Ask Penguin Podcast: Why I wanted to adapt Wuthering Heights – Emerald Fennell
Is Wuthering Heights the perfect novel or the perfect work of art? Why do we fall in love with villains? Is all love doomed? And if Emerald Fennell could adapt another book to film, what would she choose?
In this special episode of Ask Penguin, host Rhianna Dhillon speaks to Oscar-winning writer and director, Emerald Fennell, about her newest film, an ambitious adaptation of Emily Brontë's classic, Wuthering Heights.
Also joining us in the studio are authors Henry Eliott and Harriet Evans, as we deep-dive into the book, the film, and the life of the Brontës.
Listen to the episode and subscribe to Ask Penguin wherever you get your podcasts.
Click here to order a clothbound classic of Wuthering Heights
Episode Transcript
Rhianna Dhillon:
Hello and welcome to a very special episode of Ask Penguin, the podcast all about books and the people who write and publish them. I'm Rihanna Dhillon, and today we're talking about a book that despite being published 179 years ago, continues to be the inspiration behind some iconic songs. Kate Bush, I'm looking at you. Plenty of adaptations, and I'm going to say some quite problematic romantic tropes. I am, of course, talking about Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte's first and only novel, what a debut. It's a Gothic classic with the Wild Yorkshire Moores as a backdrop to an equally wild tale of love and revenge, main revenge, between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff. It shocked critics when it was published in 1847, and it's been provoking very intense reactions ever since. On today's podcast, I will of course be discussing the novel with two brilliant Penguin authors, but we're also going to take a look at the latest adaptation to make it to the big screen.
The hotly anticipated film comes from Oscar winning director, Emerald Fennell, and stars Margot Robbie and Jacob Lordi as doomed lovers, Cathy and Heathcliff. I had a chat with Emerald Fennell to find out more about her relationship to Bronte's novel and what she really wanted audiences to take away from seeing her film on the big screen.
Emerald, thank you so much for joining us at Ask Penguin. Thank you for having me. So thrilled to talk to you. I want to ask you about your first time discovering Wuthering Heights and then how the book sort of changed for you as you got older and how it changed you.
Emerald Fennell :
Well, I think like a lot of people, I read it first because it was on the curriculum.
And I think that things on the curriculum have a kind of slight stigma attached to them, right? When you're a teenager and you're like, oh, this is work versus this is pleasure. And as somebody who reads so much for pleasure, I think it had so far up to that point, yeah, it had felt like I liked things, but they hadn't kind of had any big transformative moments. And so when I first picked up Weathering Heights, and I think like a lot of people, I was just completely starstruck by it and by her. And I think like a lot of profoundly genius people and works of art, the thing that strikes you as how humane and how timeless something is and how much you feel that people have always sort of been the same.
And so there was that, but also it was so many things. It was so rich, it was so complicated, it was so difficult and it gives you a visceral physical response. And the thing that I love more than anything and the thing that I always am hoping to do and make are things that have a physical response. And this one is you cry and you recoil and you're aroused. There's a lot. And so when I was 14, it just sort of transformed the way I thought about writing and the way that love could be. And then afterwards, I've read it pretty much yearly ever since. Wow. And it's always struck me. And I know people say this about a lot of work, a lot of works of literature, it really is a very, very shape shifting novel
And I think it's partly because Emily Bronte is a poet. When I think of the Bronte Sisters, I think Charlotte was absolutely a novelist because Janet is the perfect novel, but Wuthering Heights is not a perfect novel, but it's a perfect work of art. And so every time I read it, I'm struck by how different it is and how much I feel like I've misremembered something or then experienced something new every time.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Yeah. Well, speaking about the poetry, can you talk about the poetry of the original dialogue and how much you sort of enjoyed lifting that off the page and sort of playing with it through your own creative lens?
Emerald Fennell :
Well, I think the thing that I felt so much when I realised I was going to try and attempt to adapt this Gargaguan book, I felt that the thing that I knew is I wanted to make something that felt like my own personal emotional response to something, because I sort of knew that I wouldn't be able to exactly recreate this thing that she'd made. And so it was then about what I did want, what I really did want to sort of do. And for me, Bronte's dialogue is the best dialogue ever written. It's sort of up there with Milton. It's up there with Shakespeare. It's so beautifully meeted. It's so strange. It's so profound. And so as much as I could, and I think word for word, even though this script in this movie takes some departures and maybe lives in a slightly different visual world, I think, I mean, there's a huge amount of Bronte's literal actual dialogue in there.
And that was really important to me because it can't be bettered.
Rhianna Dhillon:
So in the book, we do have this framing device of Nelly recounting the story to Mr. Lockwood. I have to say I was so relieved when I went into your film and realised that we'd lost some characters.
Emerald Fennell :
Yeah. Lockwood, I'm afraid, got lost on the Morse and froze today, goodbye, Mr. Lockwood, or he was savaged by Heathcliff Docks in this version. I mean, that's the thing, but that's the thing about this book, right? It is such a Gothic masterpiece and it has all of those Gothic kind of tropes. It has not just one framing narrative, but two, which gives you that also slightly uncanny feeling of not quite being able to believe what you're listening to. Yes. It's comes through so many different ... Unreliable writers. And through time, right? Because Nelly is recounting to Mr. Lockwood something that happened decades ago. So you're looking at things through Mirrors on Mirrors on Mirrors, which is always so gratifying and so thrilling and sort of part of the ghost story too that is part of this book.
But no, I think the thing that I've always felt, I always love an unreliable narrator, and that was very much the thing that I was interested in in making Saltburn was looking at all of those brides head and the go- between and the good soldier, all of those narrators who were kind of slightly incapable of understanding what they're experiencing. But with this one, I feel that it's the inverse. There's that amazing piece of kind of criticism or scholarship, I suppose you'd call it from the '50s, which is Nelly Dean is the real villain of the story. And it kind of posits the posits. Gosh, I'm feeling very grand today.
Rhianna Dhillon:
I love it.
Emerald Fennell :
It sort of suggests that actually Nelly kind of implies she's an innocent bystander when actually all of the withholding of information comes from her. And so the thing for me was like, I agree, I love Nellie. I understand Nellie. I think for me that I always felt like Nellie was sort of the sane person with no power trying to make sense of this completely insane world that she found herself in. And so what I felt with this adaptation, given we had less time, was to really kind of make Nellie more of an equal. So what she is in the film is she's played by the like unbelievably exceptionally gifted, brilliant, incredible Hong Chao who I'm obsessed with.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Because everything is under the surface with Hong
Emerald Fennell :
Kong. Everything child service. Well, like every actor, I think in this film, the communication, it's so clear what she feels, but also it's so understandable because I think the thing is about Nelly is that, and to understand, Cathy, you have to understand Nellie is that she's an older sister. That's what I've always felt. She's the person trying to say, "This is insanity. Don't do this. " And so it's that kind of the really important thing for me was giving her a moment of grace though, that even though she does withhold information, even though there are things that she does do that cause pain, she's also dealing with people who are not good at making good decisions and she's doing her best. And therefore it was really important. There's a moment in this film, which I really hope that acknowledges there's an acknowledgement of some things that have been done out of spite deliberately, but also there is like huge love.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Every time we tell a story verbally or we kind of rewrite it, it changes a bit depending on the storyteller, Greek mythology, et cetera. Why do you think that some readers are so protective over certain texts?
