Wuthering Heights Was Not a Swoony Romance. Then Hollywood Got Involved

When Sam Hirst teaches Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel Wuthering Heights, they often find the students who end up hating it are the ones who go in expecting it to be a love story.

“They come in thinking it’s a romance,” says Hirst, who lectures in English literature at the University of Liverpool and teaches courses at the Brontë Parsonage Museum. “And then they’re like, ‘This isn’t a romance, this is domestic abuse. This is a nightmare.’”

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Victorian critics agreed.