Emerald Fennell Cut ‘Wuthering Heights’ In Half — Here Are The Characters We Lost

Emerald Fennell has been upfront about her Wuthering Heights adaptation from the get-go, explaining to observant fans that the quotation marks around the title represented that it is an interpretation of “the things that [the book] made you feel and the things that you wish happened and didn’t happen”.

In an interview with Screen Rant, Fennell addressed the decision to cut the book’s plot in half for her screenplay, after joking about the possibility of a sequel, Wuthering Heights 2:

This book is so dense. It’s so complicated. It’s so epic. It takes place over like generations. And I think either you make a mini-series, or even a series of ten episodes where you give everything the the attention that it would need to be completely faithful to the book, or, you do what I’ve done here and make your own kind of response.

The decision wasn’t a total shocker for fans who are familiar with the source material, as all of the trailers and promotions focused on the characters from the first half of the novel, and did not feature any “time jump” versions of Jacob Elordi’s Heathcliff, or any of the other main characters.

If it’s been awhile since you’ve read the book, we’re going through all of the major characters who didn’t make the cut for the film below:

Lockwood

Mr. Lockwood is a framing character in the original novel, which is a “nesting” story within a story, told non-chronologically, by his own narrations, and Nelly Dean’s numerous accounts regarding the history of his landlord, Mr. Heathcliff.

Because the second half of the novel didn’t make it into the film, it makes sense that Lockwood would not be included, as his arrival as the new tenant of Thrushcross Grange’s occurs at the opening of the novel, but the “end” of the timeline.

This structure generates a “mystery” within the novel that was missing from the film, as his encounters with a Heathcliff who has been twisted, hardened, and tortured by Cathy’s death for decades begs the question of how such a monster was created in the first place, but we never see Elordi’s character degraded to his true rock bottom.

Hindley Earnshaw

Hindley is Cathy’s older brother who is jealous of Heathcliff’s status as his father’s favorite. When he becomes unruly, he is sent off to school, only returning after his father’s death to banish Heathcliff to the life of a servant.

Fennell slashed this character, had Cathy name Heathcliff after a “dead” brother, and wrote Hindley’s abusive behaviors and alcoholism into the character of Mr. Earnshaw. Some of the novel’s nuance gets lost in this mix, as Heathcliff’s savior is now also his abuser, and we lose the pure hatred and revenge directed at Hindley when Heathcliff returns as a “gentleman”.

We also lose a climatic moment from the novel when Hindley fails to murder Heathcliff in a drunken stupor, realizing that the man has stolen his inheritance and the affection of his son Hareton out from under him, and he is powerless to stop him.

The Entire Second Generation

Where Fennell leaned into Cathy’s miscarriage as the cause of her death, the novel sees her give birth to a daughter, often referred to as Cathy II, since the two characters bear the same name (one of the most confusing moments in literature). Heathcliff and Isabella also have a son together, named Linton Heathcliff, and we’ve already mentioned Hindley’s son, Hareton Earnshaw. These three characters form the “next gen” love triangle and storyline that forms the second half of the novel.

Cathy II is raised at Thrushcross Grange by Edgar and Nelly following Cathy’s death, Hareton is raised in squalor by a deranged Heathcliff (who brings the boy as “low” as Hindley brought him), and Linton is coddled by Isabella until her death.

When the sickly boy goes to live with his uncle (Isabella and Edgar are siblings in the book, not ward and guardian), Heathcliff insists that his son stay with him at Wuthering Heights, and plots to marry the cousins (Cathy and Linton) in a ploy to steal Edgar’s home as well. He achieves his goal, but both Linton and Edgar die not long after, and Cathy II is trapped with Heathcliff and Hareton as a result.

It’s then that Heathcliff confides to Nelly that he opened Cathy I’s grave not once, but twice, shortly after she died, and again when Edgar was buried next to her. Heathcliff plans to be buried next to her as well, with one side of both their coffins open so that their remains might “mingle” as they decompose. Fennell’s famous graveyard scene in Saltburn makes this cut the most shocking part of all. It would have been such a thematic successor on so many levels.

Lockwood’s arrival at the beginning of the novel follows all of these events, and he makes many bumbling error in assuming the remaining character’s relationships to one another, and is even haunted by Cathy I’s ghost in a terrifying vision where he drags her wrists across broken window panes.

This news sends Heathcliff into a tailspin, because he desperately wants to be haunted by her ghost himself, while cousins Cathy II and Hareton form a budding romance as she begins teaching him to read. Heathcliff’s death creates the opportunity for them to put the generational trauma to bed and pursue a happy future together, in many ways creating the ending Cathy and Heathcliff never had.

While this is the half of the book most readers don’t remember or particularly love, when we lose it in it’s entirely, we lose a crucial part to Heathcliff’s character, his undying love and obsession for Cathy, which is really the heart of the entire novel. We would never have had a Severus Snape “always” moment if Heathcliff hadn’t existed. Never.

We can’t forget about the two characters who changed so drastically they might as well be different people

Fennell takes a lot of liberties with the characters of Ellen Dean and Joseph, who are originally both servants in the Earnshaw household. The film adds new storylines to make Nelly a “companion” to Cathy, and the illegitimate daughter of a nobleman, and Joseph becomes a kind of BDSM stable boy who ushers in Cathy’s sexual awakening.

Joseph

In the novel, Joseph is called a “pharisee” and represents the religious trauma and violence that is unleashed on Cathy and Heathcliff throughout their upbringing. He is always delivering “fire and brimstone” lectures and long Sunday sermons about sin and damnation that create a baseline for Cathy and Heathcliff to rebel against as they “flip” conventions of heaven and hell on their heads in relationship to their love for each other.

His relationship with Zillah is entirely new to the film, and Fennell funnels that religious fervor and violence into the hanging scene that opens the film with manic joy of the mob watching someone else being punished. This rewrite gives us “THE” eye covering scene, so I wouldn’t change it for the world.

Ellen “Nelly” Dean

In the books, Nelly is simply a servant/housekeeper who ends up switching between the two houses of Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange each time the Cathy’s are married. She does not hold the same jealousy of Cathy and Heathcliff’s relationship as in the film, and takes on a much more “motherly/matronly” role in the novel to Cathy, Heathcliff, and Hareton.

While Nelly does notice Heathcliff listening during Cathy’s famous speech, she does not provoke her maliciously, and merely notices his presence and departure in the unfortunate moment itself. Moments later, she tells Cathy to be quiet, saying she’s “not sure” Heathcliff wasn’t just at the door listening, and a little later, when Heathcliff cannot be found, she tells Cathy she was “quite sure” he had overheard their conversation.

Fennell signals that her Nelly is getting thrown under the bus for this when Isabella Linton starts talking about the nurse from Romeo and Juliet, whose mistakes also facilitate a tragedy between two lovers. The artistic decision gives us somewhere to direct our anger over Cathy and Heathcliff’s failed romance, but also takes some of the spotlight off of their own toxicity, by placing the blame elsewhere and making the tragedy appear avoidable.

The confrontation does heighten the stakes, and allow for the “fictionalized” relationship between Cathy and Heathcliff to build in a way that the novel never explicitly consummates. Fennell follows that thread to it’s natural climax, with Heathcliff offering to murder Edgar at Cathy’s request, and we see where their mind games would lead had they allowed themselves to let go of their inhibitions.