Emerald Fennell :
Because I am. I think that was the thing is I know how it feels because I'm absolutely one of the people who's like, "Oh, I hope they don't, better be good." I really, really care as well. And I think the adaptations that I love and I've found really moving tend to be ones that exist as a response, not as a literal adaptation. I think the thing is about, and about this book in particular, there's so much in there that you can't hope to touch on all of it. And so for me, it was always about saying this is a sister or a cousin to the original text. It can't be a twin. And I think it's really important. It's why it's in inverted commas because I wanted to be clear to the people who love this book as much as I do, that I know how untouchable the coattails of Emily Brauntail, the skirt tails are.
And therefore, I wanted to say early on as I can't make a perfect thing out of this because it's too difficult, but I can hopefully make some people feel the same way that I felt when I read it
And it's in no way definitive.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Yeah, I love the idea of it being either a sister or a cousin, but either way, it' slightly incestuous.
Now, it's absolutely fair to say that the novel is not necessarily laugh out loud, funny. Your film absolutely is. Why is it important, I guess, for you to approach something which can be interpreted as so incredibly bleak and devastating with such brilliant irreverence?
Emerald Fennell :
That is extremely kind of you to say. I think it's partly the nature of the gothic because the gothic exists and I suppose it is that a poetic medium is that if you do completely faithful adaptation of the gothic, it is overwrought. It is kept. It is mellow drama. That's what the gothic is. And Bronte crucially is none of those things because it's so visceral. It's so real. But the thing is, is again, when translating it, for me, translating it into a movie, I felt kind of early on it's something you sort of have to acknowledge, you have to acknowledge. Otherwise, you don't want it to be one feeling. And for me, I'm always interested in kind of pressure and release, the application of pressure and then when to release. And humour is such an important tool for that. And I suppose also I don't really know how to make anything completely serious. I would be at a loss and it would, yeah, it wouldn't be very good.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Just thinking back now, is there one moment that still makes you cackle or one piece of production design or ... Because for me, and just telling people about it, I'm like, "And there's this, oh my God, and there's this ... " Oh, thank you.
Emerald Fennell :
For me, Isabella's book of Friendship. Oh God, great. She gifts Cathy, and I think we can say Book of Friendship in the biggest inverted commas that exist. The thing is we felt about Isabella early on, because it's a very complicated relationship, Isabella, and I felt very, very strongly when ... I felt very strongly that Wuthering Heights in general is not just about Cathy and Heathcliffe. It is about how a very destructive kind of love sucks everything, everyone and everything in its orbit and destroys it. And so Shazard as Edgar and Alison as Isabella and Hongas Nelly, these are really, really important characters. But looking at Isabella and her journey, it was really important that she had agency, that we were able to say, look, she's this one thing, but it's innocence versus experience. And it's what happens when you are made to be a little girl long into adulthood.
So much of this book is about what happens when you try and restrain what is natural,
Which is why so much of the design in the movie and so much of the kind of themes of the movie are about those things. But so what we said early on, and it's in her costumes, it's in her bedroom, it's in everything. We said that everything that Isabella did, whether it's her needle point, whether it's her crafts, whether it's the rosettes on her dresses are accidentally phallic or vaginal because she's literally a walking sort of totem of sexual frustration. And so it means that literally when she makes something, every flower she draws, every mushroom she depicts is absolutely filthy. And it's just, that's the joy. That is the joy of working with all of these incredible people is that I say, I want the rudest book of crafts anyone has ever made that wouldn't push this film into an NC17 rating and they come back with more than you could ever dream of.
Rhianna Dhillon:
I just like cackled
Emerald Fennell :
Mushroom so many times watching it. Well, also there's a kind of moment of perfect performance where Isabella's talking about the day that Cathy ... Because it's also that thing of boredom of being a woman in Victorian times and literally having nothing to do, not being allowed to live really. Exist,
Exist. And so the thing about Isabella is she's just remarking one day we went on a walk and you saw a mushroom and Edgar says emphatically, Shazad's genius sort of, yes. Of course you would remember one mushroom that you saw seven months ago because honestly, that's the most exciting thing that happens to you all week. And just that kind of detail, that's the thing when you talk about period accuracy as well. I'm not obviously devoted to period accuracy because I don't know that we can be. I think actually period accuracy tends to be a sort of trend based thing anyway, but the thing that I am interested in is what a period would do to you emotionally and how that might impact the characters.
Rhianna Dhillon:
It's interesting you talk about the sort of sexual frustration because weren't we all at 14? And so when you're sort of coming to this text at that age, is this because obviously there is a lot of sex, there is a lot of imagery, the egg yolks, it's all there, but it's all, I guess because they don't have sex in the novel, is this all the stuff that you were reading between the lines at 14? Was this all the stuff that you were putting in and now you actually do get to put it in?
Emerald Fennell :
Well, it's wish fulfilment because when you absorb a book, because that's the thing about Weathering Heights is it's not just you read it, you put it down, you absorb it into your body physically, I think, which does make me sound completely direct, but I really do feel it's like a kind of physical, it sort of swallows you up.
And so therefore when I went back to read it, even when I go back to read it now, having read it a thousand times for this film and for my life, there are things in there that I'm sure were in there that aren't in there. And of course when I read it at 14 and at 15 and 16 and 17 and 35, I kind of felt that something had happened. It's really interesting because Daphne DeMaria called it a kind of completely sexless book. Weathering Heights. Yeah. That's interesting. And I profoundly disagree. It is so dangerously sexual and whether or not what happens between them is realised or not, I believe there's so much in the book that feels dangerously sexual, which I think is partly why people so furious at the time. And so for me, it was about giving myself permission to do the thing that I think as a reader I needed, which you know, I mean, whether or not that's right, I don't know.
But I felt always, I felt I was thinking a lot about like Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and in Glorious Bastards and how Quentin Tarantino doesn't just take stories, he takes actual historical facts and says, no, but what if we change it? What if we are allowed to do something else? And so with Weathering Heights, I felt like I wish they could kiss. And of course, when you're in charge of it, they can, even though that may be wrong. I just see you as the doll with your dolls. I am making a kiss. I am Isabella in every conceivable way.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Obviously young Cathy says at the beginning, then we're doomed, which is repeated again at the end. And what is appealing or romantic about doomed love, do you think?
