Brontë Museum Weighs In On Polarising New Take On Wuthering Heights

With Emerald Fennell’s take on Wuthering Heights currently splitting opinion right down the middle, the filmmaker can at least rest easy knowing her new movie has the thumbs up from some of the biggest proprietors of author Emily Brontë’s legacy.

In a piece published in The Guardian last week to coincide with the film’s release, staff members at the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth, West Yorkshire heaped praise on the new spin on Wuthering Heights.

One staff member hailed it as “amazing” while another agreed: “It really does feel like a fever dream. From the stunning costumes and sets to the dramatic soundtrack, it’s a great escape to the world of Wuthering Heights. The themes of the novel do shine through.”

A third conceded: “Is it faithful? No. Is it for purists? No. Is it an entertaining riff on the novel? Yes!”

Read more of the Brontë museum staff’s thoughts in The Guardian’s piece here.

Emerald’s fast-and-loose approach to staying faithful to the original gothic novel has made her Wuthering Heights film especially divisive, with some taking issue with the changes she’s made – and one scene in particular coming under fire from devoted fans of the source material.

Meanwhile, the film has also faced backlash over the decision to cast a white actor, Jacob Elordi, as Heathcliff, a character who readers commonly infer is a person of colour.

Responding to some critics’ accusations of “whitewashing”, the Oscar winner said last month: “The thing is, everyone who loves this book has such a personal connection to it, and so, you can only ever kind of make the movie that you sort of imagined yourself when you read it.

“That’s the great thing about this movie is that it could be made every year and it would still be so moving and so interesting.”

Months earlier, she claimed she had first been inspired to cast Jacob as Heathcliff after noticing while working with him on Saltburn that he “looked exactly like the illustration of Heathcliff” on the first copy of Wuthering Heights that she read.