It’s hard to think of any book with a stronger hold on its admirers than Wuthering Heights. Almost 200 years after publication, Emily Brontë’s tale of forbidden love and ruthless revenge inspires a devotion that makes any reinterpretation feel like a personal and proprietary affront.

Into this sea of sensitivities has plunged the director Emerald Fennell, whose new adaptation has become one of the year’s most debated films. Dubbed “50 shades of Brontë”, everything about it has been scrutinised: from the casting of Aussies Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi as Cathy and Heathcliff to the anachronistic costumes and music, and the overt sexualisation of the plot.

Detractors claim Brontë must be spinning in her grave, but this film tells us far more about contemporary culture than it does about the 19th-century novel itself. Fennell has framed the project as a highly personal interpretation, shaped by her intense response to the book at 14 – hence the inverted commas around the title.

She has spoken of being “obsessed” and “driven mad” by the book, of wanting to honour its “primal, sexual” undercurrents and the shock that greeted its original publication (it was deemed “irredeemably........

© The Guardian