We all have books that gain the status of friends or relatives. I admit to being a tough audience for Wuthering Heights due to growing up in Leeds, often holidaying on the moors, and regarding this as the Great Yorkshire Novel.

Wuthering Heights
National theatre, London

We all have books that gain the status of friends or relatives. I admit to being a tough audience for Wuthering Heights due to growing up in Leeds, often holidaying on the moors, and regarding this as the Great Yorkshire Novel. And, though personal emotion should be introduced only sparingly into reviewing, it was my mum’s favourite book, and in front of me now is her own pencil-identified edition.

Another complicating factor of the National Theatre adaptation (to 19 March) for me was that Andrea Arnold’s 2011 movie seemed to me an almost perfect version of the book: visually and verbally rooted in Yorkshire, brutally attuned to the animalistic savagery of both moors farming and the Romantic passions of its characters. It also turned Emily Brontë’s various references to Heathcliff’s “darkness” from assumed metaphor to realism by casting the young black British actor James Howson.

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