Emerald Fennell :
I think that all love is doomed because we are all going to die. So the act of loving someone is so dangerous. Even the most happy, comfortable love. In fact, that's the worst because we all go into loving people knowing it's finite
And that's something we carry around with us every day and maybe don't acknowledge. And I think so. Therefore, tragedy and tragic love stories speak to a very profound and deep part of us, which knows that we are all doomed and I think we all need the catharsis sometimes of seeing it. And certainly for me, whether it's just I never left my 14-year-old self, the love stories I come back to again and again, whether it's Brief Encounter or Gone With the Wind or Romeo and Juliet, they are movies that don't really have happy endings. They're stories that don't have happy endings.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Oh God.
Emerald Fennell:
Yeah, sorry. It's a bummer. It is also funny, guys.
Rhianna Dhillon:
It is also really funny. And also, I've got to ask because from Pride and Prejudice to Bridgerton to Wuthering Heights, why do we all go so feral for a man and a wet white shirt?
Emerald Fennell :
Okay. Firstly, because it's perfect and because Colin Firth taught us, number one. And also to some degree, Leonard DiCaprio. I mean, he's sopping wet in Titanic and Romeo and Juliet. So he really ... I think we've got sense memory now that it's a kind of green flag for us all. But I think also what we long for and the kind of root of good storytelling and particularly romantic storytelling is boundaries. And the thing about now, a love story now, they're a bit more complicated to tell because we can get divorced. We can have ... I mean, I'm not suggesting we do have affairs, but there's not the same sort of social stigma, there's not the same kind of religious terror. And I think what we all understand when we watch Pride and Prejudice or Bridgerton or Weathering Heights is if you transgress even a tiny bit, there are serious consequences.
And so it means the stakes relate to all of us. And I think it's also, we're living in a kind of really frightening world right now. And I think for a lot of us to watch something that feels a million miles away maybe is a bit of a relief.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Yeah. And final question, because we're Penguin, we have to ask, could there be another book adaptation film from you in the future and is there a book that you would love to adapt next? God,
Emerald Fennell :
There are so many that I love. I've always thought that Hangover Square by Patrick Hamilton would be a good one, but I think it may be too cruel. I think, I don't know that I could face it. Also, I'm not sure if I read it again, I might find it, I might be on a different side. It's one of those ones. Fascinating. But actually anything by Patrick Hamilton, I think.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Perfect. Emerald Fennell, thank you so much for joining us. Thank
Emerald Fennell :
You so much.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Thanks so much to Emerald Fennell for talking to me and Ask Penguin. Wuthering Heights is in cinemas now. As my conversation with Emerald touched on, this is a novel absolutely bursting with ideas and who better to dig into some of them than my guests in the studio today who have their own, I'm going to say, very intense relationship with Wuthering Heights. I'm delighted to introduce Harriet Evans and Henry Elliot. Welcome to you both.
Henry Eliott:
Thank you. Lovely to be here.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Thank you for joining us. Henry is the author of five books, including the Penguin Classics book. He hosts a bestselling classics book club, Read The Classics, both online through Substack and in person at Hatchard's Bookshop in London. He's worked as a classics editor, Bloomsbury, Faber and Faber and Penguin, where he created and hosted the podcast on the road with Penguin Classics. Harriet Evans is the award-winning author of multiple bestselling novels, including The Beloved Girls, The Garden of Lost and Found, and The Treasures. Harriet is a lifelong fan of the Bronte's with Wuthering Heights being one of our absolute favourite books of all time. Now, first things first, as big Bronte fans, how did you feel when you heard there was a film adaptation coming out from the director of Saltburn, promising Young Woman, quite an irreverent director? What were your thoughts?
Henry Eliott:
Well, I was excited. I'm a big fan of Emerald Fennell. I'd seen Promising Yo Woman. I'd seen Saltburn. I thought they were great. I was really intrigued to see what she would do with it, especially after Andrea Arnold's sort of unusual take on the book in 2011. I was interested to see what Emerald was going to do.
Harriet Evans:
I really remember finding out she'd done it and thinking, yes, of
Rhianna Dhillon:
Course. Of course it is.
Harriet Evans:
Yeah. I was like, "Yeah, yes, I can see that for you. " It just made sense, weirdly.
Rhianna Dhillon:
I agree. It was such smart ...
Harriet Evans:
Yeah.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Immediately you're there, right? You're like, "I'm booking my seat already."
Harriet Evans:
And I think if you're a true artist, which I genuinely think she is, and we can come in onto this, quite often what's deeply unexpected then makes sense in retrospect, if that makes sense as well.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Let's delve into the book. As I mentioned, you're both big, big fans. What were your sort of first memories of reading it? How old were you? What did it mean to you then and has that changed over the years? Well,
Henry Eliott:
It's definitely changed for me. I first read it when I was 18 or 19, actually in Bangalore in Southern India. It was sort of the least Yorkshire Moore's Singfield reading the book. And I have to say, I think I wasn't quite mature enough for it at the time. I didn't immediately love it. I found it quite complicated and difficult, to be honest. I enjoyed it much more when I read it later at university. And then when I've reread it over the years, I've come to really love it. And actually I was just saying to Harry earlier that my most recent read through of it was as a teacher a couple of years ago, and I taught it to 16 and 17 year olds. The same age as I was when I first read it. And that was, again, a totally sort of new way of seeing the book, seeing them encountering it for the first time.
Rhianna Dhillon:
How was that? Did they struggle with it in the same way that you did? Yeah,
Henry Eliott:
A real mix, a real variety. Some really went for the love story aspect of it. There was one student who just hated it, really couldn't bear, couldn't understand why we were studying it, but ... And this was my favourite reaction because it completely stuck with her. And by the end of the year, it was the book she chose to write about for her final.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Wow. Oh, wow. Gosh, that's quite a journey.
Harriet Evans:
I did it for A Level and I am here today to represent the demographic of people who spent a lot of time thinking this was a doomed love story who are now grown up women who reread it and think, "What on earth?" Harry, that's really screwed up. We used to write out lines from it. I cannot live without my life. I cannot live without my soul. We used to march around quoting endless bits of it. Me and all my friends who did English. All your six former Johnson. Okay.
Gosh. And I know loads of people and a quite strong ... My other demographic that of the lady novelist who's patronised the entire time and dismissed, which I'm also here to represent. That thing of how ... I'd read so many books by that point, but I had never read anything like it. And I think because it's so visceral and the emotions are so strong, when you're 16, you respond to it so immediately. And so it does engender incredibly strong opinions, but for me and all my friends, we just really violently loved it. And as Henry says over the years, as I've come back to it, I do have different feelings about it. My feelings for it, and it's genius stay completely the same, but the stuff in it, I kind of recoil from more and think even more, "Wow, Emily Bronte, you were an extraordinary person and a genius." It is
Henry Eliott:
Completely bond because it's unlike any other book. I think it's so easy to, if you haven't read it, to see it alongside Jane Austen or George or Charlotte Bronte and it sits there on the shelf, but it is completely its own thing, isn't it? And much stranger than you expect.
