Like many of us, Emerald Fennell has a false memory of Wuthering Heights. Ask the average reader who hasn’t encountered Emily Brontë’s only novel since high school to describe it, and they’ll probably list off the same things: wild moors, stormy skies, and the passionate, tortured romance between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff. That is, of course, only partially true. Wuthering Heights does spend its first third describing the upbringings of Heathcliff and Catherine. In the book’s most memorable scene, Heathcliff snoops at a side door while Catherine admits to housekeeper Nelly Dean that she can’t marry him due to his lower social status. Heathcliff flees in response, never to hear her confess her love for him. Catherine’s declaration of love is so good it tricked generations of readers into thinking she and Heathcliff are a love story. But what follows is not merely the unspooling of an ill-fated romance but an extensive, multi-generational revenge plot. Bitter and brutal, Heathcliff spends the rest of Wuthering Heights lashing out at each and every character. When Catherine dies, the moment is not a poetic climax but another of the novel’s many misfortunes. Life goes on at Wuthering Heights, and Heathcliff’s object of vengeance shifts from her to her child.
That hasn’t stopped the potent cultural re-interpretations of Wuthering Heights, which have become, arguably, just as popular as the book itself. A 2007 UKTV poll pronounced Wuthering Heights as “the greatest love story of all time,” a tagline Fennell herself co-opted for her film adaptation. The book was referenced throughout Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series, resulting in young Eclipse readers picking up the novel and picturing Catherine’s choice between Heathcliff and Linton as an Edward-vs-Jacob-like dilemma. Public “Wuthering Heights” playlists on Spotify that predate Fennell’s film are full of songs from Taylor Swift, Hozier, Lana Del Rey, and Phoebe Bridgers—artists just as likely to soundtrack a contemporary romance or a “cottagecore” moodboard. Wuthering Heights got Tumblr-fied, turned into something dark, yearning, and cinematic. “Did I just… remember the novel only for those star-crossed lovers? They are particularly appealing to a moody teen,” wrote Vogue’s Chloe Schama.
Many of Wuthering Heights’s TV and film adaptations ignore the novel’s themes of race, class, and abuse. As a result, these versions “soften the ending and sanitize its darkest parts,” per the BBC. “Those who classify Wuthering Heights as a love story are really thinking of [Laurence] Olivier’s Heathcliff [from the 1939 film adaptation], not Brontë’s,” wrote The Guardian. Even the literary cognoscenti felt the need to distinguish the novel from our shared cultural understanding of it: “There is love, but it is not the love of men and women,” Virginia Woolf wrote in her 1916 essay Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. In keeping with this tradition, Fennell created yet another Wuthering Heights film entirely divorced from the source material’s second half. “I wanted to make something that was the book that I experienced when I was 14,” she said in an interview. Not the book itself, then; the experience of reading it at 14.
Of course, it’s not just film that has been shaped by Wuthering Heights’ cultural iconography. There’s a legacy of pop music in conversation with Brontë’s novel. Celine Dion’s smash hit “It’s All Coming Back To Me Now” was written by Jim Steinman “under the influence of Wuthering Heights,” and he described the song as “an erotic motorcycle… like Heathcliff digging up Cathy’s corpse and dancing with it in the cold moonlight,” though no such dancing occurs in Brontë’s novel). Stevie Nicks wrote “Wild Heart” about “Heathcliff and Cathy, and the fact that they were one person, that they couldn’t be together,” according to the liner notes of The Wild Hearts’s 2016 re-release. Though Nicks doesn’t specify which version of Wuthering Heights she was inspired by, it’s most likely she’s talking about a film adaptation, as anyone who has read the book would surely think that Heathcliff and Cathy should stay as far away from each other as possible. Slowdive cited the novel as an inspiration behind “Sugar For The Pill” and, most famously, Kate Bush’s 1978 debut single “Wuthering Heights” is, believe it or not, based on Wuthering Heights.
A self-fueling cycle is at play: the more artists who reinterpret Wuthering Heights, the more popular this flashy, aestheticized version of the novel becomes, and the farther future reinterpretations stray from Brontë’s original text. This is not inherently wrong. There is no “right” or “wrong” way to interpret literature, and contemporary readings allow books like Wuthering Heights to stay alive and relevant. Still, given the grip that Wuthering Heights holds on popular culture, it’s fascinating how few of its interpretations seem to grapple with the novel itself. Part of this makes sense: pop music may, in fact, not be the best vehicle to explore Heathcliff’s psychopathic obsession on destroying the Linton’s, nor is the novel’s second half—where Heathcliff’s revenge-plot usurps any remaining tinges of love and warmth—nearly as Hollywood-friendly as its first.
STILL, IF ANYONE IN POP MUSIC has come close to making a truly forlorn, misty, and gray soundtrack for Brontë’s work, it is not “It’s All Coming Back To Me Now,” nor is it Charli XCX’s accompanying album to Fennell’s film, nor is it even Kate Bush’s breakout hit. The closest anyone has come to capturing Wuthering Heights is an odd, middle-period Genesis album called Wind and Wuthering.
