grandma’s house way back when.

In her annotated edition of Brontë's novel, director Fennell calls the work “too slippery, too wild, too good to distill into two hours of film." But Fennell is not the first to turn to slippery thoughts of the story's lovers Catherine and Heathcliff. The influential 1939 film version famously transformed the couple's cruelty into a tale of tragic, thwarted love. And there is, indeed, a 2011 “Wild and Wanton” edition of the book that augments the original text with spicy scenes.

This impulse to soften or eroticize Wuthering Heights stands in sharp contrast to the novel's initial reception.

In the mid-1800s, readers were especially surprised by the story’s intensity and moral abandon—even more so when Brontë was posthumously revealed in 1850 as the woman behind pseudonymous male author Ellis Bell. One reviewer in the January 8, 1848, issue of the London Examiner called the novel “wild, confused, disjointed and improbable,” and concluded: “This is a strange book.”

Brontë’s story is framed through the perspectives of outsiders, who piece together what transpired at Wuthering Heights estate. Thirty years earlier, the Earnshaw family adopted “a dirty, ragged, black-haired child” from Liverpool (then widely associated with the slave trade), a “gipsy brat” of whom “not a soul knew to whom it belonged.” This was Heathcliff.

Heathcliff grows up alongside Catherine Earnshaw, and though the two form a fiercely intense bond, rigid social hierarchies and biases keep them romantically apart. A frustrated Heathcliff flees Wuthering Heights. By the time he returns to the estate, newly educated and wealthy, Catherine has married someone else. What follows is a bleak cycle of emotional and legal warfare that spills into the next generation. Heathcliff refuses to let go of Catherine, even after her death, and swears he is haunted by her ghost.

This does not, on its face, scream romance.

Was Wuthering Heights meant as a love story? It’s strongly arguable the answer is no. Brontë’s novel more pointedly went after Victorian social norms with its violence, cruelty, class commentary and ambiguous morality.

Wuthering Heights' violence is not neatly moralized and its central relationship is never transformed into a socially acceptable romance. "There seems to be a great power in this book but a purposeless power," wrote a critic in 1848.

Novels were widely expected to be moral and instructive in mid-19th century Britain. The furious response to Wuthering Heights emphasizes the story's "direct engagement" with "social and political conflict" in contrast to other contemporary novels, explains James Eli Adams in A History of Victorian Literature (2012).

Brontë arguably used fiction to shed light on structural and social problems like class and race, and to show how Victorian social norms politely obscured real violence. The perpetual reminder of Heathcliff’s social exclusion and the bitterness with which he returns to execute his vengeance on polite white society, make racism—in particular, discrimination against the Romani ethnic minority—a dominant theme. Dark sexuality and sexual politics are also prominent.

Jane Eyre author Charlotte Brontë, aware of the pervasive criticism of her sister’s work as shocking (and ostensibly hoping to do some damage control around the family brand), later wrote a preface to the work. In it, she defended Wuthering Heights as the product of a highly creative, if naïve, country author. Still, she mused over the morality of its characters: “Whether it is right or advisable to create beings like Heathcliff, I do not know: I scarcely think it is.”

Writing in the mid-20th century, critic Melvin Bell acknowledged Wuthering Heights walked a long road to renown, having to overcome the initial dismissal of the reading public and critical community. “Because the novel neither 'teaches mankind to avoid one course and take another,'" he wrote, “nor dissects 'any portion of existing society, exhibiting together its weak and strong points,' its powerful writing was thrown away."

This is no longer the case today, and fans and critics are now more likely to argue that Brontë’s exploration of passion, obsession and moral transgression is an important ancestor to modern stories of intrigue, “dark romance" or even erotica.

The modern life of Wuthering Heights has been characterized by a desire to see it, along with contemporary novels like Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre and the like, as bodice-rippers—to classify Heathcliff and Catherine as eternal, frustrated lovers of the deepest variety.