Cathy's come home

As a new version of Wuthering Heights, starring Margot Robbie, is released, novelist ESSIE FOX reflects on why Emily Bronte's masterpiece is still so inspiring

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DESPITE being written nearly 200 years ago, Wuthering Heights is still read and loved.

And now, it's finding even more fans, with a resurgence of interest due to the release of Emerald Fennell's big-screen version in time for Valentine's Day - which is coincidentally the same time my own novel, Catherine: A Retelling of Wuthering Heights, is published.

Fennell's film will be the latest in a long line of adaptations for both the big and small screen, and all of them with unique visions of Emily Brontë's own creation. The original mannered and sanitised Hollywood version made in 1939 showed the gritty gothic novel as a sweeping romance, with less focus on the scenes of brutality and trauma that are present in the book.

At least the 2011 version, directed by Andrea Arnold, showed the character of Heathcliff as racially abused as a person of colour - this "difference" being one of the novel's central themes. From his first introduction in the pages of the book, Heathcliff is portrayed as the frightened orphaned child who Cathy's father saved from the streets of Liverpool.

Various characters then describe him as being "dark as the devil", a "swarthy gipsy", a "black villain", or "a foreign castaway". However, there are also more exotic images, with Nelly Dean (the main narrator, and once housekeeper at the Heights) referring to Heathcliff as being handsome, with black eyes that are flashing with fire; even suggesting that his father was the Emperor of China, and his mother had perhaps been an Indian queen. The novel never reveals the truth of Heathcliff's birth.

But his otherness does lead to his cruel isolation, and an obsession with revenge when the love of his life chooses to marry someone else. In her rash naivety, Cathy believes she can have her cake and eat it, walking out on the arm of her wealthy "golden" husband while keeping Heathcliff as her lover. She has no idea of the misery and pain that her actions will cause.