6 Bold Ways Wuthering Heights Rewrites Emily Brontë's Classic

Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights isn’t just an adaptation; it’s a clean slice through Emily Bronte’s novel that keeps the torrid heart and tosses a lot of the bones. Reviews are already split, and the departures from the book are doing most of that heavy lifting. Here’s how the 2026 film reengineers the story, what it cuts, and why book loyalists are yelling at the moors.

The big swing: half the saga is gone

The film narrows the whole thing to Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, full stop. That means multiple major characters never show up, and with them goes the novel’s entire second-generation storyline. On the page, the back half of Wuthering Heights matters just as much as the first: it tracks the wreckage after Cathy’s death and maps Heathcliff’s slide into obsession. On screen, that whole arc gets trimmed to a sharp, tragic point.

A different ending: no Cathy Jr., no aftermath

The film changes the endgame. In the book, Cathy dies giving birth to her daughter, Cathy Linton, whose very existence needles Heathcliff for years. She’s central to what follows: Heathcliff abducts her, she winds up marrying his son, and she’s caught in a messy legal battle while both her parents are gone (Edgar dies later too). The movie erases that thread completely by having Cathy and Edgar’s baby die, effectively wiping out the second-generation plot that defines the novel’s latter half.

The affair is, well, an affair now

On the page, Cathy and Heathcliff’s reunion is fierce and intimate, but it’s psychological more than physical. Interpretations vary, but the text keeps it coy. The film, meanwhile, goes all-in on passion: multiple explicit rendezvous out on the moors, plus a timeline shuffle that dangles paternity doubts over Cathy’s pregnancy with Edgar’s child. In Bronte’s version, that pregnancy happens later, and Heathcliff elopes with Isabella before any of this, which keeps the mess emotional rather than carnal.

Ghosts, graves, and what the movie skips

If you know Wuthering Heights, you know the haunting. Cathy’s ghost isn’t background flavor in the novel; it’s a major force. The film stops short of all that. Gone are the scenes of her trying to get in through the window. Also missing: the wildly macabre moment when Heathcliff opens Cathy’s grave and embraces her corpse, and his arrangement to have the side of her coffin removed so their bodies can meet after his own death. The movie nods in that direction with a stark final image of Jacob Elordi’s Heathcliff cradling Margot Robbie’s Cathy and asking her to haunt him, but it cuts out before the book’s full-on obsession takes hold.

The Lintons, rewritten from the ground up

In the novel, Edgar and Isabella Linton enter young. Their early encounter with Hindley and Cathy sets the tone, and Edgar and Hindley bullying Heathcliff lights one of his earliest revenge fuses. Edgar later inherits Thrushcross Grange after his parents die of fever, and the estate is entailed to go to his or Isabella’s heirs.

The film changes all of that. Cathy and Edgar meet for the first time after she twists her ankle near Thrushcross Grange, an echo of a later book incident where Cathy is attacked by a dog and taken in to recover — except in the novel they already know each other by then. Even stranger: Isabella isn’t Edgar’s sister here; she’s labeled his ward. The movie uses that to mirror Cathy and Heathcliff’s not-quite-family dynamic, right down to Mr. Earnshaw musing on why Edgar didn’t just marry Isabella. In the book, that question never exists because they’re simply siblings.

Heathcliff’s identity, blunted

Jacob Elordi plays Heathcliff, with Owen Cooper as the younger version. Both deliver committed performances, but the casting scrubs away something the novel leans on: Heathcliff’s otherness. Bronte’s text describes him as dark and foreign, and while it never nails down an exact origin, it’s clear the character isn’t white — and that difference shapes how everyone treats him, which in turn fuels the man he becomes.

In the book, Heathcliff is described as "like a gipsy," possibly of Spanish or Latin American descent.

He’s an orphan with murky origins, implied to be a stowaway. The film doesn’t need to issue a birth certificate, but by sidestepping his racialized outsider status, it trims away one of the story’s sharper edges.

Framing the timeline

Bronte tells the tale through a hopscotching narrative, with Nelly looking back years after most of the people we meet are already dead. The movie flattens that structure by ending earlier and focusing on the first-generation tragedy, which is part of why the haunting and the second generation never enter the picture.

The small stuff

For what it’s worth, Margot Robbie’s Cathy is blonde. Book Cathy is canonically brunette. Compared to the bigger surgery above, that’s cosmetic at best.

Cast check

Jacob Elordi plays Heathcliff, Margot Robbie is Catherine Earnshaw, and Owen Cooper appears as young Heathcliff.