Let's imagine that Emily Jane Bronte - a woman who died of tuberculosis on December 19, 1848 at the age of 30, leaving behind only one novel - somehow got the opportunity to see what happened to her creation almost two centuries later. She would be sitting in a dark cinema in February 2026, perhaps in London or Yorkshire, where her book was born, and looking at the screen where Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi embody Catherine and Heathcliff to the soundtrack of Charli XCX. Around her there are people with phones and popcorn waiting for a romantic story for Valentine's Day.. None of them know that the author is nearby.

How would she feel?

ZN. UA tried to look at Emirald Fennell's film through the prism of what Wuthering Heights was first and what it has now become.

Section I. “Your love is poor if it is afraid of a snowstorm”.

“Be with me always - in any semblance... Drive me crazy, just don’t leave me in this emptiness! “—it was with these words that Emirald Fennell announced her film. The director, known for Promising Young Woman and Saltburn, has chosen the most emotional, wildest novel in English literature for her third feature.. The choice was no coincidence: Fennell admitted that she had been obsessed with the book since she was fourteen.

Emily Bronte would probably just shrug. She wrote her book in complete isolation - in the parsonage in Haworth, far from literary salons. She left behind no significant epistolary legacy or circle of friends, so her public image is largely the creation of Elizabeth Gaskell. It was Gaskell, a successful novelist and the first biographer of the Bronte sisters, who constructed the myth of “tragic maidens against a backdrop of bleak moors.”. She described Emily as an " Her biography was so frank and scandalous that it resulted in lawsuits, because Gaskell deliberately demonized the Bronte circle in order to emphasize the “holiness” of the sisters.

Emily Bronte's novel received terrible reviews - it was called " One reviewer wrote that the book was " Emily died without knowing that she had written a masterpiece.. Her death was as extremely discreet as her life: the coffin was only 40 centimeters wide - the carpenter noted that he had never made anything narrower for an adult.

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Warner Bros. received distribution rights for $80 million. , effectively beating Netflix's more generous offer of 150 million. Selection strategy - streaming offered a full buyout without a big screen, while Warner Bros.. guaranteed large-scale worldwide distribution. For Emirald Fennell and Margot Robbie's company LuckyChap, the status of a theatrical event and potential percentages from the box office turned out to be more significant than an instant fee from the platform.

Section II. "

The casting of the film caused a storm even before filming began. 35-year-old Margot Robbie, the epitome of Hollywood glamor, plays Catherine, who appears in the novel as a dark-haired girl (she was barely nineteen at the time of her death).. Jacob Elordi, a white Australian, embodies Heathcliff, whom Bronte consistently described as a “dark-skinned gypsy boy” or “lascar” (as sailors from South Asia or Arab countries were called in Britain)..

Fennell explains her choice with almost childlike spontaneity: “When I saw Elordi with sideburns on the set of Saltburn, I thought: “Oh my God, that’s Heathcliff from the cover of a book I read as a teenager.”.

This answer is both honest and symptomatic. The director visualizes his teenage memories of the affair. She deliberately positions her own interpretation as deeply subjective, devoid of claims to historical or literary authenticity. “I can’t say I’m making Wuthering Heights,” admits Fennell. - This is impossible. I'm filming a version. The one I remember and it's not quite real. This is an attempt to embody something that was not actually in the book. So, it’s Wuthering Heights, and at the same time it’s not.”.

Margot Robbie, who also appears here as a producer, defends the project from accusations of excessive commercialization: “I understand the skepticism - now viewers only see the trailer. But this is a big epic romance. We haven't had anything like this for a long time - perhaps since The Notebook or The English Patient.. It's that same feeling when your chest is squeezing, like someone punched you in the gut.. This is Emirald’s signature handwriting.”.

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Emily Bronte, if she could hear these comparisons, would probably be most surprised. Her book about degradation, violence and an ancestral curse that holds entire generations hostage is once again transformed in 2026 into "

However, there is an element in this adaptation that Emily Bronte would probably appreciate most.. His name is Owen Cooper. A fifteen-year-old boy from Warrington, a prosaic town between Liverpool and Manchester, plays young Heathcliff.. For this role, he shaved his head without hesitation, although it came as a shock to him: “I just came to the set, and they told me: we’ll cut everything off.”. Oh god" However, it is precisely this visual austerity that identifies his character. Cooper describes his Heathcliff as lost in his own world. This is a surprisingly accurate hit on Bronte's image..

Heathcliff in the novel is not the Byronic handsome man from the cover, but an orphan, a devil, snatched from the dirty streets of the port of Liverpool. He is a stranger, his origin and social status automatically make him an enemy in the world of aristocrats. Owen Cooper, with his working English and non-acting background, brings an authenticity to the frame that is impossible to play..

Emily, who was socially awkward and painfully shy, would have felt a kindred spirit in this boy. She knew what inner wildness and alienation were. A well-known biographical anecdote about how Bronte severely beat her mastiff Keeper for an offense, and then she herself tenderly healed his wounds. This illustrates the same duality that is present in Heathcliff. It is a combination of cruelty born of pain and the boundless need for love.. Casting Cooper as young Heathcliff may be Fennell's most honest move yet.. He restores history to its original class anger, which is often dissolved in Hollywood syrup.