Rhianna Dhillon:
And the word violent, you use the word violent there, you loved it violently, but violence kind of leaps out every page, which I'd sort of forgotten just how, as you say, you have such a physical reaction to it because it is violent.
Harriet Evans:
And it's very casual. People are constantly say ... Heathcliff will be in the middle of a conversation with Nelly and he'll say, "I can't." And he'll kind of dash his head against the side of a
Rhianna Dhillon:
Rock, which would explain a lot.
Harriet Evans:
Ah, yeah.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Yeah. So critics, I mean, even those who don't really love the book, they have to admit that it has an extraordinary power over its readers. So what do you think is the sort of basis of that power?
Henry Eliott:
I would have to say, I think it's the character of Heathcliff. I think he's so central to this book and he's such a mystery, such a mercurial character. He's, in some ways, a blank canvas that readers can sort of project whatever they want onto. You can read him as a ironic hero, you can read him as a devil, you can read him as an abuser, which he is. And so I think it's the fact that he's so hard to pin down and he's so full of this passion and rage. And the fact that we see, obviously we see the story in the book from lots of different perspectives, from Lockwood's perspective, from Nelly's perspective, but Cathy has been dead a long time by the time we come to this story. Heathcliff is the survivor of this story and there's something about how does he get to this point?
Who is he? What's his backstory? And that unravelling is, I think, the most fascinating thing about it. For me, he is the centre of it.
Harriet Evans:
Yeah. I've never thought that before. It's so interesting because he's also a curiously blank figure. He's only passion and emotion and violence and strength of feeling. You never know if he prefers hot pot or roast chicken. You don't know the most basic things about him. You don't know whereas Edgar Linton and everything at Thrush Cross Grange and everything is about taste and experience and liking one thing over the other. Heth Cliff, he's sort of like a whirlpool, you know what I mean? You don't know anything about him.
And it's weird because you can project quite a lot of stuff onto him and people, like all generations have reinvented him for themselves and people, readers of different ages do. I think for me, what I enjoyed so much and continue to enjoy when I start to, when I reread it, is the structure of it. It's just a really, really well done novel. And when your job is trying to ... I was an editor before I was a writer trying to sort of look at the alchemy because we throw out round words like I say, God, it's crazy and it's bonkers and it's such an extreme book, but it's such a cleverly written book. There are screeds written about how incredibly complex and sophisticated the structure is. And it starts off as a sort of ... I'm telling you that I'm getting you to this point where we can start to talk about the past, and it is because Lockwood has to go back and find all this stuff out from Nelly, but then that almost becomes something that she's like kicking around like a ball.
She's like, "Yes, this man who's telling you who's going to lead us this story is a fool and we almost might not get there." And the way the story comes out is incredibly at times difficult to pull out and yet you know she She's in total control of her material.
And as a writer, you frequently are not. And I've got used to seeing when other writers I think are losing control of the material or when a book is not particularly well. This, it's just constant storytelling all the time. And it's done at kind of full throttle. And I can't think of another book like that because it obscures how incredibly clever it is.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Yeah. That's such an interesting perspective. I really struggle with the framing device of this. The kind of somebody recounting a story that isn't really there to tell. And I mean, it's kind of like MR James as well, like the story within a story and that you kind of feel like it's all dialogue because of it. It's all verbalised. And I find that in my head quite stressful to read a book full of dialogue.
Harriet Evans:
Yeah, you're completely right. I guess there wasn't visual entertainment then. So I think there was a lot of dialogue because some books wanted to provide that experience of just hearing people talk in the way that we would now watch stuff on Netflix. But I mean, and Henry would be able to speak to this much more erodically than I, but like so many books then did have quite a lot of framing devices and novels did use this kind of, I'm writing you this letter to tell you about this because it was a way of getting, just as mobile phones today have totally ruined quite a lot of murder mysteries.
Henry Eliott:
No, I think that's really right. And of course, one of the things we know about Emily is that she hardly left the house, did she? But we know that she immersed herself in the library that was there at Howarth. And she knew her romantic literature. She knew her 18th century novels. And yet of course there was this big tradition of epistolary
Novels written entirely through letters and through the voices of different characters. So I think that was probably quite a natural way for her to frame it. I personally really like it partly because it is in some ways a ghost story. Heath Cliff is haunted by the memory of Catherine. But are they dreams? Are they actual ghosts who enter this story? It's never quite clear. But in some ways it is a ghost story. And those ghost stories, you mentioned MR James, I think they work particularly well when there are nested narratives and we as a reader get closer and closer to reality. So it starts off, you think, oh okay, well this is just a story I'm hearing secondhand and then it gets one step closer. And then by the end of a novel, we're right there with the latest developments. And it really makes it, it's a great effect because it's like we're being brought right to the centre of it.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Yes, and it does do that, doesn't it? Our nose pressed up against the window. Yeah. So Henry, can you sort of contextualise this a little bit for us because the novel had sort of mixed reviews when it was first published and Charlotte Bronte was embarrassed by it apparently and kind of concerned about the impact that it might have on the rest of them. So how is that sort of cultural position? When did that position change, do you think, and why was that initial response so strong?
Henry Eliott:
Well, you're absolutely right. The three sisters who had written all their lives, that Charlotte suggested that they published a joint publication of poetry together and it didn't do well at all. Nobody read it. Nobody bought it. And so they decided to turn their ... Well, Charlotte decided to turn her hand to writing a novel and she wrote Janet, which was rejected by her publisher.
Meanwhile, she discovered that Emily had written this novel almost sort of secretly the way Charlotte describes it as she came across some loose papers and started reading it, couldn't believe what she was reading. Where did this come from, her sister of hers. And Wothering Heights and Agnes Grey and Bronte's novel were accepted for publication before Janelle. Although in fact, Janelle came out before them in the end because of the way the timeline worked. So they had these novels coming out at a very similar time. And I think because they were published under pseudonyms, initially people thought they were all written by the same person. I think Charlotte felt like she wanted her rights as an author to be sort of known. And so in a biographical note to, I think the third edition of Jane Air, she revealed the identities of her three sisters. And then in the 1850 edition of Wuthering Heights, she wrote a kind of preface.
And really Charlotte has quite a lot to answer for because these two notes really position Mothering Heights as ... She calls it a moreish wild book, as naughty as a root of heather. And she describes Emily writing from impulse. She'd never sort of educated herself. It's described as a kind of, almost like a sort of savance moment of brilliance, but it kind of shocked everyone how great it was. And I think for a long time, that became the prevailing view of Wuthering Heights and it was this sort of freak from the moors that had somehow achieved some success. And it was only over time that as Harry says, critics started to point out that Novus is really intricately constructed. There's so much depth of psychology, feeling, and yet also a kind of totally liberated, unfettered passion and feeling in there. And I would say now it's probably overtaken Jane Air in terms of which is the greater classic.
