MOOR FOOL YOU

With a new big-budget film adaptation hitting our screens, 'Wuthering Heights' is on everyone's lips. It's a shame, then, that it's such an awful, awful book, argues Helen Coffey

- Helen Coffey

“Believe women” is a phrase we’ve heard a lot in recent times – and quite rightly. But there is one instance in which, I must confess, I don’t believe women. And that is every time one tells me that Wuthering Heights is her favourite book.

I still remember the first time I picked up a copy of Emily Brontë's much-vaunted 1847 literary classic. I'd loved eldest Brontë sister Charlotte's Jane Eyre; I'd developed a soft spot for the quiet radicalism of youngest sister Anne's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Now, in my mid-twenties, it was finally time to take on the most extravagant, gothic of masterpieces, penned by the extraordinary middle child herself.

Ill-fated lovers torn asunder, yearning across bleak northern vistas, desire so powerful it transcends the grave - I was all set to swoon over this "tragic love story" between Cathy and Heathcliff, in which the backdrop of the Yorkshire Moors "represents the wildness of Heathcliffe's character" (this information having been gleaned from an episode of Friends in which Phoebe and Rachel join a book group).

And this Heathcliff character sounded like "a bit of me", as they say on Love Island, a heady mix of Mr Darcy's brooding, glowering allure and Rhett Butler's arrogant, magnetic charm. I'll admit it: I was ready to have my head turned by a sexy leading man in period dress. Sue me.

The only good thing to have come out of 'Wuthering Heights' is the near-perfect 1978 Kate Bush song