Section III. “He banged his head against a tree trunk and, raising his eyes to the sky, howled not like a man, but like a wild animal.”.

To understand the nature of Wuthering Heights, both the original text and any attempt to visualize it, one must go beyond the armchair literature and into the moors of Yorkshire.. The open space, where the wind reigns eternal, and the marshy ground between the hills is held by the roots of twisted trees, is a territory of radical solitude under a fickle sky.

In the 19th century, Haworth, where the Bronte family lived, was a gloomy industrial town with terrible unsanitary conditions. The statistics of those times are staggering: the average life expectancy here barely reached 26 years, and about 40% of children died before reaching the age of six. Polluted water and overpopulation made death an everyday visitor. Bronte's house was adjacent directly to the cemetery - a source of infections that seeped into the well water, poisoning the lives of the inhabitants of the parsonage.

Emily Bronte was the flesh of these wastelands. She morbidly hated cities - neither London nor Brussels. Every attempt to socialize outside the home ended in physical exhaustion and nostalgia. Virginia Woolf aptly noted: “The Yorkshire landscape penetrated so deeply into her that everything she wrote bore its gloomy and creative reflection.”. In her classic study, The Madwoman in the Attic, Sandra Gilbert interprets Catherine Earnshaw (the novel's protagonist) as a symbol of a woman devoured by a patriarchal culture - the same "

Emirald Fennell's film appeals to this authenticity - filming in the valleys of Arkengarthdale and Swaledale, and cinematographer Linus Sandgren using 35mm Vistavision cameras to capture the majesty of the landscape. However, sometimes instead of the harsh realism of the late 18th century, we see the sensual aesthetics of Saltburn, seasoned with the neon sound of Charli XCX.

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Fennell promises 'primal, sexy' cinema. Scenes that border on " Wait until you see the decorations - there might even be a dog collar." This is where the main stylistic gap arises.. The “vulgarity” that Emily Bronte was accused of by her contemporaries concerned the depiction of violence, cruelty and social injustice. Fennell's "

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The hottest point of discussion is the issue of race and class. In the novel, Heathcliff is described as a “dark-skinned boy”; his otherness is not a decorative element, but a plot driver.. The humiliation of Earnshaw and the Lintons is based on the fact that he is a product of colonial era Britain. 1840s Liverpool, where Heathcliff comes from, was the epicenter of the slave trade, and Bronte was undoubtedly aware of this context.

However, Hollywood traditionally ignores these facts. From Laurence Olivier to Ralph Fiennes and Tom Hardy, Heathcliff remained white. The choice of Jacob Elordi continues this line of whitewashing.. Fennell justifies this with personal memories of the illustrations from childhood, and Margot Robbie calls for watching the film first.

Section IV. “I believe in ghosts, I am sure that they can wander the earth - and indeed they do wander; they are among us, next to us!

The film's musical score may be Fennell's most radical gesture yet.. The soundtrack was entrusted to Charli XCX, the ideologist of brat summer (as Charli herself explained, brat is also a girl who has a pack of cigarettes, a Bic lighter and a white tank top with straps without a bra). She created a concept album inspired by the dark passion of the novel. The first singles - House (featuring The Velvet Underground legend John Cale) and Chains of Love - set the tone for the entire promotional campaign.

“I was fascinated by John Cale’s phrase that music should be both elegant and cruel,” explains the singer. It was this duality that became the bridge between the electronic pop of the 2020s and the gothic of the 1840s.

Emily Bronte, who was herself a good pianist and taught music in Brussels, lived in a world of church hymns and folk ballads. What would she think of a synth drive with lyrics about toxic destruction Perhaps I would feel a kinship. Her own poetry lacked the feminine meekness that her contemporaries expected. " " Charli XCX does the same thing, just in a different language: she puts the eternal longing for freedom into decibels understandable to the modern generation.

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Let's return to our imaginary ghost in the cinema hall. Emily Bronte looks at the screen where Margot Robbie, a woman five years her senior at the time of her death, is embodied by Catherine Earnshaw. She sees luxurious dresses that she has never worn, and sensuality that she has never allowed herself to put on paper so openly.. She sees her novel - a manifesto against class humiliation and destructive obsession - being turned into "

What does she feel? Perhaps anger. Her text is again interpreted through the prism of what “sells”. In 1847 it was “vulgarity,” in 2026 it was “sexuality.”. But the essence of Wuthering Heights was always deeper: it is a story about how trauma is inherited, how love without equality inevitably becomes violence.. Or maybe it's a quiet surprise. Her book survived. Emily Bronte sold only two copies of her poetry collection during her lifetime, and now has become the object of a multimillion-dollar investment. Her name is a brand. She was admired by Sylvia Plath and Kate Bush.

We know that Emily was working on a second novel before her death.. A letter from the publisher Thomas Newby, dated February 1848, confirms that he was waiting for a manuscript that would be “an improvement on the first work.”. This text has not survived - it was probably burned by Sister Charlotte. We'll never know what it was about.

Sales of Wuthering Heights increased by 132% ahead of the film adaptation's release..

The film is in cinemas across the country from February 12.

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