There are novels you admire the way you admire good manners. They do what they promise, they arrive on time, they tidy up after themselves. Wuthering Heights is not that sort of novel. It does not behave. It does not reassure. It does not offer the reader a safe moral armchair and a cup of tea at the end.

And yet we keep reading it.

Even those of us who will confess, a little guiltily, that it is not our favourite Brontë.

If you love Charlotte, you may crave the fierce clarity of Jane Eyre, that disciplined flame of a voice insisting on dignity, autonomy and a room in the world. If you love Anne, you may want the moral courage and social realism of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, a novel that looks straight at what respectable society prefers to keep behind closed doors. Wuthering Heights feels, by comparison, like stepping out onto the moors in the wrong shoes. It is wild, wind-bitten and deliberately indifferent to your comfort.

So why do we all love to read it? Even when we have issues with it. Especially when we have issues with it.

The book that provokes you on purpose

Part of the allure is that Wuthering Heights does not ask to be “liked”. It does not court the reader. It dares the reader.

A lot of classic novels are frequently tamed by reputation. We are told what they mean, how to feel and who the heroes are. Emily Brontë’s novel refuses that. It is gothic, yes, but it is also domestic. It is romantic, yes, but it is also brutal. It is about love, but not love as a self-improvement programme. It is about obsession, possession, class resentment, cruelty, grief and the way hurt replicates itself across generations like a curse you inherited along with the family silver (and the family temper).

You finish it and you are not soothed. You are stirred up.

That stirring-up is precisely why readers form camps. You do not merely “enjoy” Wuthering Heights. You take a position.

The big issue: people keep mistaking it for a romance

Here is where many of our “issues” begin. The novel is commonly marketed, adapted and quoted like a tragic love story in the conventional sense. Heathcliff and Catherine are treated as a doomed couple the universe cruelly separates, rather than two people whose bond becomes destructive to everyone around them, including themselves.

If you read it as romance, you can end up defending the indefensible. Heathcliff’s cruelty becomes “passion”. Catherine’s selfishness becomes “spirit”. Violence becomes intensity. Control becomes devotion. That framing can feel queasy, especially for modern readers who have seen far too many “bad boy” narratives dressed up as fate.

But if you read it as a book about what obsession does to human beings and households, it becomes something else entirely. Not a guide to love, but a study of what happens when love curdles into possession and revenge.

Emily Brontë is not asking you to approve. She is asking you to look.

Why readers disagree so violently about the characters

People hold contradictory opinions about these characters because the novel itself is constructed to keep certainty at arm’s length.

We meet the story through layers: Lockwood, an outsider, then Nelly Dean, an insider with her own loyalties and blind spots. It is like hearing a family scandal second-hand, except the second-hand account is also, clearly, part of the scandal.

So, readers argue about Heathcliff: is he a wronged child turned monster, or was the monster always there? Is he a symbol of class hatred and exclusion, or is he simply a sadist with a poetic soundtrack?

We argue about Catherine: is she trapped by social pressure and class expectations, or is she reckless, cruel and addicted to drama? Is her “I am Heathcliff” a mystical declaration of identity, or the moment she confesses she cannot tell love from appetite?

We argue about Nelly: is she the sensible witness trying to keep a household from combusting, or the quietly manipulative narrator whose “common sense” is a form of control? Some readers see her as the moral centre; others see her as the book’s most dangerous character precisely because she seems reasonable.

And then there is the next generation, often ignored in popular conversation: Hareton and young Catherine, the possibility of healing, education and tenderness after the storm. Some readers experience the ending as redemption. Others see it as merely the surviving characters learning to live with the wreckage.

Your reading of Wuthering Heights tells on you a little. It reveals what you fear, what you forgive and what you believe love is allowed to be.

The moors are not just scenery, they are the frame of their universe.

Another reason we return is that the novel feels elemental. The landscape is not a backdrop. It is the book’s nervous system.

Those winds, those thresholds, the constant sense of exposure, the houses as opposing forces (Wuthering Heights, raw and hostile; Thrushcross Grange, polished and repressive), all of it externalises the inner lives of the characters. The weather has opinions. The architecture has mood swings. Even the names feel like a dare.

That is also why it transfers so well to film.

Cinema loves what Wuthering Heights supplies in abundance: atmosphere, stark contrasts, physical isolation and emotion big enough to be seen from a distance. The moors are instantly legible. So is the rage. So is the haunting.

Why film adaptations keep happening (and why they keep simplifying)?

Film loves Wuthering Heights, but film also can’t help flattening it.

The novel is structurally strange: stories within stories, time-skips, the slow unspooling of cause and effect, the moral ambiguity of almost everyone involved. On screen, all of that can become a problem. So many adaptations do the same thing: they centre the first-generation “love story” and glide quickly past the second generation, the social detail, the narrative unreliability and the sheer domestic mess of it all.

What cinema captures brilliantly is the physicality: the bleak beauty of place, the claustrophobia of two houses locked in mutual resentment, the sense of people becoming weather. A good adaptation can make you feel the chill in your bones.

What cinema often misses is the novel’s cruelty as a system, not a single tragic love affair. The book is not simply, “they loved too much”. It is, “hurt begets hurt, and the household becomes a machine that manufactures suffering until somebody interrupts it”.

When film-makers do lean into that, when they let the story be uncomfortable and morally complicated, it suddenly feels modern again.

Emily Brontë: not “one of the sisters”, but an original force

It is tempting to talk about Emily mainly in relation to Charlotte and Anne, because the Brontës are culturally packaged as a trio, like a gothic literary girl band from Haworth. But Emily is startling in her own right.

She wrote one novel and a body of poetry, and in both you can feel an imagination that is not interested in social approval. Charlotte writes with moral intensity and psychological insight, often through a voice addressing you directly, bargaining with the world. Anne writes with moral realism and clear-eyed critique, often exposing hypocrisy and harm. Emily writes like someone listening to something older than society, something impersonal and vast.

Her writing is not primarily about manners, or even morality in the conventional sense. It is about forces: belonging, exile, nature, rage, longing and the terrifying freedom of not being domesticated. She is less concerned with whether a character is “good” than whether they are real, and whether their reality is bearable.

Emily genius is that she makes the reader feel the seduction of the storm without asking the reader to pretend the storm is kind.

So why do we love reading it, even when we don’t “like” it?

Because it is a book that does not let you stay neutral. It treats you like a grown up (even though many of us read it as teenagers). It encourages you to hold several things to be true at the same time.

It gives you language for the feral corners of human emotion, the parts we tidy away in polite conversation. It stages the battle between appetite and civilisation. It confronts you with the uncomfortable truth that suffering does not automatically make people noble and love does not automatically make people safe.

And it offers, quietly, a second movement: the possibility that the cycle can be interrupted, that education and tenderness might rebuild what obsession destroyed. Not a neat redemption, but a hard-won thaw.

That combination is addictive. We argue about it because it matters. We adapt it because it is visual and visceral. We reread it because each time we do, we are a different person bringing different weather to the moors.

If you want a novel that behaves, there are many to choose from.

If you want one that bites, Wuthering Heights is waiting, as ever, at the gate, unbothered by your approval.

Looking for a second copy or new copy of Wuthering Heights second-hand? Explore our selection at Chapters Bookstore on Parnell Street, Dublin, for classic fiction, Bronte favourites, and more second-hand treasures.