Few filmmakers relish provocation the way Emerald Fennell does, and her upcoming adaptation of “Wuthering Heights” looks like her most combustible swing yet. The filmmaker has been unusually candid about how she approached Emily Brontë’s feral, storm-blasted novel — not as a tidy period drama, but as something closer to a psychic rupture.
And now we know why. As part of a newly announced Female Filmmakers Collection from Simon & Schuster — a line of classic paperbacks reissued with new covers, forewords, and cinematic Easter eggs curated by contemporary directors — Fennell is writing the new foreword for “Wuthering Heights” (via THR), That opening salvo, arriving ahead of her 2026 film adaptation, reveals just how violently the book reshaped her interior world as a teenager.
“It is too slippery, too wild, too good to distill into two hours of film,” Fennell writes in the foreword about her film and artistic intent. “Instead, what I have attempted to do is adapt my own experience of reading it for the first time. It is an adaptation of a feeling: my first disemboweling by the baby god.”
That sentiment seems to mirror what she told the Guardian earlier this fall, describing her adolescent encounter with Brontë’s novel as something scorching and destabilizing. “It’s an emotional response to something. It’s primal, sexual,” she said. Calling the book “an act of extreme masochism,” to adapt, Fennell admitted, “There’s an enormous amount of sado-masochism in this book. There’s a reason people were deeply shocked by it.” Translating it to screen, she said, has been “a kind of masochistic exercise… because I love it so much, and it can’t love me back, and I have to live with that.”
Fennell’s film — starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi as the doomed pairing of Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff — is rumored to take a far more volatile, fever-swept approach than any previous adaptation. Her comments reinforce that she’s not seeking fidelity to canon so much as fidelity to the wound the novel leaves behind.
Meanwhile, Charli XCX has also entered the storm. The musician has announced a new 12-track album, also titled Wuthering Heights, with all original songs, due February 13 via Atlantic Records — and she’s already dropped the single “Chains of Love,” and “House,” a collaboration with the Velvet Underground’s John Cale, accompanied by a video inspired by Fennell’s film. It’s yet another sign that Brontë’s gothic howl is about to become a full-blown cultural moment, refracted through multiple media at once.
With the new foreword arriving February 3, 2026, and the film to follow later that month on February 13, on the eve of Valentine’s Day, Fennell seems primed to deliver a take on “Wuthering Heights” that understands the novel’s savagery isn’t a barrier — it’s the point.
