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@frederick.atkinson
#WutheringHeights #EmilyBrontë #GothicLiterature #ClassicLiterature #BookTok
♬ Storytelling - Adriel

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Chelsea 卓穎 🖤 on Instagram: "Let’s talk about the costumes in the new Wuthering Heights adaptation. Emerald Fennell‘s Wuthering Heights has gotten its fair share of backlash, particularly when it comes to the costumes. My hot take is that there’s a time and place for historically inaccurate costumes. Personally, I find the culturally inaccurate casting more offensive than the clothes 🙊

#wutheringheights #wutheringheightsmovie #periodcostume #jacobelordi #margotrobbie"

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821 likes, 29 comments - _chelseahui on January 12, 2026: "Let’s talk about the costumes in the new Wuthering Heights adaptation. Emerald Fennell‘s Wuthering Heights has gotten its fair share of backlash, particularly when it comes to the costumes. My hot take is that there’s a time and place for historically inaccurate costumes. Personally, I find the culturally inaccurate casting more offensive than the clothes 🙊

#wutheringheights #wutheringheightsmovie #periodcostume #jacobelordi #margotrobbie". 

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Wuthering Heights was my favorite novel as a teenager because, of course, it fit my angsty, romantic gothic self. I'm still angsty and goth, but now I'm bitter and jaded so now I see the characters and plot for the simplistic archetypes they are, tucked up underneath all that poetry. And since much of what makes Emily Brontë's novel great is the language, when adapted for screen, all that tends to come thru is the ridiculousness of the plot and characters. Only a couple adaptions touch at some of the poetry, and I find this 1992 one titled Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights pretty good.

Even though this is just a 105-minute film, it manages to include all the major plot points of the novel, from Lockwood to the second generation and does mostly in costumes of the right historical periods. As I complained in my big wrap-up of all the TV and movie versions of this novel, one thing that productions frequently get wrong is the story's carefully laid out timeline. Brontë writes in the book that the action starts in 1801 and is told in flashback, so the main action takes place from 1780 to 1784. Costume-wise, this means we should see two distinct eras in clothing: the flashback / main story is in 18th-century fashion, while the "current day" story is in early 19th-century / Regency fashion. With the caveat that the whole novel is set at two big manor houses in the wild Yorkshire moors, with one family being wealthier than the other.

Oscar-winning designer James Acheson (Dangerous Liaisons, Restoration, The Last Emperor) created the costumes for this film, and it's the best-looking Wuthering Heights around (not a high bar, but still). So I'm going to go through this wuthering wardrobe from start to finish, mostly looking at the women because I find them more interesting and their fashion shows the progression of time better.

As a refresher, check out this family tree someone posted on Wikipedia - the portraits aren't perfect, but the dates are taken from the novel.

This movie opens with the 1801 framing story. Except ... here's Cathy Linton in solidly 18th-c. dress and her hair running wild. Now, the hair will be a theme with everyone living at Wuthering Heights. I guess it's a symbol of the wild moors or something. Totes cliche! But IDK why the dress is 20-ish years out of date.

Alrighty then, after the ghost bits, we flashback to the real start of the story, when young Heathcliff is brought to the family by old Mr. Earnshaw in 1771. These scenes work from a costume-showing-the-correct-historical-period POV.

Mr. and Mrs. Earnshaw die, Cathy's asshole older brother Hindley takes over the house. Fast-forward a decade, and we get older actors.

Cathy Linton in 1801, young Cathy Earnshaw in 1771, and grown-up Cathy Earnshaw in 1780-ish are all wearing the same style of gown. Now, the 'night gown' or 'robe a l'anglaise' had lots of variations, but this essential style is plausible for the two earlier decades. It's stretch to find someone wearing it for longer, IMO.

Heathcliff and Cathy run around, peek in at Thrushcross Grange where the fancy-pants Lintons live, but they're caught. Cathy gets hurt and is stuck. This is our first chance to see upper-class 18th-c. clothes and hair. Presumably the families at Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange are of similar social status, as their both the only landowners out the middle of bumfuck nowhere. But the Lintons wear silk, style their hair, and have more servants.

Cathy's asshole brother and his pregnant wife, Frances, greet her when Cathy returns after recuperating.

Staying with the Lintons turns Cathy on to the finer things in life. She still can't put her hair up but, hey, silk dresses sure are nice.

The Wuthering Heights people and the Thrushcross Grange people have a party to, I guess, celebrate that Cathy's back home? In the book, it's for Christmas but that's not made clear in this movie.

Cathy hangs around the Heights just long enough after this to give the iconic speech that Heathcliff half-overhears and gets pissed off by and leaves for a few years.

Cathy marries Edgar and moves to Thrushcross Grange, where they make a boring little family with Isabella.

