Monday Miscellany: Somehow it is always raining

Notes from February 9 - 15

Feb 16, 2026

Friends, I come to you today fresh from the moors, where I’ve been running about in heavily layered skirts through the downpour and thunder, longing for a love that isn’t to be.

That is to say, I’ve spent the week immersed in the world of Wuthering Heights and I’m certainly not sad about it. Accidentally gothic-themed newsletter, commence!

Read this week

Time is a circle, and books find their way to you when the moment is right. Wuthering Heights is a classic that I somehow missed; it wasn’t ever assigned to me in school and I never found a particular reason to pick it up afterward. When I saw the 2022 film Emily, though, a story of Emily Brontë based equally in history and imagination, I finally felt the urge to experience this famous author’s sole published work, and I chose the Modern Library Torchbearers edition because (1) introduction by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and (2) LOOK AT THAT COVER. Unfortunately, as is so often the case, even with books I’m legitimately eager to read, it sat waiting on my shelf for a full four years—until this week, when Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” “adaptation” (a word choice I will address in more detail below) released in cinemas to great discussion and debate. As my friend Anna and I were planning to see the film on Galentine’s Day,1 I figured it was finally, no seriously, finally time to read the book.

Above all, I would call Wuthering Heights a story of deep hurt and longing, of the insurmountable walls put up by societal othering and the damage they can cause over the span of decades. There’s love at its core, but there’s also abuse of many sorts, of both substances and people, and heartbreak in place of happy ever after. I’ll confess to having a bit of trouble keeping things straight in my head at first, as there are multiple characters with the same (or similar) names, characters referred to by several different names, and frequent flashbacks and experiences reported secondhand. But now that I understand the general scope of the narrative, I think a future re-read would be much easier to follow along with and sink into. Despite the gloomy complexity of it all, there are lots of gorgeous descriptions and a masterful use of prose, and I can see why this is a beloved classic. I’m so glad it came to me at long last.

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Watched this week

So that word adaptation. I think it deserves some measure of fidelity, no? Some degree of respect for and accuracy regarding the source material? If yes, “Wuthering Heights” (2026) plainly, simply, isn’t one, and I think it does itself a disservice by pretending to be. I’m sure you’ve seen all of the takes floating around the internet, the backlash against casting a white actor to play Heathcliff, who is explicitly described as dark-skinned, the blatant disregard for certain plot points, and the invention of others that just aren’t there in the book. All of that—valid, completely. If you’re going into this film expecting to see Emily Brontë’s novel played out on the big screen, you’re setting yourself up for major disappointment and possibly some anger.

But!

If you remove the idea of “adaptation” from your mind and replace it with something like “reinterpretation,” or “reimagining,” or even “loosey-goosey fangirl homage,”2 you might quite enjoy it. I did. The visuals are dark and stunning, the costumes (period inaccurate but) gorgeous and bold. Everything is crafted to the HEIGHT OF DRAMA—the gazes are long and intense, the music is sharp and shrieking and string-heavy, the sex is super frequent and erotic without being explicit (which felt masterful to me), and somehow it is always raining. And oh, the longing. THE LONGING. It will not stop.

The headline of this Vulture piece, which I bookmarked but haven’t yet read, got it right, I think: “Finally, a Smooth-Brained Wuthering Heights.” It fails horribly as an adaptation, but if you and your best gal just want to go watch toxic hotties be messily sexy at each other for a couple of hours, this is your movie. I loved seeing it in a full theater, hearing everyone’s “oooo”s and gasps and laughter. Get ready for Jacob Elordi’s muscular torso, Margot Robbie’s heaving bosom, lots of tongues, and some dog-collar kink, too!

Of course, reading the classic novel and seeing Fennell’s take made me want to revisit Emily (2022), the film that sparked my renewed interest in the first place several years ago. It shares some emotional DNA with these other two works: it’s dark, wild, a bit out of control at times, full of bittersweet yearning. Writer and director Frances O’Connor uses factual pieces of Emily Brontë’s biography and family history as a base, and yes, imagines and embellishes quite a bit as well, especially concerning the unlikely relationship with curate William Weightman that the film portrays. But unlike the new “Wuthering Heights,” her work retains some nuance and doesn’t come across quite as one-note. She’s more upfront with her creative liberties, which stay a little more within the realm of reasonable speculation—this most likely isn’t what actually happened, but what if Brontë’s novel were based on the emotional gravity of a relationship the author herself experienced? The title, Emily,3 reminds us that we’re straying from strict historical truth, and yet, it’s fun to contemplate and fantasize.

As a companion piece, I greatly enjoyed this Smithsonian article, full of letters and drawings and other historical artifacts, that helpfully breaks down what is known about the Brontë family and what the film has embellished or made up.