Why Wuthering Heights is not a romance. The misreading of Emily Brontë’s classic

Romantic, not romantic

The great error of Wuthering Heights’s cultural afterlife, part of which was fueled by Stephenie Meyer’s popular Twilight series, is the assumption that Brontë intended a romance in the lowercase sense, evoking images of candlelit devotion, destiny-laden courtship, love conquering all. What Brontë gave us is Romantic with a capital R, a work born of a literary movement obsessed with wildness, excess, the sublime and the terrifying. Heathcliff is not Mr Darcy in a leather jacket. He is closer to Milton’s Satan: elemental, vengeful, almost inhuman in his capacity for cruelty. Catherine is no heroine either. Her mercurial whims, her selfishness, and her inability to choose make her a tragic agent of destruction.

How we fell for the myth

And yet, generation after generation, we keep insisting otherwise. Why? Because we want it to be true. Because we are addicted to the idea that passion redeems suffering. Because we crave love stories so intense they burn morality away. It is why Wuthering Heights ends up on bridal Pinterest boards and “best romances of all time” lists. It is why reels clips swoon over Heathcliff, despite the fact that he systematically abuses nearly everyone in his path, including the next generation of characters who never wronged him at all.

In other words, it is not Brontë who romanticised Heathcliff and Catherine. It is us.

A thunderstorm, not a love song

Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon in the 1939 film Wuthering Heights. (Wikimedia Commons)

Brontë’s contemporaries knew better. When the novel was published in 1847, critics were horrified by its ferocity. One called it “a compound of vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors.” Even Charlotte Brontë, Emily’s own sister, admitted the book baffled her with its “fiery and reckless” energy. It was not until the 20th century, amid swoony black-and-white adaptations and the marketing machine of “great romances,” that the myth hardened. By then, Wuthering Heights had been repackaged not as a howl of rage and longing but as a dark fairy tale about soulmates who transcend death.

The problem is not that people misread Wuthering Heights. It is that this misreading obscures what makes it extraordinary. Unlike Austen’s sharp comedies of manners or Dickens’s sprawling social canvases, Emily Brontë wrote something closer to an elemental scream. To call the book a romance is like calling a thunderstorm light rain.

Our toxic love affair with toxic love

This matters now more than ever because we live in an age obsessed with “toxic love.” TikTok thrives on aestheticising dysfunction: reels of Harley Quinn and the Joker captioned as “relationship goals,” playlists romanticising red flags as though intensity excuses harm. Wuthering Heights has become the literary ancestor of this cultural tic, a work misremembered as a tragic love story when it is, in fact, a warning about the destructive fantasy of love as possession.

The Brontëan howl devolves

Fennell’s Wuthering Heights doesn’t appear to be doubling down on Brontë’s storm and savagery so much as refashioning it for BookTok’s appetite: erotic trailers, glossy stars twice the age of their characters, and a soundtrack designed for viral edits. That choice may sell tickets, but it also risks repeating the oldest mistake made with this novel, mistaking obsession and cruelty for romance.

The casting of Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff has also sparked debate, as Brontë’s text describes him as “dark-skinned” and possibly of mixed-race or outsider heritage. Critics argue that portraying him as white erases key aspects of his outsider identity and the social tensions Brontë encoded into his character.

The irony is that Brontë herself never married, never lived the kind of life that would have yielded a cozy, candlelit love story. Instead, she gave us a work that feels less like courtship and more collision. The real romance in Wuthering Heights is between Emily Brontë and her own imagination, a solitary act of creation so raw and uncompromising that it still unsettles us today.

We do not need to make Heathcliff and Catherine into models of eternal love, nor do we need to sex them up for modern marketing. We need to accept them for what they are: avatars of obsession, cruelty, and the human heart unhinged.