I haven't mentioned Nelly yet - she's the servant who's just a little bit older than Cathy and Heathcliff, and she follows Cathy to Thrushcross Grange (and later serves Cathy and Edgar's daughter, following her back to Wuthering Heights). In the novel, chunks of the story are told through her POV, but not in this movie or any other filmed adaption that I recall.

Heathcliff visits, after having disappeared for a couple years. Good thing Cathy's wearing a nice dress!

Compare Heathcliff to Cathy's hubby:

With Healthcliff back in the picture, Cathy's out and about, and Isabella's tagging along in wanna-be matchy outfits.

Cathy notices that Isabella is getting the hots for Heathcliff, and she both teases Isabell about it and warns her away.

Isabella runs away and marries Heathcliff, regretting it instantly. Cathy dies giving birth to a daughter, who Edgar names Cathy (ugh).

Isabella gives birth to a son she names Linton (ugh). Hindley dies, in case anyone gave a shit.

Time passes, and we see Cathy Linton around age 16 - she meets Heathcliff and Linton, and no good will come of this.

Heathcliff plots to force Isabella to marry Linton as part of his grand revenge scheme.

Edgar dies, and this is the last time young Cathy wears Regency-style gowns.

WTfrock? Is it because all her money is gone with Daddy? Yes, we've been shown that Wuthering Heights is backwards and unfashionable and generally fucked up, but this is taking it a bit too far for one character to revert.

Finally Heathcliff dies, and the loose ends of the story are tied up. Young Cathy Linton and Hareton Earnshaw (Hindley and Frances' son) fall in love and ride off into the moors together.

And then we see a frame with in the frame - the film had begun with a voiceover, and now it's revealed that this was the author, Emily Brontë, telling the whole story to us.
What do you think of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights?

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TBT: Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1992)

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Wuthering Heights was my favorite novel as a teenager because, of course, it fit my angsty, romantic gothic self. I'm still angsty and goth, but now I'm bitter and jaded so now I see th...

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Official Trailer WUTHERING HEIGHTS (1992, Juliette Binoche, Ralph Fiennes)

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Wuthering Heights (1992) (720p) 🌻 Movies

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A man becomes obsessed with vengeance when his soul mate marries another man.

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The Narrative Structure: The film is told in flashback by housekeeper Nelly Dean to a gentleman named Lockwood, who experiences a ghostly encounter with Catherine at Wuthering Heights.

Childhood and Separation: Heathcliff and Catherine grow up as inseparable "wild" spirits. After Mr. Earnshaw's death, Hindley reduces Heathcliff to a servant, fostering his resentment.

Betrayal and Transformation: Catherine admits it would degrade her to marry Heathcliff, leading him to overhear her confession and flee, returning years later as a wealthy, vengeful man.

Destructive Revenge: Heathcliff, now master of Wuthering Heights, wreaks vengeance on both the Earnshaw and Linton families, marrying Isabella Linton and tormenting Catherine's daughter and his own son.

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Wuthering Heights (1939) - Laurence Olivier, Merle Oberon, David Niven, Flora Robson

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Directed by William Wyler and based on the 1847 novel by Emily Brontë, this is the tale of the passionate and doomed love story between Catherine Earnshaw, the daughter of a Yorkshire landowner, and an orphaned Gypsy boy named Heathcliff.

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Plot Focus: The narrative is framed as a story told to a traveler (Lockwood) by the housekeeper, Ellen, about the intense, tortured relationship between the two main characters.

Conflict: Despite their deep affection, social standing drives them apart; Cathy marries the wealthy Edgar Linton, prompting a heartbroken Heathcliff to disappear, only to return later as a wealthy, vengeful man.

Key Scenes: Iconic moments include the pair meeting on the moors at Penistone Crags and the scene where Cathy is injured by dogs at the Linton estate.

Production: The film is celebrated for its atmospheric, Oscar-winning cinematography by Gregg Toland, although it was filmed in California, not Yorkshire.

Differences from Book: The 1939 adaptation omits the entire second generation of characters present in the novel.

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Dark, gloomy

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Is ‘Wuthering Heights’ Actually a Love Story at All?

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Entire generations who first read “Wuthering Heights” in high school may be holding on not only to lines and passages from the book they slightly (or entirely) misremember, but also to an image of iconic love that is…more than a little messed up.

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Authored by one "Ellis Bell", Wuthering Heights was met with rather mixed reviews when it was first published in 1847. Some were scathing, horrified by its "brutal cruelty" and portrayal of a "semi-savage love". Others acknowledged the book's "power and cleverness", "its delineation forcible and truthful". Many said it was simply "strange".

