If You Want to Understand the Enduring Appeal of Wuthering Heights, Read This Book

There is a meme circling online asking whether you’re an Emily Brontë or a Charlotte Brontë person. Every thirteen-year-old girl must decide, according to the post, with the implication that the way you answer that question at thirteen will determine the rest of your life. I was a Charlotte person, unambiguously. Charlotte’s world made sense to me in the way I needed the world to make sense at that age, offering self-respect, moral clarity, and—most importantly for my teenage self—a love story that felt earned. Jane Eyre taught me that suffering could be metabolized into dignity, that integrity was its own reward. I found Emily’s novel disturbing in a way I couldn’t quite name and kept my distance from it for years. Decades, really.

Emerald Fennell’s new film adaptation has brought Wuthering Heights back into the conversation, and I suspect a lot of people are returning to Emily Brontë right now, or encountering her for the first time. Before you see it—or alongside it, or instead of it, depending on your disposition—I’d recommend picking up Karen Powell’s 2023 novel Fifteen Wild Decembers. It is the best preparation I know for that encounter, because far from softening Emily’s brutal vision or making Wuthering Heights more palatable, it offers something I didn’t have as a young reader: the context of what Emily Brontë was actually writing about, and why.

Powell’s novel is narrated in  Emily’s voice, and centers her role as primary caretaker for her brother Branwell during the years she was writing Wuthering Heights. Branwell Brontë—once the family’s great hope, the son on whom all expectations rested—spent those years in a spiral of alcohol and laudanum addiction, humiliated by a failed love affair with a married employer, cycling through rages and remorse, through binges and vows of sobriety that lasted until they didn’t. He died in September 1848, just months after Emily’s novel was published. She followed him that December.

What Powell renders so precisely is the dailiness of that care. Emily hauling Branwell home from drinking, supporting what she drily describes as “two grown men up the stairs, one half-blind, the other incapable”—her father, whose eyesight was failing, and her brother, who could barely stand. Emily scrubbing a soiled rug in the back kitchen the morning after, while Charlotte’s voice comes at her “sour as an underripe plum,” asking why she can’t make Branwell clean up after himself. The landlord at the inn, looking doubtfully at Emily as Branwell is shouldered to the door, shirt half-untucked, one sleeve of his coat hanging empty: You’ll manage? And Emily managing, as she always does, turning him in the right direction and tacking their way home.

These scenes are not dramatic in any conventional sense. They are repetitive by design, because that is what this kind of caregiving actually is—the same crisis with minor variations, the same hope extinguished in roughly the same way, the same morning after. Powell understands that the accumulation of these moments is itself a form of knowledge, and that Emily was accumulating it in real time while writing one of the strangest novels in the English language.

Charlotte, during these same years, was writing Jane Eyre. The contrast Powell draws is quiet but devastating. Charlotte’s novel is about moral testing: a woman who holds to her principles under extraordinary pressure and is ultimately rewarded for it. Emily was living a different question entirely. What does it mean to love someone who is suffering and who is, by any conventional moral measure, making themselves unlovable? What do you do with love that has nowhere to go, that cannot be resolved into clarity or rewarded with reciprocity?

The answer Powell’s Emily finds her way toward is not a comfortable one. In one of the novel’s most illuminating scenes, Emily explains her novel to her sisters, reaching for their worn copy of Paradise Lost to make her point. She wants her hero to be like Satan—not evil exactly, but unable to help himself, shaped by his own nature into someone who, if he cannot have what he wants, makes the whole world pay. She finds the line she’s looking for in Book 6, where Abdiel says Satan is “to thy self enthrall’d,” and she closes the book. “So shall be my Heathcliff, my Cathy,” she tells them. “They love each other because they are one and the same. You would no more expect a rock or a tree to show empathy or gratitude.” Charlotte raises her eyebrows. It sounds a most peculiar story, she says. I hope you know what you’re doing.

