The lead-up to the release of Emerald Fennell's Wuthering Heights, which hit theaters on February 13, was awash with sweaty clips and technicolor movie posters showing Margot Robbie as Cathy arched in a yearning embrace with Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff. It was the actors as sex symbols, and not their Victorian-era source material, that has elicited buzz for the film, and a wave of admonitions of its historical unfaithfulness.

With Charli XCX’s melodrama-infused original score blaring, Emily Brontë's original 1847 text, a canonical commentary on race, patriarchy, and capitalism, could have been lost in the noise.

In an essay for Public Books, Shawna Lipton—a professor of critical studies—noted how Warner Bros. has marketed the film to modern erotic romance readers. “It promises a version of Wuthering Heights where the destructive obsession is the point, and the abuse and psychological torment is aestheticized as intoxicating lust,” she writes—and romance circles have come running for it.

Wuthering Heights events, watch parties, and meetups have taken over bookish corners across New York, including Alamo Drafthouse Cinema’s “book club screenings” inviting “readers, rereaders, and mild obsessives” to debrief and delight in Fennell’s screen candy; Liz’s Book Bar’s Valentine’s Day event featuring special editions of the book and locally-curated florals; and pre-screenings for book influencers hosted by intimacy brands.

Possessiveness over the classic—accompanied, inevitably, by the belief that its significance escapes modern readers—has inspired widespread ire over the film. If people are only going to encounter Brontë's work through Fennell’s adaptation, the line of thought goes, then Wuthering Heights deserves something less, well...moist.

But what many outside of publishing circles may not realize is that people are reading the book—not just any people, but the sort of people whom classics gatekeepers are most worried about.

Book clubs new and old have picked up Brönte's Wuthering Heights in recent months. Emily Brontë's sales on Circana BookScan have already surpassed 100,000 units in the first two months of this year, compared to just over 180,000 units in all of 2025. A decent number, like that of romance publisher 831 Stories, operate in the orbit of online romance communities.

831's Wuthering Heights group read, which it ran through Substack with online book club Belletrist, launched with the steamy trailer for Fennell's take embedded in-line with the announcement. 831 cofounder Claire Mazur said they knew a lot of people would be talking about the book, and they wanted to make it feel more "manageable" to approach.

Their group read broke down the book into weekly chunks and ran a chat for resource-sharing and discussion. Threads on the characters' motivations and marriage—occasionally collapsing into modern romance-trope shorthand—ensued. Mazur said that participants found the book quite sexy, "even without it being really explicit on the page."

Though a small number of readers were disparaged to find that sexiness was of the repressed, brooding variety, most approached comparisons to Fennell's interpretation with genuine curiosity or humor. Brontë, for instance, often uses "ejaculate"—meaning a sharp utterance—in her dialogue tags. Near the end of the group read, one subscriber wrote, "I have a feeling this new movie is going to be nothing like the book."

After viewing the film, romance author Rebecca F. Kenney, who penned her own "spicy" Brontë spinoff entitled Ruthless Devotion (Sourcebooks Casablanca) in 2025, told PW that it was "wild, vicious, and glorious as the original." Fennell "gave me things I craved that weren't in the original, except maybe hinted at," she added.

It may be true that, as St. Martin's editor Vanessa Aguirre told PW, these readers are devouring Wuthering Heights as a "dark romance," which combines Gothic aesthetics, "big feelings," and "angst" to vindicate a morally grey affair as true love. But the words on the page also resist these frameworks. Brontë's story is irrevocably tragic, as Lipton rightly noted.

Many other book clubs are using the lustful for the film as an excuse to revisit Brontë's bad romance. The New York Times and New York Public Library both ran Wuthering Heights book clubs with the express intention of considering its new place in the zeitgeist. When Vogue launched its book club in January and announced Wuthering Heights as its first pick, staff culture writer Emma Specter wrote that the "Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi of it all" was welcome, but not central, to the discussion.

Former Vanity Fair editor-in-chief Radhika Jones also chose Wuthering Heights as the first title for her new Substack book club, which is suffused with the chic intellectualism of glossy magazines. Jones, who holds a PhD in English from Columbia, writes posts that are conversational without sacrificing analytical rigor, discussing "why Emily Brontë's windswept romance is actually a novel of revenge," the trope of the orphan, and the deceptiveness of its "tempestuous teenage" appearance.

After viewing a pre-screening of the film, Jones returned to her Substack with a list of spoiler-free notes on Fennell's "choices with respect to the novel." It's hopeful to hear her idealism about book clubs, the way they can cut through the myopia of individual readings and redraw well-worn lines of criticism.

"I think anything that gets people together to talk about books is high on my list of excellent cultural situations," Jones told PW.

Jones doesn't pretend to know the "fortuitous" circumstances behind Wuthering Heights's ascent. Still, if we're going to keep making 200 year-old novels sexy again, New Grub Street by George Gissing and The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins are at the top of her wish list.