Michelle Wollaston On Why Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë’s Dark Classic, Is Not a Love Story

If Wuthering Heights were handed to you as an English literature assignment, you would not be asked whether Catherine and Heathcliff were in love. You would be asked to examine who they were within the structure of the story, to consider what shaped them, to notice what was present in their lives and what was absent. You would be asked to understand why they became who they became.

This is how stories endure. They are built on archetypes.

There is always the one who enters the world without belonging, the one who must find his place without ever having been given one to begin with. There is always the figure who represents stability, the life that is possible but not chosen. And there is always the moment where the path divides, where each person moves toward what they are capable of sustaining, rather than what they once believed they could not live without.

Heathcliff enters as that outsider. Everything that follows unfolds from that starting point.

Each generation returns to Wuthering Heights and tries, once again, to soften it.

With news of Emerald Fennell’s new adaptation starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, that familiar reframing is already underway. Robbie has publicly spoken about the “intensity of its love story”, and much of the early coverage leans into the language of tragic romance and emotional passion. It is being presented as a connection so powerful it cannot be broken, a love that exists beyond circumstance.

But that is not what Emily Brontë wrote.

She wrote about what happens when two people recognise themselves in each other before either of them has been given the chance to become fully anchored on their own.

Heathcliff arrives as an orphan and is taken into the Earnshaw household, yet he is never truly secured within it. He grows up inside the family, but without the certainty that allows a child to feel safe in their place. He learns early that belonging is not something he can rely upon. Catherine grows up beside him, shaped by the same emotional environment. She understands him not as something separate from herself, but as something familiar.

Their connection forms there.

This is why Catherine says, “I am Heathcliff.” It is often quoted as one of the most romantic lines in literature, yet it reveals how deeply their identities formed alongside each other. She does not experience herself as entirely separate from him. Her sense of self developed in parallel with his existence.

It feels like certainty. It feels undeniable. Recognition alone, however, does not create stability.

When Catherine chooses to marry Edgar Linton, she is not rejecting Heathcliff as much as she is choosing a life that offers structure. Edgar represents stability, acceptance, and safety. Heathcliff represents the emotional world she already knows: intense, consuming, and uncertain. Her decision reflects what she is able to sustain, rather than what she once felt.

Heathcliff does not move forward from that moment. His life becomes organised around it. Everything he builds afterwards, his pursuit of power and his control over the environment that once excluded him, exists alongside the original fracture rather than replacing it.

He does not resolve the wound. He learns how to live around it.

It is also important to remember who Emily Brontë was when she wrote this novel.

She lived on the edge of the very social structure she was observing. Born into a clerical family in rural Yorkshire, she occupied an in-between space. She was educated enough to see clearly, yet not positioned within the upper classes whose lives were defined by property, inheritance, and marriage. She would have watched women around her make decisions shaped not purely by love, but by survival. She would have seen how belonging, security, and social acceptance influenced the direction their lives would take.

She did not write Wuthering Heights to present an ideal. She wrote it to reflect what she could already see.

A woman recognising the emotional patterns unfolding around her. A woman with enough clarity to name them honestly. She was not asking readers to admire Catherine and Heathcliff. She was asking them to recognise them.

To see what happens when identity forms inside instability. To see what happens when belonging is uncertain. To see what happens when recognition comes before a person has had the chance to become fully anchored within themselves.

For the women reading her work at the time, this would not have felt like fantasy. It would have felt familiar.

That is why the story continues to resonate now.

Not because it presents a love to aspire to, but because it reflects something many people quietly experience. Relationships that feel inevitable rather than chosen. Connections that remain long after the conditions that created them have changed. Bonds that form before a person has had the opportunity to fully become themselves outside of the attachment.

The landscape itself reflects this reality. The moors are open, exposed, and unforgiving. Nothing there softens what exists. Catherine and Heathcliff do not escape themselves within that environment. They are reflected by it.

If this new adaptation chooses to show that truth, rather than simply the surface intensity, it will honour what Brontë actually wrote. Because Wuthering Heights was never a story about love conquering everything.

It is a story about what happens when someone enters the world without belonging, finds recognition before stability, and spends a lifetime trying to resolve what was never secure to begin with.