Somehow, Genesis averted disaster. For years, the English prog-rock band was best known for the theatrics of its frontman Peter Gabriel, though the group’s music was written collaboratively. After Gabriel’s highly publicized departure from the band in 1975, the remaining members regrouped as a quartet and tapped drummer Phil Collins to be its lead vocalist. The band’s first post-Gabriel album, 1976’s A Trick of the Tail, was a surprise success, rebuking any doubt from fans and press that the band couldn’t survive without Gabriel. It landed in the top 3 on the UK album charts, and its tour was “their most successful tour of America ever,” according to contemporaneous press materials.
Eager to follow up Trick, Genesis churned out another record in their first post-Gabriel year. Wind and Wuthering is A Trick of the Tail’s moody sister: it’s lush, dreary, and gloomy. The LP is also Genesis’ last with guitarist Steve Hackett, who felt his contributions were ignored in favor of keyboardist Tony Banks’s expansive, spacey arrangements. The result is a transitional moment in Genesis history, captured directly between the band’s two main eras. The group was not yet the sleek, drum machine-powered juggernauts penning pop hits in the ‘80s, nor were they the high-concept band donning costumes for multi-act live shows. Wind and Wuthering finds them trying to solidify what that new iteration of the band was capable of.
There are explicit references on Wind and Wuthering to Brontë’s work. The album was named after the novel, and its two-part instrumental tracks “Unquiet Slumbers for the Sleepers…” and “…In That Quiet Earth” directly quote its final line. Colin Elgie’s album artwork is monochromatic, misty, and empty, evocative of the wild moors Brontë’s book is famous for. Some fans consider album-closer “Afterglow” to be sung from the perspective of Heathcliff.
But what makes Wind and Wuthering a surprisingly effective interpretation of Wuthering Heights is not its direct references to the text, but the way Genesis conjures the novel’s spectral setting—its cold winds, empty houses, and lonely rooms. Unintentionally, Genesis stumbled on the feeling of the place. When Gabriel departed the band, he left behind a colossal amount of space in their musical arrangements. His vocals employed accents and different intonations. No matter what he did, he had a magnetism that could be pompous, irritating, and entertaining, sometimes all at once.
Collins was a more direct singer. Rather than try and fill the space that Gabriel left behind, Wind and Wuthering feels cavernous. Three of the nine tracks on the album are instrumentals, and songs like “One for the Vine” or “Eleventh Earl of Mar” contain long, meandering instrumental passages. Its lyrics—entirely absent of any Brontë-related details—are an afterthought. It’s prog-rock without any of the play-acting. The focus here is solely on atmosphere, one that is panoramic and eerie. Banks’ keyboards curl like smoke on “One for the Vine”; his layers of organ blanket “Eleventh Earl of Mar,” like the snow that locks its inhabitants into Wuthering Heights. As is the case for Brontë’s writing, Wind and Wuthering could be unexpectedly tender (“Your Own Special Way”) and violently unpredictable (“…In That Quiet Earth”).
Every musical adaptation of Wuthering Heights falls into the same trap—artists recontextualize Catherine and Heathcliff’s relationship into one of pop music’s favorite tropes: unrequited love. On her Wuthering Heights album, Charli adopts an overtly lyrical, metaphor-driven writing style, singing of the cruel “Chains of Love.” Apparently this is a necessity when adapting a Victorian literary classic, though the lyrical method doesn’t suit her nearly as well as BRAT’s directness. On “Wuthering Heights,” Kate Bush assumes Catherine’s perspective, pining for Heathcliff and escaping from the cold. It’s certainly the best song inspired by Wuthering Heights, but it also reframes this novel as a story of tortured love. Genesis circumvents the problem of portraying Cathy and Heathcliff by not portraying them at all. This very English, very creaky, and very hollow album conveys well the central feeling of Wuthering Heights: isolation.
Frankly, there’s no reason that Wind and Wuthering, an album made by four music nerds who showed little actual interest in Brontë’s novel, should receive the recognition of “Best Wuthering Heights Soundtrack.” Unlike other adaptations, the band had no intention of actually invoking Wuthering Heights. It just felt right, considering the album’s windy, frozen tone. Perhaps the fact that a band like Genesis made a worthy Wuthering Heights interpretation isn’t a reflection on their robust engagement with the text but as a testament to Brontë’s un-adaptability. For all our fascination with Wuthering Heights, the novel’s incomprehensibility is what makes it so compelling. As text-purists criticize Fennell’s untethered reading of the novel, it begs the question: Can anyone really do this book justice?
Andy Steiner is a writer and musician. When he’s not reviewing albums, you can find him collecting ‘80s Rush merchandise. Follow him on Twitter.
