7 Wild Facts About Wuthering Heights, Ahead Of The Margot Robbie-Jacob Elordi Film

Emerald Fennell is bringing Wuthering Heights back to the big screen, and suddenly, the moors feel hot again. Margot Robbie as Catherine. Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff. Charli XCX on the soundtrack. The hype on the internet is real. But before you book tickets for another doomed lovers aesthetic moment, go back to the book, because Emily Brontë didn’t write a soft period romance. She wrote something feral.

Wuthering Heights confused critics, scared Victorians, and its author died thinking it had failed. Nearly two centuries later, it stands as one of the most iconic novels ever published in the history of English literature. Here are seven things that make it way wilder and weirder than any adaptation: 

1. Before the Novel, There Was an Entire Fake Universe

Long before Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë was creating entire fictional worlds. As a teenager, she and her sister Anne created Gondal, an elaborate imaginary island kingdom ruled largely by women.

It had wars, betrayals, assassinations, forbidden affairs, and messy political drama, basically everything you would binge in a prestige TV show today.

Emily’s central character, Augusta Geraldine Almeida, was a ruthless, Byronic antiheroine. Sadly, most of Gondal has been lost, and only fragments survive.

2. The Tragedy Wasn’t Gothic Drama. It Was Real Life

The novel’s illness and death scenes feel disturbingly precise for a reason. Three characters, Francis, Edgar, and Linton, die of consumption (now known as tuberculosis). It mirrored the Brontë family’s reality. 

Emily, her brother Branwell, and her sister Anne all died of tuberculosis. Even the term “brain fever,” which appears in the book, was a genuine diagnosis at the time.

Doctors rarely show up in the story except to confirm that someone is beyond saving. Emily herself refused medical treatment when she became ill.

3. The “Atmosphere” Was Literally Her Backyard

Readers often talk about the Yorkshire moors as though they are some dramatic aesthetic choice. For Emily, they were simply home. She walked the moors every day, often alone for hours.

The landscape in Wuthering Heights comes straight from lived experience. There is even a real farmhouse ruin called Top Withens, widely believed to have inspired the house in the novel.

4. Branwell Was the Blueprint for Hindley

While Emily was writing, her brother Branwell was quietly falling apart. He struggled with alcohol and opium addiction, sank into debt, and became entangled in a damaging affair with a married woman.

Hindley Earnshaw’s chaotic spiral into addiction and self-destruction closely mirrors Branwell’s life, making that part of the novel feel painfully close to reality.

5. Publishing Was a Mess and They Paid for It Themselves

Getting Wuthering Heights published was anything but easy. Publishers rejected the manuscript over and over. Calling it too violent, too disturbing, and too unfeminine. 

Faced with constant refusal, Emily and Anne finally paid £50 out of pocket to publish their novels themselves, Even then, the release was strange.

Wuthering Heights did not come out as a standalone book. Instead, it appeared as Volumes One and Two of a three-volume set, with Anne’s entirely unrelated Agnes Grey awkwardly tacked on as Volume Three.

6. Death, Numbers, and Strange Patterns

Readers have long noticed the novel’s curious structure. Twelve characters die over the course of the story, a number traditionally linked to endings and cycles, from hours in a day to months in a year.

The book is also full of doubles and pairings like two houses, two generations, mirrored relationships, repeated names. The pattern feels as though the tragedy is carefully arranged rather than accidental.

7. She May Have Been Writing a Second Novel

There is evidence that Wuthering Heights might not have been her only novel. A letter from her publisher in 1848 mentions arrangements for her next book and advises her not to rush it, which strongly suggests she had already started something new. 

But that same year brought devastation. Branwell died and Emily fell ill soon after his funeral. She refused treatment and died within months.

No manuscript has ever been found. Some scholars believe Charlotte may have destroyed it along with other private papers. What that second novel might have been remains one of literary history’s great mysteries.