Introduction

Abstract

This book examines what happens to classic literature when it becomes a cultural legacy through the process of screen adaptation. The primary focus of this examination is Emily Brontë’s famous 1847 novel, Wuthering Heights (Brontë, 1998).¹ Brontë’s novel is bound-up with personal, cultural and national histories as a continually reproduced entity. In much the same way as individuals hold certain texts close to their hearts as remnants of childhood, lovers and the past, societies and cultures continually rework certain texts as a collective inheritance. Yet, the construction of Wuthering Heights as a cultural legacy and collective inheritance through its screen adaptations has rarely been examined as closely as it deserves. The intimacy with which many people respond to Wuthering Heights speaks of its presence not only in their individual lives, but also, within culture.

She loved second-hand bookshops for their presumption that any tatty volume mattered. … Inherited books. Books as gifts. Books as objects flung across the room in a lover’s argument. Books (this most of all) taken into the warm sexual space of the bed, held upon the lap, entered like another body, companionable, close, interconnecting with innermost things.

Gail Jones (2006, pp. 136–7)