Powell understands that the accumulation of these moments is itself a form of knowledge, and that Emily was accumulating it in real time while writing one of the strangest novels in the English language.

Emily knows exactly what she’s doing. She is writing from inside the experience of loving someone who is “to thyself enthrall’d”—whose suffering has become a kind of prison that shapes and distorts everything around it, including the people who love him. Branwell is not Heathcliff, and Powell is careful not to collapse that distinction. But the emotional territory is the same; what it feels like to be in proximity to a need that is absolute, a grief that has curdled into something destructive, a person who inspires love and makes love almost impossible to sustain.

One of the novel’s quietly devastating moments comes when Branwell, in the middle of one of his cycles of resolve, tells Emily he is done with laudanum and alcohol. He is pale and hollow-eyed but composed, eating bread and butter at the kitchen table. Emily looks at him and thinks about the difference between his suffering and the suffering she has witnessed in others—illness that actually corrupts the body, pain that has no switch. His suffering is real, she does not doubt that. But he could, in theory, simply decide to stop. She knows this and also knows, from her own experience of a darkness that once swallowed her at school, that it is not so simple. She thinks of the bottomless black hole she’d poured herself into at Roe Head, and the argument she’s been building against him quietly dissolves. She goes downstairs to fetch her bonnet. She comes back. She keeps showing up.

I have thought about that passage more than any other in the novel, because I recognize that particular arithmetic—the one where you’re trying to assess someone’s suffering against a standard of what they could do differently, and the calculation keeps failing because suffering doesn’t work that way. Many of us have loved people in the grip of addiction. I have. Some I have lost. The experience doesn’t resolve into moral clarity, no matter how long you wait for it to. You don’t arrive at a place where you understand it well enough to stop grieving. What you learn instead—if you’re lucky, if you pay close enough attention—is that some bonds exist in a register where questions of virtue and vice simply don’t apply. You are not loving a person’s choices, but something more intractable than that.

This is what I couldn’t understand about Wuthering Heights at thirteen, and what Powell’s novel finally gave me the language for. Emily Brontë was not writing a love story in any sense Charlotte would have recognized. She was writing about love as a force that operates independently of goodness, of worthiness, of the basic reciprocity we expect relationships to provide. Heathcliff is not redeemed. Cathy is not redeemed. The novel does not offer the reader a character to comfortably inhabit or a moral to extract. It offers instead a kind of fidelity to an experience many of us know and almost none of our stories honor, the experience of loving someone whose suffering has made them very, very hard to love.

Fennell’s film will no doubt be worth seeing on its own terms. But if you want to understand why Wuthering Heights has haunted readers for nearly two centuries—if you want to know what Emily Brontë was actually reaching for when she wrote it—Powell’s book is where I’d start. Powell is a novelist, not a biographer, and the emotional logic she constructs can’t be verified. But fiction may be the more honest vehicle for this kind of reconstruction precisely because it doesn’t pretend to a certainty it can’t have. Where Fennell’s film departs from its source—reimagining rather than excavating—Powell’s novel goes the other direction, pushing deeper into Brontë’s life and work to find what might explain them. Fifteen Wild Decembers is much more than a novel about a writer and her sources. It is a novel about what it costs to love without the comfort of narrative resolution, to keep showing up for someone who cannot be saved. Emily Brontë knew that territory from the inside. So, in different ways, do most of us.

That recognition is what the greatest novels offer, not answers or moral instruction, but the relief of feeling that your own most difficult experiences have been seen. I needed Charlotte’s world at thirteen because I needed to believe in the clarity of earned rewards, that if I held to my principles I would be recognized and loved correctly. I still believe that, some of the time. But I am also, now, old enough to know that some of the people I have loved most have not been reachable by that kind of story. Powell’s Emily—scrubbing rugs, tacking home through village lanes with a brother who can barely stand—knew that too. She wrote Wuthering Heights about it. It just took me this long to understand.