Literary Purists Debate as Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” Adaptation Tops Box Office

Despite mixed reviews from critics, Emerald Fennell’s adaptation of Emily Brontë’s classic novel “Wuthering Heights” led the box office last weekend, raking in over $34 million in North America. The film has sparked debate among Brontë scholars and literary fans about the liberties taken with the source material.

Lucasta Miller, a British author and Brontë scholar who wrote the preface for the Penguin Classics edition of “Wuthering Heights,” defends the adaptation’s creative approach. “It would be meaningless to criticize it for that, just as it would be to criticize a grand opera that plays fast and loose with the plot,” Miller says. “I wasn’t asking for a faithful adaptation of ‘Wuthering Heights,’ but whether it works on its own terms. And my sense is that it does.”

Even before the film’s release, Brontë enthusiasts questioned several of Fennell’s creative choices, including casting Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff instead of a dark-skinned actor more aligned with Brontë’s description, making the sexual attraction between the lead characters explicit rather than suppressed, and having blonde Margot Robbie play the famously dark-haired Cathy.

Claire O’Callaghan, a senior lecturer at Loughborough University and Brontë scholar, notes that while she was initially skeptical of the casting choices, Robbie’s performance effectively captures Cathy’s selfish nature in ways other adaptations have overlooked.

The relationship between books and their film adaptations has always been complex. Some adaptations, like “The Godfather” films, are widely considered superior to the original novel, despite significant differences. Billy Wilder’s “Double Indemnity” featured a narrative device that author James M. Cain later wished he had used in his book.

Among current Oscar contenders, Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another” takes a loose approach to Thomas Pynchon’s “Vineland,” while Chloé Zhao’s “Hamnet” deviates from Maggie O’Farrell’s novel in various ways. O’Farrell, who collaborated on the screenplay, embraces these differences, telling The Associated Press, “The book is mine, it’s my baby, but the film is Chloé’s adaptation. And the film feels not like my child, more like a kind of niece or nephew. And that’s exactly as it should be.”

Brontë experts point out that a truly faithful adaptation of the 400-page “Wuthering Heights” would require a multi-hour streaming series. Most film adaptations, including Fennell’s and the 1939 classic starring Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon, essentially eliminate the second half of the book.

“What film and TV can’t do is maintain the ambiguity in Emily’s novel — the fact that her book is both a tragic love story and a revenge novel and a tragedy,” O’Callaghan explains. “Film and TV tend to focus on one of those for clarity and to focus dramatic tension.”

Fennell herself acknowledges taking creative liberties, telling the AP she was inspired by her teenage memories of the novel: “There are things I have added for my own needs, because I loved the book so much and I always desperately needed some kind of sense for it to go a little further.”

Miller describes the film as a fairy tale, “stylized and extravagant,” and appreciates how Fennell “quite insightfully” uses fairy tale language. O’Callaghan finds it “quite Tim Burton-esque in its surreal perspective.”

“It radically departs from the book, but I still found it entertaining even if I’m unsure if I’d claim to like it,” O’Callaghan concludes, capturing the ambivalence that often accompanies bold literary adaptations that challenge audience expectations while finding commercial success.