I think it's considered one of the greatest novels of the 19th century now.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Why do you think ... Because you were talking about sort of Heathcliff perhaps being the basis of the power, do you think for ... This can sound really generalised, but for a lot of female readers, if they're coming at the novel, if a protagonist is described as sort of disfigured and ugly as Rochester is, then is that potentially why it hasn't kind of reached the great passion that Wothering Heights has seen as? Because Heath Cliff, we kind of project as he's caught handsome in the novel with other things as well, but do you think that's part of it? Is that me being incredibly superficial?
Henry Eliott:
I think Jenna is a great novel, and I think they're doing slightly different things. I think Charlotte Bronte is setting out to do actually quite a radical thing, which is to make a feminist statement at a time when that was really hard to do. And there's several moments in that novel where she talks about gender equality and makes some quite bold statements. But I think Emily is being radical in a sort of totally different way and in a way which still feels really radical. And maybe that's why it endures even more because Heathcliff is a bad man, he's violent, he's cruel, and yet there is something totally magnetic about him. And that the boldness to do that, to give this cruel man such sex appeal still feels really bold
Rhianna Dhillon:
Today. Emerald for now obviously has this really kind of clear vision of the story that she wanted to tell, right? And she just kind of takes a fraction of the book and turns it into the entirety of her film. So when you went in, did you sort of feel the loss of any of the characters that we don't see at all or are sort of amalgamated in any way, or were you sort of quite happy with the fact that actually we lose a lot of the original book, but we do then have the focus pretty much entirely on Cathy and Heathcliff.
Harriet Evans:
I think there's two questions there. And the first is doing that work. Does taking the first half of the story work, but it also leads on to like, would you have liked to seen the whole story and is it possible to film the whole story? Because a lot of adaptations, the Olivier, the Andrea Arnold, I think as well-
Henry Eliott:
It goes on just slightly after
Harriet Evans:
Her
Henry Eliott:
Death, but yes, similar.
Harriet Evans:
For me, the second half of the novel is the more interesting and the more where you just keep thinking, God, the things can't get any worse. But also this idea of, if you love Emily Bronte, then you love all of them, really. You are interested in all of the sisters and that incredibly strange life that they led and the idea of the other and leaving the space of othering heights and what this very small, yet incredibly wild landscape means, it's just played out and played out with a different kind of kaleizoscopic vision through the rest of the book, but she just keeps tightening and tightening. So you think, oh, he won't do that. He won't do that. And then he goes ahead and does it. And it's so unput downable and real and visceral, but I can see everything, every discussion about this film, this adaptation needs to be, I think, prefaced with this idea of like, A, have you seen the film?
Because I went on to read it a couple of days ago and I was just looking to see if anyone else had seen it because we've been lucky enough to see a preview just to see ... And it was full of people saying, "This is what I have a problem with. " And no one had seen the film. So go and see the film and then let's have a problem with the conversation because everything about this film is context
And the decisions that Emerald Fennell has taken
As an artist and a film director, which I by and large loved, I really, really, really enjoyed it. I really just appreciated it. And I saw, as the person I've described myself as earlier, I was like, "Yes, Emerald, I see you. I see what you're trying to do and you've absolutely beautifully done it. " And on every level, like visually and aesthetically and casting wise, it's just a treat, but does that mean that you're not allowed as the viewer and as the Bronte fan to have any questions about like, "Are you allowed to just do this? And are you not subject to any criticism or like questions at all about like, you've changed Isabella's character quite a lot to fit in so that it's not a horrifically abusive
Rhianna Dhillon:
Situation." She has a lot more agency in this.
Harriet Evans:
She has a lot more agency and so questions and decisions like that, I don't think you can just say, "Well look, this is her vision. So any questions about whether it was right or wrong aren't allowed." What you can't do though is say, "I don't like this film and I haven't seen it. " This is a great, I think a real grateful- I mean I would say that with most criticism you can't do that. No, but it's astonishing the number of people who do. The number of Amazon reviews I have when people say this book arrived with a slight dent one star. Not an Amazon review of my book that I spent two years writing. Really interestingly, and this is an adjacent point, Margaret Robbie had never read the book before she was sent the script and she chose not to before she read the scripts and started to talk to Emma Vannell about it.
And I love that. I love that idea that she was like, right, I'm going in blind and this is how I'm going to approach it and then read the book three or four times.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Yes. I mean, I did absolutely love this film. It's such a bit of me, but also I kind of love how it will bring in new audiences and it is visually as ... So like meaty and stunning and beautiful and bright and overstylized, but I love that. I think if she had tried to do anything more traditional, she would have actually maybe opened herself up to a lot more criticism. I think just almost throwing the idea of this kind of being a fever dream version of Wuthering Heights is actually a great way in.
Henry Eliott:
I think you almost don't want to think of it as an adaptation of the book. It is a kind of a fevered dream version of the book, and it exists in its own right. I mean, to your question, you only have the feature length, don't you? I think cutting out all the different characters and it's such a complicated book. I think you have to simplify it a bit. The one element I missed was that sense of being haunted in it because by playing it so straight from Cathy and doing it from Cathy's point of view as well, which makes sense if she's remembering her teenage girl's reaction to it, going from a young girl to a woman, you just don't get any of that sort of ghostly sense from it, which is for me a large part of the reading experience.
Harriet Evans:
Yeah, totally. I completely agree. I do think it makes sense of Cathy, who is an unsympathetic person in lots of ways and behaves really badly and according to the dictates of the day and readers as well, lots of readers like sympathetic women
And Cathy, it's for me, the strongest Cathy I've ever seen. And I think what a lot of people do is get really caught up in the wildness of the moors and actually the wildness of the moors takes care of themselves. If you've got a good cinematographer, just stick a camera on that. And in this film, the cinematography is beautiful, but it's also, that's a lovely landscape. What this does so cleverly is give you a sense of her interior world. She's wild, but she's also really quite calculating about her own need for self-survival because she is brutalised and living in a brutalised place and gives this child who is thrust upon the family the name of the son who died. She chooses his name and says he should be called Heathcliff. So there's this incredibly kind of weird and cestuous relationship right from the beginning, which I think the film does really well and gets across really well and makes so much sense of.
I didn't feel Jacob Lordi, whilst just a pleasure to look at that man for two hours, just well done. I didn't feel that I got a massive insight into the evelocity that's driving him, which in the book, he's riven by hatred and bitten. He's very petty.
