Why I wanted to adapt Wuthering Heights with Emerald Fennell
Ask Penguin
Penguin Books UK
4.1 • 550 Ratings
🗓️ 13 February 2026
⏱️ 68 minutes
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Summary
Is Wuthering Heights the perfect novel or the perfect work of art? Why do we fall in love with villains? Is all love doomed? And if Emerald Fennell could adapt another book to film, what would she choose?
In this special episode of Ask Penguin, we speak to the director of Wuthering Heights' latest adaptation, Emerald Fennell, about her relationship to Emily Brontë's novel, how she went about interpreting such a complex classic, and what she wants audiences to take away from her vision.
Also joining us in the studio are authors Henry Eliott and Harriet Evans, as we deep-dive into the book, the film, and the life of the Brontës.
Discover more about this episode and all the books by clicking here
Watch Emerald Fennell's interview on YouTube
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to a very special episode of Ask Penguin, the podcast all about books and the people who write and publish them. |
| 0:09.8 | I'm Rihanna Dillon and today we're talking about a book that despite being published 179 years ago |
| 0:15.4 | continues to be the inspiration behind some iconic songs. Kate Bush, I'm looking at you, plenty of adaptations, |
| 0:22.8 | and I'm going to say some quite problematic romantic tropes. I am, of course, talking about |
| 0:28.6 | Wuthering Heights. Emily Bronte's first and only novel, what a debut. It's a Gothic classic |
| 0:35.3 | with the wild Yorkshire Moors as a backdrop to an equally wild |
| 0:38.7 | tale of love and revenge, mainly revenge, between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff. It shocked critics |
| 0:45.9 | when it was published in 1847 and it's been provoking very intense reactions ever since. |
| 0:51.6 | On today's podcast, I will of course be discussing the novel with two brilliant |
| 0:55.3 | penguin authors, but we're also going to take a look at the latest adaptation to make it to the |
| 1:00.2 | big screen. The hotly anticipated film comes from Oscar-winning director Emerald Fennell and stars |
| 1:06.1 | Margot Robbie and Jacob Alourdi as doomed lovers, Kathy and Heathcliff. I had a chat with Emerald Fennell to find |
| 1:12.8 | out more about her relationship to Bronte's novel and what she really wanted audiences to take |
| 1:17.4 | away from seeing her film on the big screen. Emerald, thank you so much for joining us at Ask Penguin. |
| 1:25.3 | Thank you for having me. I'm so thrilled to talk to you. I want to |
| 1:28.3 | ask you about your first time discovering Wuthering Heights and then how the book sort of changed for |
| 1:33.4 | you as you got older and how it changed you. Well I think like a lot of people I read it first because it was on the |
| 1:41.2 | curriculum. Yeah. And I think that things on the curriculum have a kind of slight stigma attached to them, right? |
| 1:48.1 | When you're a teenager and you're like, oh, this is work versus this is pleasure. |
| 1:51.8 | And as somebody who reads so much for pleasure, I think it had so far up to that point, |
| 1:58.1 | yeah, it had felt like I liked things, but they weren't kind of, you know, they hadn't |
| 2:01.8 | kind of had any big transformative, like, moments. And so when I first picked up Wuthering Heights, |
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