Wuthering Heights
Emily Bronte, the most brilliant and most mysterious member of the Bronte family, was born on July 30th, 207 years ago today. She died in 1848, aged 30, a year after the publication of Wuthering Heights, a novel which is now considered a classic of English literature.
It’s a gothic romance set on the windswept Yorkshire moors, known for its intense and passionate, albeit turbulent, love story between Catherine and Heathcliff. The novel explores themes of love, revenge, social class, and the destructive power of passion.
It was not a great success. One critic was, “shocked and confounded by a tale of unchecked primal passions, replete with savage cruelty and outright barbarism.” Another described all the characters in the novel as being: “utterly hateful or thoroughly contemptible”, and said it was “wild, confused, disjointed, and improbable”.
What inspired Wuthering Heights? In this short documentary, narrated by former Culture Secretary, Chris Smith, and directed by Tim Brearley, we take a journey across the Yorkshire Moors to Haworth to find that the romantic myth of Emily as ‘The Mystic of the Moors’ hides a more complex and fascinating truth.
With the help of Emily Bronte’s biographers, Lucasta Miller and Stevie Davies, her connection to the land and the intellectual life of her time is examined and presents a picture of a woman very different from our convention picture of her from the various films of her classic novel.
In 1939, Wuthering Heights was made into a feature film starring Laurence Olivier as the self-destructive, vengeful Heathcliff and Merle Oberon as his soulmate Catherine Earnshaw, as they grow up in the moors and seal a love that neither marriage nor madness could dissolve. In this version,David Nivenis Edgar Linton, Cathy’s husband.
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