Rhianna Dhillon:
It's eventual. He's
Harriet Evans:
Such a petty man. And this, the 14 year olds who loves this is going to be ... He's definitely that version. And that's the one bit where I was like, all the other changes I can see, but that I really needed you to show for all the 14 year old girls who might end up with terrible men as a result of reading too many books like we all do where you're like, "Oh, this is normal." And I wanted to see a bit more what's driving him because the early scenes are so good. And when he comes back later and he's had his hair cut and he's always stopped looking like, I don't know, a barista from Froom, but I live in Bath. There's a lot of people who like him before he
Rhianna Dhillon:
Said- That was such a specific reference. You know what I mean? There's one called Barisa. I
Harriet Evans:
Thought she liked my earrings. I was like, wait, wait, she's going to get his hair cut guys. It's going to be really exciting. He comes back and you're like, yes, that's completely perfect. The visuals are really good and the specifics were all so good, but I think there's just a slight for me, a gap where I'm like, I'm not getting that final step across where I'm like, this is who Heath Cliff is because I 100% got Cathy and so many other things, Edgar, the best version of
Rhianna Dhillon:
Edgar. Well ways, but also the most decent character in the book and again in the film. We had this really great question from Zara about Heathcliff. He's always been incredibly complex. He's either a victim, a villain, or a romantic hero or all three. So tell us about your thoughts about Jacob Lordy's interpretation of those elements.
Henry Eliott:
Yeah, like Harry, I feel like he is a ... I mean, this film is very much from Cathy's perspective, isn't it? We're on her the whole time and he comes in and out of her world, as opposed to, for instance, the Andrea Arnold adaptation, which is from his perspective. And Cathy's much less of a presence in that. And it's all from his point of view. So I guess that's a directorial decision, I suppose, of how where you put that emphasis. If I had one other criticism, I think it's that I kind of wish they hadn't had so much sex because not that I've mind there being sex and classic adaptations, it's just that they don't in the book. And that's one of the things which really makes their relationship so tantalising and poignant and you feel like that's what ... He's yearning for that for quite much after her death.
He digs up her corpse twice to lie with it because he just wants that physical context. And when they enter this really torred affair in the film, my heart sank a little bit because I thought, oh, this is ... I feel like it reduces a story a bit to the story of an affair, whereas actually what the book is, is about something sort of less mundane than that.
Harriet Evans:
Yeah. I think it's a storytelling choice, the sex, and it's well done, like the chemistry between them is good. And in classic adaptations, that's not always the case. I thought it worked really well, but I know exactly what you mean, but I think there are some things you have to lose and some things you have to insert, sorry, I didn't mean like that, but you know what I mean, to get the audience to visually appreciate just what it would have been like.
I am so interested all the time in how Emily Bronte, who was a young woman in her 20s when she wrote it, and who had been hardly anywhere, she went to boarding schools to be a teacher, she went to boarding schools and then all her sisters died and then she went to teach and it was always a disaster wherever she went anywhere. And then she went to Brussels for two years and that was very difficult and she didn't enjoy it. She always wanted to be at home, always. And she was this incredibly wild person. And I think the reason she's sort of one of the more popular, and in Howarth in the shop, you can pick badges dependent on which it just says Emily or Anne or Charla. One of the reasons people love her so much now is this sort of rewilding of women that people identify a lot with the wildness of Emily.
They see her as this very wild person. And I'm always so interested in, did she see herself as Heathcliff?
Writing Heathcliff, did it allow her to access that totally wild, primitive part of herself? Yeah. Because at the same time, she was a very, very able housekeeper. She ended up doing a lot of the stuff after their aunt died and she was very, very precise. They were all very good at housekeeping. They were obsessed with keeping things neat and tidy and making sure that with hardly any money and everyone being ill all the time and dying, that they were making a home that was ... And people who always comment on that. And so I wonder if writing Heathcliff, this may be a stretch, but I often wonder if writing Heathcliff, not only is it the embodiment of the moors in this landscape, but it's her accessing just as people go to festivals now and lose themselves. So we do things now and we know it's a part of ourselves.
We don't mind it, but I'm fond of him because I think he's a terrible person. She's in prison for multiple, multiple different reasons, but I'm fond of what I think he represents to Emily writing away and what he enabled her to sort of loosen within herself. I hope he's not based on the worst man in the entire world, her brother Branwell, but that's how I always see it.
Rhianna Dhillon:
And something that I really noticed again on a reread of this was just how hateful all of the characters are in some capacity or another. And it's so interesting, like when you're talking to people about it, you're like, "Well, everyone's awful. Everyone is awful. You don't like any of them." You were talking about the need for like a sympathetic female protagonist often, which I think is definitely changing, especially in the last kind of few years, but can you talk about the need for that in a novel versus a film? Do you think that we are maybe more forgiving of having characters who are all absolutely despicable because they are, and yet look at them, how kind of in a high regard we hold Cathy and Heathcliff.
Henry Eliott:
Yeah, I think we're always quite attracted to villains, aren't we? And you think of Satan and Paradise Lost or Dostoevsky where they're all grotesque and yet we're kind of totally sort of gripped by them. And I think clearly Emerald Fennell is too because the Barry Kiergen character in Saulburn is awful, but you can't take your eyes off him. He's just totally magnetic. So
Harriet Evans:
I don't know.
Henry Eliott:
I think we all like a villain, don't we?
Harriet Evans:
We do. And there's the, when I'm doing creative writing talks, whatever, I always talk about the Hannibal Lecter factor, which is we all know Hannibal Lecter's bad person, right? We know he's a serial killer. We don't want him to escape from jail, but that book would not be interesting and we would not stick with it and nor the film if we weren't just slightly interested in him achieving some more agency and getting one over on the doctor and finding out a bit more about him. We know he's bad, we know, but it's what you do with bad people that makes them interesting. And yeah, I think Barry Giegan is such a perfect example because he's not a serial killer, he's Eden people, but he's not particularly nice. No one in that film's particularly nice, but you watch. And I think it also speaks to that just completely remarkable situation of the Bronte's, which is they hadn't learnt that they needed to present themselves as likeable.
And Charlotte, I always think with Charlotte, she's quite difficult to like as a person and I've read loads about her, but she's very easy to love. She always sounds quite sort of prickly. She's rather
Dogmatic. She's kind of this and Emily just sounds bonkers and actually I increasingly have a lot of time for and just off earning a living and then writing Tenet Wildfall Hall, which is by the way, a deeply great novel, which Charlotte also wrote an incredibly rude forward to and was, didn't she? This book is disgusting because she talks about how a woman should be able to leave her alcoholic husband who's beating her up. She's just really, sorry, she's not my sister. I really don't like how you problem with that. And she discerns it even more than she slightly does with Weathering Heights when she writes the forward to that. They were growing up in such a vacuum, they found the outside world, they hadn't really learnt to adjust to it. And by the time Charlotte had some fame and success and went to London, she found it quite odd and difficult to fit in.
