VARIATIONS ON A THEME

A new Wuthering Heights adaptation joins a rich history of cinematic reimaginings

- STEPHANIE ZACHAREK

THE MARK OF A GREAT, TOUGH BOOK MAY NOT be how many literature classes it's taught in but how many film or TV adaptations you can drape on its branches without breaking them.

Dramatizations are tricky business: no film-viewing experience can match the way an individual imagination—yours or mine—brings a writer's words to life. Yet dogged faithfulness isn't the goal, either. A film can be spiritually faithful to a book even when it jettisons whole shards of plot. A good adaptation is a lover, not a fighter; it entwines itself with a work, rather than clawing away at it.

Emily Brontë's 1847 wind-thrashed sycamore of a novel, Wuthering Heights, holds power even over those who haven't read it. No wonder filmmakers have been drawn to it almost since the advent of movies, beginning with the first known version—a 1920 British silent, now lost—and ending, for now, with Emerald Fennell's candy-colored bodice ripper starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, which barely holds a dripping, gothic candle to any of the others (but more on that later). That means, whether you've read the middle Brontë sister's novel or not, there's a Wuthering Heights film or TV dramatization for you.