Despite the popularity of gothic fiction at the time, it's perhaps unsurprising that Wuthering Heights shocked readers in the 19th Century, a time of strict moral scrutiny. "People did not know what to do with this book, because it has no clear moral angle," says Clare O'Callaghan, senior professor of Victorian literature at Loughborough University in the UK, and the author of Emily Brontë Reappraised.

Three years after the novel was published, Charlotte Brontë revealed the true identity of its author - Ellis Bell was not in fact a man, but a pen name for her younger sister, Emily Brontë. Charlotte argued that critics had failed to do Emily's work justice, "The immature but very real powers revealed in Wuthering Heights were scarcely recognised; its import and nature were misunderstood."

A gothic tale of two families set on the wild Yorkshire moors, Wuthering Heights went on to become a genre-defining classic - and yet, Charlotte's words still ring true.

Emily Brontë's novel Wuthering Heights was met with scathing reviews when it was published in 1847 (Credit: Getty Images)

Now, Saltburn director Emerald Fennell is poised to reveal her version of the story, with a film released on 13 February, starring Australian actors Margot Robbie as Catherine Earnshaw and Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff. Perhaps partly in response to the various controversies preceding her film - around the age and ethnicity of the lead actors, the erotically charged scenes and inauthentic costumes shown in the trailer - Fennell added quotation marks to its title, stating that she is not actually adapting the novel, but making her version of it, because the story is too "dense, complicated and difficult". Could she be right?

And just why has this "strange" but captivating novel puzzled fans, readers and critics from the beginning?

A tale of passion and revenge

Fennell isn't wrong about the book's complex nature. Its non-linear, multi-layered structure and multiple narrators can be mind-boggling at first. Why does everyone have the same name? How many Cathys and Catherines and Lintons and Heathcliffs and Linton Heathcliffs can there possibly be in 300-odd pages?

Wuthering Heights is effectively a story-within-a-story. Jumping between the past and present, and spanning around 30 years, it is told by Lockwood, Heathcliff's tenant, and Ellen Dean, a maid at two houses called Thrushcross Grange and Wuthering Heights. Both narrators are unreliable.

Lockwood, a gentleman from London with a superiority complex, serves as a nosey outsider and a vessel for the reader to uncover secrets from the past. Nelly, the revealer of said secrets, tells the story from a seemingly perfect memory. She controls the narrative and often interferes when perhaps she shouldn't - her emotional attachments to certain characters, and judgment of others, shine through.

Saltburn director Emerald Fennell's new film has already drawn criticism for its casting, costume and erotic content (Credit: Warner Bros)

Fennell has spoken of how she was captivated by the novel when she first read it as a teenager. Her film uses the tagline "the greatest love story of all time", but the greatest revenge story of all time might be more apt. Of course, there is undeniable romantic passion in the story: "Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same; and Linton's is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire." But some readers may have latched onto this, while forgetting what ensues afterwards.

It quickly becomes clear that Heathcliff is more of a tortured anti-hero than a romantic one. Catherine is challenging too - she is melodramatic and spiteful. Their unbreakable bond, while spirited and everlasting, is ill-fated - and their unending misery creates a generational cycle of abuse and destruction begging to be broken.

The structure of Wuthering Heights cleverly plays into these themes of passion and revenge. The first edition was divided into two volumes, which could be perceived as the generational divide - the first focusing on Catherine and Heathcliff, the second focusing on their children. Brontë draws on our sympathy for Heathcliff in the first volume. Upon his arrival at the Heights as an orphaned young boy, he is othered, a "ragged, black-haired child... a dark-skinned gipsy in aspect". Catherine even spits on him.

Later, he is physically abused by his drunkard adoptive brother Hindley Earnshaw, who treats him as a servant. Throughout, he is referred to as "dirty". His only solace is Catherine, with whom he roams the wild moors. But even then, despite her declaration, "I am Heathcliff... he is more myself than I am," and partly due to a misheard conversation, she marries the wealthy Edgar Linton of Thrushcross Grange.

Heathcliff's revenge on Edgar and Catherine intensifies in the second half of the novel, after the latter's death. Brontë sorely tests any sympathy readers might have had for Heathcliff, as his monstrous tyranny reigns. He physically and psychologically abuses his wife (and Catherine's sister-in-law) Isabella through vile acts like hanging her dog.

Heathcliff is more of a tortured anti-hero than a romantic one, whose revenge intensifies in the second half of the novel (Credit: Warner Bros)

He also abuses the family's children. Hindley's son Hareton is forced to work as a servant just as Heathcliff was as a young boy. He kidnaps Cathy Linton, Catherine and Edgar's daughter, forcing her to marry his son, Linton Heathcliff, to secure ownership of Thrushcross Grange. Every action is deliberate, calculated and vengeful.

