Fifty shades of Brontë

As the new 'Wuthering Heights' film trailer arrives to much outrage among passionate fans, Katie Rosseinsky explains why so many are uniquely protective of the source material

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The sad literary girls are in uproar. The focus of our outrage? The one-and-a-half-minute trailer for Emerald Fennell's Wuthering Heights movie, which arrived online on Wednesday with all the subtlety of, well, a trailer for an Emerald Fennell movie.

It's the moment many Emily Brontë fans had been dreading ever since set photos emerged featuring Margot Robbie as Catherine, wearing a flouncy puffball of a wedding dress that looked more Eighties Sloane Ranger than 18th century, and Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff, grinning with a gold tooth. And somehow, this brief teaser manages to be even worse than we'd imagined. I haven't felt so personally attacked by a literary adaptation since Dakota Johnson started Fleabagging to the camera in Netflix's assault on Jane Austen's Persuasion.

Elordi's Heathcliff seems to have been reimagined as one of the hulking male models who appeared on the cover of pulpy romance novels back in the day, all long hair, abs and brooding glances. There's music from Charli xcx (Brontë meets Brat? It's a no from me). The colour grading has been amped up so that many of the settings resemble hyper-stylised music video backdrops. There are a lot of fingers being stuck into mouths, or into dead fish (Fennell is not one to shy away from turning subtext into screamingly obvious text).

Wuthering Heights is getting the