wuthering heights
What Wuthering Heights Still Reveals About Women’s Stories
In case you somehow missed it, a small and entirely unknown film called Wuthering Heights has recently returned to public conversation through a new adaptation. And if the endless stream of commentary, think pieces, and social media debate is anything to go by, people have a lot to say about it.
For months, the latest adaptation directed by Emerald Fennell has dominated cultural discussion. Critics, readers, and audiences have debated everything from casting choices to narrative framing. Like many others, I have found myself deep in those conversations, reading analysis, revisiting the novel, and questioning why a book written in 1847 still exposes such uncomfortable truths about how women’s stories are framed today.
Because the real question raised by the new adaptation isn’t simply about literary interpretation. It’s about who gets to tell complex stories, and how those stories are allowed to exist once they are told.
The Problem With “Women’s Fiction”
For decades, Wuthering Heights has been placed within a category often described as “classic women’s fiction,” alongside works by writers such as Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Virginia Woolf, and Emily Dickinson.
Yet these authors wrote vastly different works, across different genres and philosophical traditions. The label says more about the gender of the author than it does about the content of the writing.
Male authors are rarely categorised this way. Their works exist within distinct literary traditions — gothic, modernist, existentialist, romantic. Women writers, by contrast, are frequently grouped together simply as women writing about women.
The result is a subtle but powerful hierarchy. Men write literature. Women write women’s literature.
This categorisation narrows how female authors are read, marketed, and remembered.
The Myth of the “Tragic Love Story”
Perhaps the most persistent misreading of Wuthering Heights is the idea that it is primarily a tragic love story.
The novel is often framed as the tale of a passionate but doomed romance between Catherine and Heathcliff, a gothic love story driven by obsession. Popular culture has embraced Heathcliff as the archetype of the brooding, tortured male anti-hero.
But that framing is incomplete.
Emily Brontë’s novel is not simply a romance. It is a story about power, class, race, violence, obsession, and social exclusion. It explores generational trauma, revenge, and the consequences of rigid social hierarchies.
Reducing the story to a love narrative strips away the political and social critique embedded within the text.
And this reduction reflects a broader pattern: stories written by women are often simplified into narratives about romance or emotion, regardless of their complexity.
Women Writing in a System That Didn’t Want Them
It is worth remembering the conditions under which Wuthering Heights was written.
Emily Brontë originally published the novel under the male pseudonym Ellis Bell. In the 19th century, women frequently adopted male pen names simply to have their work taken seriously enough to be published.
Women have always written powerful and complex stories. What has changed over time is not their ability to do so, but society’s willingness to recognise and legitimise those stories.
Even today, we continue negotiating the boundaries of that acceptance.
Adaptation and the Politics of Interpretation
Emerald Fennell’s adaptation has generated significant debate, particularly regarding its framing and casting choices.
Fennell herself has acknowledged the challenge of adapting such a dense and complicated novel, stating that it is impossible to fully recreate the book and that any film version inevitably becomes “a version of it.”
That may be true. Every adaptation reflects interpretation.
But interpretation also carries responsibility — particularly when it reshapes narratives that already carry significant cultural meaning.
Critics have raised concerns that the film’s marketing and framing lean heavily into the romanticised toxic relationship narrative, emphasising the Catherine–Heathcliff romance while sidelining the novel’s broader themes.
Others have questioned casting choices that appear to overlook the novel’s exploration of race and class. In Brontë’s original text, Heathcliff is repeatedly described as dark-skinned and racially ambiguous, with origins linked to the port city of Liverpool, a historical hub of the transatlantic slave trade. Scholars have long interpreted this as deliberate commentary on Heathcliff’s status as a racial and social outsider.
When those elements are removed or minimised, something significant is lost.
Without the context of racial and class exclusion, Heathcliff risks becoming simply another brooding male character, rather than a figure shaped by systemic marginalisation.
Why Women’s Stories Still Get Simplified
The controversy surrounding this adaptation raises a deeper question: why do complex stories written by women so often become simplified over time?
Part of the answer lies in the labels we attach to women’s work.
Stories centred on women are frequently categorised as:
romantic
controversial
niche
emotional
“for women”
These labels subtly frame women’s narratives as less universal or less serious than stories centred on men.
Consider the reception of Fennell’s earlier film Promising Young Woman. Despite its sharp critique of sexual violence and rape culture, it was frequently described as “controversial” or “provocative” rather than being recognised primarily as social commentary.
When women tell difficult stories, the conversation often shifts away from what the story says toward whether the story is acceptable.
The Stories We Are Comfortable With
The ongoing discussion around Wuthering Heights reveals something uncomfortable: society still struggles with narratives that centre women’s complexity.
We are comfortable with women’s stories when they are:
romantic
inspirational
easily categorised
culturally familiar
We become less comfortable when those stories challenge power structures, interrogate race and class, or disrupt traditional narratives about love, gender, and morality.
The result is a subtle pressure on women creators to produce stories that remain digestible within existing cultural frameworks.
Why These Conversations Matter
Despite the criticisms surrounding the new adaptation, one thing is undeniably valuable: it has reignited conversation.
People are debating:
how women’s stories are interpreted
how race and class are represented in historical narratives
how literary works are marketed and simplified
whose perspectives shape cultural storytelling
These discussions matter because storytelling shapes cultural understanding.
If we continue reducing complex works written by women to simplified narratives, we risk erasing the very critiques those stories were written to expose.
Making Space for Complexity
Women’s stories deserve the same creative freedom and interpretive depth afforded to men’s.
They deserve to be:
complex
uncomfortable
politically charged
contradictory
expansive
We should not have to fight for narratives that reflect the full complexity of women’s experiences.
Wuthering Heights has survived nearly two centuries because it refuses to be simple. It resists easy categorisation, romantic idealisation, and moral clarity.
Perhaps the real lesson from the current debate is that we are still learning how to sit with stories like that — especially when they are written by women.