The novel's complex legacy

Some film and TV adaptations have skipped the second half of Wuthering Heights entirely, presumably because of its savagery and complexity - William Wyler's 1939 Oscar-winner ends shortly after Catherine's death, her ghost and Heathcliff wandering the moors. Robert Fuest's 1970 film starring Timothy Dalton also ends with her death, as does Andrea Arnold's 2011 film, which dedicates most of the screen time to the younger Catherine and Heathcliff.

But her death comes halfway through the novel and therefore many adaptations have missed out a further 18 years or so of plot, softening the ending and sanitising its darkest parts. A few have attempted to cover the whole story - including the BBC's 1967 series, which inspired Kate Bush to write her 1978 hit. But it's the BBC's 1978 mini-series (aided by its five-hour running time), which is held up as being the most faithful to the whole text.

Ignoring the latter part of the book "doesn't work", says Claire O'Callaghan. "I think love and vengeance are the engines of the book, and that's what so great about it... there's no boundary to the depths to which [Heathcliff] will go to, to make people pay," says O'Callaghan.

The BBC's 1967 TV series inspired Kate Bush's 1978 hit song (Credit: Getty Images)

Heathcliff lives a life of torment and uncontainable grief, but inflicts that suffering on everyone around him and feels no remorse in doing so. By not righting his wrongs, and letting him die without further punishment, O'Callaghan says, Brontë poses more complex questions to the reader, rather than giving them answers: What is love? Does the marriage system work? What are the limits of violence?

That's part of the complex legacy of the novel. "Popular culture tends to tell us it's this great romance... when [readers] are encountering it for the first time, that jars, because the book is so different. It still has the ability to shock, and I think, like the Victorians, we're still grappling with how to define it and what to do with it," O'Callaghan says.

Another popular misconception of the novel is that it's unremittingly bleak, when, at times, it's quite funny. Nelly and Zillah, the two servants, are major gossips. Linton Heathcliff is a mopey, sickly and bratty child, who provokes an eye roll from the reader. And when you can understand what the farm servant Joseph is saying through his thick Yorkshire dialect, he is often a witty cynic, who never has anything nice to say. When Catherine falls ill after searching for Heathcliff in the rain, he snarkily croaks, "Running after t'lads, as usual?"

More like this:
* Why Heathcliff and literature's greatest love story are toxic* Why readers are wrong about Mr Darcy* Why Frankenstein is so misunderstood

Lockwood's snootiness is amusing, too. "He is like a character from a Jane Austen novel who's walked into a Brontë world, and that, for me, is hilarious," says O'Callaghan. "If you read this book and take it as a kind of gothic satire to some extent, it's a completely different book. And I think that's one of the things, though. People take it very, very seriously, don't they? They're absolutely convinced that these are real characters, rather than this gothic, over-the-topness."

Emily Brontë never saw the success of her only novel, but we know that she read initial reviews. Her writing desk is on display at the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth, and it contains five clippings of Wuthering Heights reviews, which were largely negative. She died at the age of 30 from tuberculosis, around a year after Wuthering Heights was published. Behind her she leaves a masterpiece.

Whether you are a fierce lover or loather of Brontë's deeply flawed characters, the harrowing and unsettling plot and the toxic romance, Wuthering Heights has possessed its legions of fans throughout history - "driven us mad", you could say. We can be sure that Fennell's interpretation will not be the last. Whether anyone can do this book justice on screen, however, is a whole other question.

Hopefully, at least, we can all agree with one anonymous critic, who reviewed Wuthering Heights in January 1848. "It is impossible to begin and not finish it," they said, "and quite as impossible to lay it aside afterwards and say nothing about it."
Wuthering Heights is released on 13 February. -- If you liked this story, For more Culture stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook and Instagram. sign up for the Essential List newsletter - a handpicked selection of features, videos and can't-miss news, delivered to your inbox twice a week.

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'It still has the ability to shock': Why 'masterpiece' Wuthering Heights is so misunderstood

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Ever since it was published in the mid-19th Century, Emily Brontë's tale of passionate love and ruthless revenge has captivated fans and confounded critics in equal measure.

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The Victorians, fashions and clothing in the 19th and 20th centuries

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epochs-of-fashion: Ladies costume through the ages

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Towards the end of the Regency/Empire epoch (approx. 1820), the high empire waist slipped down about an inch every year. Therefore existing gowns were altered according to the new fashion with wide waistbands to help lowering it. In the mid-twenties, the waist reached its natural position and it became again fashionable to be very slim.

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Although the Victorian era was a period of extreme social inequality, industrialisation brought about rapid changes in everyday life. Family life, epitomised by the young Queen Victoria, Prince Albert and their nine children, was enthusiastically idealised.