She met Fat Ray and people and she was a bit like, I don't know what to say to all them because she was just so used to being herself
And that's why the novels ... Jane Air isn't particularly likeable. Rochester is a thousand percent not likeable. As people who've read Widesargassocino, like the only really likeable person in that is Bertha Mason and that's one of the reasons they're so interesting and extraordinary. They hadn't been brought up going to quadriels and curtsying and saying, "Hello, sir. How are you? " They just brought up seeing people die all the time of Typhus in the village and their own siblings die of consumption. It's a hard way to live your life and it doesn't leave you much chance to be like, "Oh, I must inquire after where your new bonnet is from. It says your face so
Rhianna Dhillon:
Perfectly." But that's manners, right? That's kind of manners. And then there's also deliberately heaping misery on another person for the sake of you're having a miserable time. You want everybody else to be miserable with you, which I think in, I think with Nelly, Nelly, I've not really heard many people talk about Nellie. She is so much a part of Wuthering Heights, so much more than Cathy and Heathcliffe, and yet she's very overlooked in kind of literary conversations, I think. She is played brilliantly by Hong Kia in the film, but again, I actually found I had more empathy with her, much more in the film, because you see where- You have some
Harriet Evans:
Context.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Yes. In the book, she, I find, is horrendous, and I hate her. I mean, I kind of love her for her gossipy ways and the fact that we're kind of hearing it through her eyes and you're kind of having to constantly reassess what she's saying because it's through her mouth and the film is not Nellie's story, but yes, tell me your thoughts about Nellie as a character.
Henry Eliott:
Well, yeah, I agree. I think it's a brilliant performance and she is a very unreliable narrator in the novel. And there are sort of sins of a mission where she fails to tell people things which would change the course of events. And I think Emily's done a great job of kind of really just clarifying that. One way she's done that is by elevating her social status. So even though she's an illegitimate child, she's on the same kind of level as social level as Cathy. So that sort of equals, and then she gets snubbed when Heathcliff arrives and that childhood jealousy leads to this whole story, which is not an aspect of the book, even though Nelly sees herself as a kind of foster sister because I think her mother was Cathy's wet nurse, but I think that works extremely well. I wonder if there was an article by an American academic in the 50s called The Villain of Wuthering Heights where he looks at Nelly as for sort of the ultimate villain who's kind of controlled this whole situation, ends up in basically in control of both these houses, sitting pretty drinking tea. And yeah, I think that was really clever to bring that out more in the film.
Harriet Evans:
Yeah. I think it's one of the ways in which the dialogue between this film and the novel is really, brilliantly beautifully done because in the book, for people who haven't read it, she's sort of responsible for everything going wrong because she doesn't, as you say, she doesn't pass on this quite crucial piece of information that Cliff's misheard or hasn't heard the more relevant bit that he needed to hear to persuade him to not go insane and ruin everyone's lives for generations. Just all hangs a very, very small, very small hook. But I love the way Emor Fanal, she knows we'll know that if we love the book and for those who don't know the book, she sort of tidied it up. There is a book coming out next year called Nellie and it's just from her. Yeah. I
Rhianna Dhillon:
Mean the whole book's from her perspective. Mothering Heights is Nellie's perspection. Yeah. I love that idea though, that she's the villain of the
Harriet Evans:
Piece that going out. That's brilliant.
Rhianna Dhillon:
But she absolutely is. I mean, sort of forgotten and everything else. Let's go back to the film and specifically some of the decisions that Emerald for now made visually because, oh my goodness, the costumes, the set ... I mean, talk about the set first of all, Wuthering Heights itself. Do you think that she manages to encapsulate the isolation that we feel? You talked about the Moores, about how they speak for themselves. She has a very specific look for Wuthering Heights. Did that work for you guys?
Harriet Evans:
A hundred percent worked for me because you're in there straight away. There's really interesting use of perspective the whole time. There's lots of sort of diagonal lines leading you into the centre of the picture. There's lots of visual references to things like Vermeers. It's quite still, lots of people are kind of sitting around and you think, is that ... I've seen that before and it might be a Rembrandt painting or it might be a pop video. She's such a beautifully visual director. It's extraordinary. So you leave having had this ... It's not an assault on the senses and the book is actually an assault on the senses in lots of places like you've eaten this incredibly rich, beautiful, multi-layered meal,
But the decisions about the house, the house does not bear any resemblance to the house in the book, but if you love the book as I do and sort of really to weird, you just are so like, yes, I can see why you've done that and I thank you for it because I can see what you're doing. And I really love old films and I love like 1950s big things and things like Douglas Sirk and everything. There's a lot of that kind of visual feast aspect of it and drama of the visuals. And the house of hammer horror kind of vibe as well, which I, yeah, isn't done to bash you over the head and say, look how clever I am. That's what I really like about it. It just sort of is there and you take it if you want to and you don't if you don't.
And Martin Kluens, let's get
Rhianna Dhillon:
Martin Luther great. I kind of love that it's not at all the Wallering Heights that we read in the book or the one that you might have in your head, but how exciting to have somebody else's vision of
Henry Eliott:
It. I think, I mean, the whole film just looks absolutely stunning. There's so many just sort of screenshots that are stuck in my memory, like that moment where Cathy's walking across the walls and her dress is like floating over the heather or the moment with the leeches, my God, trying to stick with me forever.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Oh, so horrendous.
Henry Eliott:
And I think in terms of the sets, Thrush Cross Grange I thought was incredible. It was like this sort of bizarre sort of house of strange rooms with, and then with the dolls house inside, it was like a sort of ... And the doll's house inside of a doll's house and you felt like it was this sort of terrible sort of- Nesting
Rhianna Dhillon:
Gold. Nesting, exactly. And hands coming out of the fireplace, which is obviously a great reference to the hand through the window. Of
Henry Eliott:
Course. And actually made that connection, of course. Of
Rhianna Dhillon:
Course. Lost hands everywhere.
Henry Eliott:
Yeah. And I think the contrast between Thrushcross and Wuthering Heights was really good. The actual house of Warding Heights, I'm not sure I was quite such a fan. I found those glazed bricks reminded me of sort of the London underground. Yes, exactly. The tiles. It sort of took me out of it a bit, but I did love those sort of crazy like rock formations around it. And also I couldn't quite work out the levels. It seemed like you could sort of walk in at roof level, but I loved, and sometimes there were sort of tunnels around the side of it,
Harriet Evans:
But yeah,
Henry Eliott:
All of that weirdness I liked, those
Harriet Evans:
Glazed
Henry Eliott:
Bricks, I wasn't sure.
Harriet Evans:
You can't make sense of it and you can't make sense of the house. I actually, you can't You can't really work out where the front door is.
