Much fanfare and speculation has surrounded this weekend’s release of Emerald Fennell‘s new, wacky film adaptation of Wuthering Heights. Is it an aesthetically rich, eroticized reimagining of Emily Brontë‘s tale or a luridly hollow interpretation, more style than substance? Either way, Fennell is far from the first auteur to find inspiration in the pages of this provocative Gothic novel.

In 1847, Brontë shocked Victorian audiences with her magnum opus, a story that continues to evade easy classification. Readers seeking romance will be unprepared for the disturbing, destructive potential of Heathcliff and Cathy’s all-consuming passion as it becomes twisted into madness, tragedy, and revenge.

Brontë’s lively and evocative writing has received plenty of homages, from the literary efforts of poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, to the 1978 hit of the same name by singer-songwriter Kate Bush. But how have artists like Balthus, L.S. Lowry, and Sam Taylor-Johnson sought to bring its scenes and setting to life through art?

Edna Clarke Hall

Lady Edna Clarke Hall, Heathcliffe Supporting Catherine on a Couch. Image: © Tate.

The English artist and poet Edna Clarke Hall is today best known for her illustrations of Wuthering Heights. Daughter of the renowned Victorian social reformer Benjamin Waugh, Clarke Hall attended the Slade School of Fine Art in London, studying under Henry Tonks and alongside Gwen and Augustus John. She felt a strong personal connection to Wuthering Heights after her husband, who pressured her to prioritize traditional wifely duties over her artistic ambitions, moved Clarke Hall into a 16th-century house that reminded her of the antiquated dwellings Brontë described.

Marooned from society, Clarke Hall obsessively sketched hundreds of scenes from the book that speak to her own emotional turmoil. The ramshackle appearance of the Heights is imagined in some detail in one etching from around 1910 of Catherine and Heathcliff as children. Some of the most memorable works are brutal, such as those in which Catherine cries for Heathcliff or her beloved consoles her on her death bed. A standout at Tate Britain is this undated ink and watercolor study of the doomed lovers forever locked in an embrace.

After two decades of misery, Clarke Hall had a mental breakdown in 1919. Her old teacher Tonks helped her seek psychological help and focus her energies on making art by establishing a London studio and regularly exhibiting. After her studio was destroyed during the Blitz, Clarke Hall withdrew. She died in 1979 at the age of 100.

Balthus

Balthus, drawings for Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë, 1933 pic.twitter.com/MwfbXWlwHY

— Thomas Ragon (@ThomasRagon) October 30, 2022

The mysterious Polish-French modernist Balthus has often proven controversial for his dreamlike but suggestive paintings of young adolescents. It is no surprise, then, that he was particularly drawn to Catherine and Heathcliff’s formative childhood years. “Very early on, I heard the call of childhood, as my version of Wuthering Heights shows,” Balthus once said.

The artist first read Wuthering Heights as a teenager and would go on to re-read it many times, returning to the text most memorably in his mid-twenties through the creation of 14 ink on paper illustrations. These works never shy from the trauma of Heathcliff’s origin story, and we see him abused and humiliated by Catherine’s tyrannical older brother Hindley. The two future lovers find refuge in each other, as is evident from another scene in which they escape through a window into the surrounding moors. The stripped-back strangeness of Balthus’s illustrations has been likened to drawings for Alice in Wonderland by its author Lewis Carroll, whose own preoccupation with childhood had a big influence on Balthus.

La Toilette de Cathy (1933) in the retrospective of Balthus at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid, Spain, 2019. Photo: Quim Llenas/ Getty Images.

In the 1933 painting Cathy’s toilette (1933), an oil on paper work at Paris’s Centre Pompidou, Balthus strays considerably from Brontë’s plot in casting himself as Heathcliff and his lover Antoinette as Catherine. She stands naked while the novel’s main narrator Nelly Dean brushes her hair. In a turn of events that would mirror Catherine and Heathcliff’s own tragic story, Balthus learnt that Antoinette was planning marry another man at around the time that this painting was made.

L.S. Lowry

L.S. Lowry, “Wuthering Heights” (The Witherns, near Haworth) (1942). Image courtesy Bonhams.

Little wonder that the quintessential 20th-century painter of northern England, L.S. Lowry, was moved by Brontë’s words to revisit the wilderness of the Yorkshire moors. These rural landscapes represent a marked departure from the humdrum industrial cityscapes for which the artist made his name, but they are emblematic of his elegantly understated style. The endless stretch of grey-green grasslands are interrupted only by small dwellings like boats at sea. One of these is the abandoned farmhouse at Top Withens near Haworth, where the Brontë sisters grew up, which some experts believe served as inspiration for Wuthering Heights.

The novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, a close friend of Emily’s sister Charlotte Brontë, wrote in the latter’s biography of “wild, bleak moors—grand, from the ideas of solitude and loneliness which they suggest, or oppressive from the feeling which they give of being pent-up by some monotonous and illimitable barrier.” Certainly, Emily Brontë uses the moors’s untamed, stormy landscape to build emotional gravitas. In Lowry’s hands, they take on a gloomier calm, perhaps reflective of his mood after the devastating loss of his mother in 1939.

Born in 1887, Lowry spent most of his life in Pendlebury, Greater Manchester, where he took his everyday surroundings—faceless workers scurrying amid a skyline of factory chimneys—as his subject. This rare gem, derived instead from one of the greatest works of English literature, was offered by Bonhams auction house in 2009.

Sam Taylor-Johnson

Sam Taylor-Johnson, Ghosts VIII (2008). Image courtesy of the artist.

The landscape that envelops Brontë’s characters was also the subject of Sam Taylor-Johnson‘s 2008 photography series “Ghosts.” Like Lowry, she chose to shoot around the farmhouse ruins of Top Withens, explaining at the time that she “wanted to feel the turbulent emotional weather of that book and the harshness of the landscape.” To do so, she battled with her assistant through heavy sleet on early winter mornings, hoping to catch the mist that shrouds the rolling hills. For Taylor-Johnson, it was an act of submitting herself to an unforgiving terrain in an attempt to find “some sort of redemptive quality in that landscape, as well as capture the bleakness that those characters are set against.”

“It is amazing when you read [Wuthering Heights] that there is not one redeeming feature about any of the subjects,” she wrote in an essay for the Independent. She had picked it up expecting a more obviously romantic plot line. “It is just unremitting pain and relentless torture of each other throughout.” Her chosen title, “Ghosts,” may refer to Catherine’s haunting of Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights.

Taylor-Johnson made her name in the 1990s thanks to her association with the YBA movement. She is best-known as a filmmaker for her biopic Nowhere Boy about John Lennon‘s childhood. In 2008, the same year that she photographed “Ghosts,” she ended her decade long marriage to the gallerist Jay Jopling, with whom she had shared a second home in north Yorkshire.