I Finally Admitted It: Wuthering Heights Is a Terrible Book

I’ll finally say it: Wuthering Heights is terrible. Truly, spectacularly terrible.

With yet another glossy film adaptation on the way, Emily Brontë’s 19th-century novel is back in the cultural spotlight. Which is unfortunate, because rereading it only confirms what I’ve long suspected: this so-called “classic” is an exhausting, joyless slog.

I came to it with high hopes. I adored Jane Eyre. I admired The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Naturally, I expected the most gothic and hyped Brontë novel of all to sweep me off my feet with doomed romance and windswept passion. Instead, I found myself trapped in a book populated entirely by people I actively disliked.

Every character is cruel, selfish, weak, or downright vile. They fall ill, drink themselves to death, or die in childbirth, and yet it’s almost impossible to care. The only consistent response to their suffering is relief.

Then there’s the narrative structure: stories nested inside stories inside stories, recounted by multiple narrators, draining all momentum from the plot. Add to that pages of phonetically written dialect that make reading feel less like immersion and more like punishment, and the experience becomes genuinely miserable.

And at the centre of it all lies the great literary myth: the “epic love story” of Cathy and Heathcliff. This isn’t romance — it’s obsession, control, jealousy and abuse. Heathcliff isn’t a brooding hero; he’s a vindictive, violent antagonist whose behaviour is routinely softened or erased in adaptations desperate to make him sexy. Their relationship poisons everything around it, leaving devastation in its wake.

If Wuthering Heights has given us anything of value, it’s Kate Bush’s transcendent 1978 song — a dramatic, cathartic way to experience the story’s mood without enduring the novel itself.

We’re all entitled to our tastes, of course. But I remain unconvinced that anyone has ever truly enjoyed reading this bleak, overpraised exercise in misery.