You can't make sense of it actually if it's in a rock. And that's why, to repeat myself, that they've got the Moores and they do the Moores really well. And they're true to what that feeling for those kids and then those adults would have been of feeling free out on the Malls. If they'd screwed up with that and made the Moores also have cling film, lollipops sticking out of them and loads of crazy lights or people with meat wallpaper, I'd be like, no. But because she knows that that's the elemental that really needs to stay, I think she's given herself permission to play with these. And for everyone, a lot of Christmas decoration inspo to be had in this film. Please, Pinterest. Yeah.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Okay. So if you're kind of thinking about the film as a whole, were you aware of those little meta references all the way through? Do you think you could just enjoy it going in, not knowing anything about Watherine Heights, not having any of that love for it? Do you think just as a film you can enjoy it?
Henry Eliott:
For sure. In fact, I'd almost recommend that. I went in thinking I'm coming in to see an adaptation of Wuthering Heights. And actually about a quarter of the way through, I thought I can just relax.This is just its own thing. I'm just going to enjoy it for what it is. So yeah, I don't think you would suffer from not knowing the book.
Rhianna Dhillon:
And were you okay with that? As somebody, as people who are such fans of the book, are you okay with this very loose interpretation of Wuthering Heights if it might be some people's first
Henry Eliott:
Access
Rhianna Dhillon:
To it?
Henry Eliott:
I see what you mean. I suppose basically I am okay with it because I feel like I don't go to watch an adaptation to see exactly what's in the book because if I could just read the book, I want to see an interpretation and I think my favourite classic adaptations are ones which are really playful with. My favourite of all is the Cock and Bull story of the Michael Winterbottom, which is so bonkers, but really captures a spirit of trust from Shandy. And I feel like Emerald Fennell has made an Emerald Fennell film and she's drawn a strand out of Wuthering Heights and I think we can enjoy that. I don't get too hung up on it.
Harriet Evans:
Yeah. And it always seems so small minded to castigate something for not being a lifelike adaptation. When the source material is weathering heights, the purest representation of that book might actually be the Kate Bush song because it is made by a true original and it is also very bonkers and has nothing to do with it, but it somehow captures something of the wildness of the film. But I get so annoyed when people are, when it's something as strange and bonkers and incredible as this novel, when people are like, "Well, I should have done that on that. " When actually you need to have a true artist interpret another true artist's work and I think that's what they've done. And exactly like Henry Half, about 50. I knew it was going to be quite full on and we saw it in the morning and it's quite a strange time to watch a film if you ... You definitely
Rhianna Dhillon:
Need a drink after it.
Harriet Evans:
I did. I had about nine drinks. No, I didn't. I went and did some work, but I needed a drink. I said to Henry afterwards, and we hadn't met before. A, I'd torn a piece of my skin. I just chewed a bit of my nail off without rounding. And I left and there was like blood on my nail. I was like blood because you're so used to seeing like incredibly pale skin with like beading blood everywhere. Yeah, there was a lot of bleeding. And B anyone stood in the lobby and I was like, "This is the only thing we've got in common. We've never met before. And this film is the thing we've got in common. This is really weird because it's the most bonkers thing we've ever seen." And we were, I think, both okay with that. I feel quite fondly towards it, which is strange because it's mad.
So
Henry Eliott:
You're saying it'd be a good blind date.
Harriet Evans:
Imagine if someone was like, "Hey, come and see one of your eyes with me. " Yeah.
Rhianna Dhillon:
But I think that's exactly what Emerald Fennell was hoping for when she put Wuthering Heights in- Inverter cars. Because she is saying, this is very much my interpretation, as you were saying, her 14 year old self memories, et cetera. And if you're going in with that from the very beginning, great. Relaxing is exactly the word. I think if you go into, I don't know, a pride and prejudice adaptation and everything is really similar, but they've then changed a few things that really jars. But if you're going in and everything is different and everything is over the top and then great, that's fine. This is a very different interpretation. So I guess for me, there's a spectrum when it comes to adaptations.
Henry Eliott:
Yes, agreed.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Now, Emily Bronte only left us with one novel, which obviously we're very lucky to have. You guys are big fans, but if listeners want something similar to her style of writing or to Wuthering Heights, have you got any recommendations, Henry?
Henry Eliott:
Well, I've got one of my favourite books to recommend here. I mean, first of all, if you love Wuthering Heights, do read the other Bronte since we've been saying, read her poems, and read Villett Charlotte Bronte's novel, which is so great.
Harriet Evans:
I'm reading at the moment. It's so great. Thanks, how are you? It's really great. I've never
Henry Eliott:
Read it before. Well, it's good, isn't it? But no, if you want something, especially if you enjoy the film of Wuthering
Rhianna Dhillon:
Heights,
Henry Eliott:
If you want something that's gothic, sexy, overblown, coming of age, love and death, highly recommend O Caledonia by Elsbeth Barker, which is all those things and is just fantastic.
Harriet Evans:
Mine would be, and I actually reread it only last year, The Woman in Whites by Wilkie Collins, because it's got epiculitary and kind of going back in time to work out how this and that has happened. It's got the greatest villain of all time. It's got a genuinely really awful villain. We'll keep
Rhianna Dhillon:
Coming. Who
Harriet Evans:
Isn't? No one would go, "Oh, let's have a chat about whether this guy's good or not.” Everyone agrees. Whereas he, sadly, there is some debate about, is he a hot piece of mess or whatever still? A hot piece of earth. You know what I mean? And this person, I'm not going to say who is, it's got the greatest character ever in Marion who is one of the sisters and it is genuinely so gripping. You cannot put it down. I mean, it was written about the same time as Weathering Hyatt. Yeah, like
Henry Eliott:
20 years later.
Harriet Evans:
Yeah. It is unput downable. Honestly, I promise you. Go read it. You won't be able to stop reading it. It's so mad. It is quite, there's a lot going on and it's tense, tense, tense. It's got proper sort of Donovan Will things be okay. And he was also a friend to women, Wilkie Collins. He was a real feminist.
Rhianna Dhillon:
I love that.
Harriet Evans:
Yeah. Both
Rhianna Dhillon:
Great, great recommendations.
Henry Eliott:
Highly second that Brett.
Harriet Evans:
Highly second yours. Thank you. So now we've got more than the adaptation of Weber Heights in comic few.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Thank you so much, both of you for joining. Thank you for your passion, talking about all things weathering heights. Henry Elliot and Harry Evans. It's been so interesting to delve into the book and also talk about the new adaptation. I feel like when you talk to people who are so passionate, it makes you love whatever that thing is more. So I feel like you've made me slightly love the book more just through your love of it. You can find links and information for all of the books that we've talked about today in the show notes. If you've enjoyed this episode and you'd like to submit a question of your own, you can follow us on Instagram @penguinukbooks or subscribe to the podcast wherever you listen to those. We'll be back soon with some more author chats and book recommendations. Thank you so much for listening and in the meantime, happy reading.