Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847)
“Wuthering Heights” (Emerald Fennell, 2026)
Wuthering Heights (Andrea Arnold, 2011)
Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold, 2009)

When I was clinging onto the idea of teaching English Literature, I got three part time gigs teaching nineteenth literature. This was ironical, because as an undergraduate there was an notable gap in my Beowulf to Virginia Woolf (and up to about 1990) that was Victoria Literature. Inevitable I had to teach three different Dickens and three Eliots, but Emily saved me by only having a single surviving novel.

I suspect my only knowledge of it was Kate Bush (which I had seen) and a Cliff Richard musical (which passed me by).

The train ticket as bookmark, if not various scraps of paper, suggest I last read it in 1999 and I did recall the framing narrative of Mr Lockwood renting Thrushcross Grange and meeting a rather grumpy landlord at Wuthering Heights, along with a young girl called Cathy.

Not the famous Cathy.

Lockwood is trapped for the night and haunted by Cathy (yes, the famous one) and eventually gets back to the grange where housekeeper Nelly gives him the backstory. There’s the Earnshaw family and their children Hindley and Catherine, and an adopted boy from Liverpool, Heathcliff, whom they treat pretty badly. Meanwhile, the Linton family move into Thrushcross and Cathy ends up marrying Edgar Linton, which pisses Heathcliff off and gets added to his motives of revenge. Heathcliff marries Edgar’s sister, Isabella, and it all gets rather murky, but the end result is a couple of decades later Heathcliff is living with Cathy’s daughter.

I can remember reading about all the names — or, rather, the short list of names — and how this ties three generations together. If you look at the family tree in the Oxford World’s Classics, it’s distinctly incestuous. Of course, we’ve only got Nelly’s word for pretty much any of it happening and grafitti and marginalia in someone’s library. It’s disturbing, there’s a great ghost scene and in no way is this the Greatest Love Story of All Time.

Unless Oedipus is number two.

Fennell, on the back of the flawed Saltburn (think a contemporary update of Brideshead Revisited with The Draughtsman’s Contract [1982], but directed by Yorgos Lanthimos), dispenses with all that frame story nonsense, because no great film ever got told in flashback. And she dispenses with Hindley. And the third generation. Heathcliff’s revenge is less. We still have Nelly — Hong Chau — here recast as some kind of lady’s companion and ambiguously the moral centre of the film.

Much of the narrative is there to hang the production design on, with no clarity as to whether this is 1800 or 1840, and striking things like a room of empty bottles behind the dissolute Mr Earnshaw (Martin Clunes, much the hightlight of the film). There’s a scene with a swing, which is presumably a nod to Fragonard’s painting, and a weird collection of hands as art and skin as wallpaper, not to mention lightning ripped off from Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête (1946)… Margot Robbie hasn’t quite shaken off Barbie and Jacob Elordi is fair enough, but he’s done much better films.

There’s a thread of BDSM — first an everyday story of horsey fun and then nineteenth century puppy play. Isabella (Alison Oliver) seems to have come in from a different film and I really wish the audience hadn’t laughed so much at the coercive control her character was subjected. Sometimes it works when film adaptations give the text that the source has to offer subtext.

This is not one of those films.

In this version, Cathy gets to give Heathcliff his name and I had a sudden whiff of Frankenstein — the most recent version of which had Elordi as the Creature and which I wouldn’t add to his interesting pile.

There was some fuss that Elordi is rather too white to be Heathcliff — he gets described as a “dark-skinned gipsy” and “a little Lascar, or an American or Spanish castaway” — but Brontë doesn’t want to give us details, just as she skips over where his newfound wealth might have come from.

Andrea Arnold cast Solomon Glave as Young Heathcliff and James Howson as the adult one and I wonder if it upset people back in 2011. She had no truck with framing narratives, with any production design hidden beneath darkness or rain or a camera that hardly stays steady for half a second. All the characters have Yorkshire accents, unlike the Earnshaws of Fennell’s. It feels like a nineteenth century answer to kitchen sink realism and hardly seems to be the greatest love story of all time.

This seemed like a good reason to watch Fish Tank, a rather more disturbing love story. Fifteen year old Mia (Katie Jarvis) lives in a tenement in Essex with her mother and sister, and seems unpopular with everyone her age. She has the ambition to be a dancer and her mother’s new boyfriend Connor (Michael Fassbender) wants to encourage her. It is no surprise that he is going to be a wrong un, unlike the traveller, Billy (Harry Treadaway). The camera is again mobile, but not so much, and the weather better, and the Essex landscapes perhaps echo Great Expectations. I think Arnold would be more interested in Pip, mind.