What if Emily Bronte was on Tiktok? Why Wuthering Heights is the movie for the moment

March 1, 2026 — 5:00am

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It’s hard to believe it now, but Emily Brontë – Victorian oddball, dog-torturer and now-famous authoress – paid to have her novel Wuthering Heights published.

After several rejections, in 1847, Emily and her sister Anne Brontë received an offer from Thomas Newby, of Cavendish Square, London, to publish their two novels – Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey – in a three-volume book.

The sisters paid Thomas Newby £50, to be recovered after sufficient copies had been sold.

Their ultimately-more-famous sister Charlotte was still shopping Jane Eyre to publishers, and she was privately horrified by the subject matter of her wild sister’s book.

In her excellent biography of Charlotte, British author Claire Harman writes that the elder Bronte sister found Wuthering Heights “profoundly disturbing and difficult. Why was it so violent, so impious? Where had these brutish characters and coarse action come from?”

Wuthering Heights, the recent scare-quote film version of the infamous book, has already made more money than Emily (and Anne) could ever have dreamed of – it has amassed nearly $160 million in box office sales globally since its release on Valentine’s Day.

We don’t know a lot about Emily Brontë, but it is clear she was unconventional, deeply strange and antisocial. Every time she left her home on the remote Yorkshire moors, she grew ill, so much did she hate the outside world.

She also seems to have had a sado-masochistic relationship with her beloved (and despised?) dog, Keeper, a part-mastiff that she beat so savagely, on at least one occasion, that the........

© The Age