How Hollywood Turned Wuthering Heights Into a Romance

Many students go into Emily Brontë’s novel expecting a swoony romance and leave shocked by its brutality. Victorian reviewers found Wuthering Heights disturbing and violent, and the first known film adaptation, a lost 1920 silent, advertised itself as “Emily Brontë’s tremendous Story of Hate.” The 1939 Laurence Olivier–Merle Oberon version, however, excised the book’s second half, softened Heathcliff’s violence and emphasised the lovers’ passion, reshaping how generations of readers and viewers understand the story.

Subsequent adaptations followed that template. Films from Mexico, Bollywood, Britain, France and a 2011 version concentrate on Cathy and Heathcliff’s destructive attraction while omitting the novel’s later chapters, a choice that removes the book’s sense of a recurring cycle of violence.

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