The technicolor movie posters for Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights, which hit theaters on February 13, show Margot Robbie as Cathy in a yearning embrace with Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff. It’s the actors as sex symbols, and not their Victorian-era source material, that has elicited buzz for the film, and a wave of admonitions. If people are only going to encounter Emily Brontë’s work through a film adaptation, the line of thought goes, then Wuthering Heights deserves something less, well... moist.

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

But as many in the publishing industry know, despite the blaring score by Charli XCX, Emily Brontë’s 1847 text has not been lost in the noise. Book clubs new and old have picked up Wuthering Heights in recent months, and Brontë’s print sales have surpassed 100,000 units in 2026 so far, compared to just over 180,000 units in all of 2025, according to Circana BookScan. A decent number of those sales are creditable to online romance communities, such as that of romance publisher 831 Stories.

The steamy trailer for Fennell’s take was embedded in the announcement for 831’s Wuthering Heights group read, which it ran through Substack with online book club Belletrist. 831 cofounder Claire Mazur says her team knew people would be talking about the book, and they wanted to make it feel more “manageable” to approach. Their group read divided Wuthering Heights into weekly chunks and ran a chat for resource sharing and discussion. Threads on the novel occasionally lapsed into romance-trope shorthand—831 kicked off one discussion about whether Heathcliff was a “love bomber”—and Mazur says participants found the book quite sexy, “even without it being really explicit on the page.”

Though a small number of readers were discouraged to find that the 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 to speak sharply—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 spin-off entitled Ruthless Devotion in 2025, told PW it was as “wild, vicious, and glorious as the original.”

It may be true that, as St. Martin’s editor Vanessa Aguirre says, some readers are devouring Wuthering Heights as a “dark romance,” which combines gothic aesthetics, “big feelings,” and “angst” to vindicate a morally gray affair as true love. But the words on the page also resist these frameworks. Brontë’s story is irrevocably tragic, as Lipton rightly notes.

Many others are using lust for the film as an excuse to revisit Brontë. The New York Times, the New York Public Library, and Vogue all ran Wuthering Heights book clubs with the express intention of considering its shifting place in the zeitgeist.

Former Vanity Fair editor-in-chief Radhika Jones also chose Wuthering Heights for her new Substack book club. After viewing the film, Jones, who holds a PhD in English from Columbia, 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 says.

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