Despite being written nearly 200 years ago, Wuthering Heights is still being read and loved. And now, it’s finding even more fans, with a resurgence of interest due to the release of Emerald Fennell’s big-screen version in time for Valentine’s Day – which is coincidentally the same timing my own novel, Catherine: A Retelling of Wuthering Heights is published.

Fennell’s film will be the latest in a long line of adaptations for both the big and small screen, and all of them with unique visions of Emily Brontë’s own creation. The original mannered and sanitised Hollywood version made in 1939 showed the gritty gothic novel as a sweeping romance, with less focus on the scenes of brutality and trauma that are present in the book.

At least the 2011 version, directed by Andrea Arnold, showed the character of Heathcliff as racially abused as a person of colour – this “difference” being one of the novel’s central themes. From his first introduction in the pages of the book, Heathcliff is portrayed as the frightened orphaned child who Cathy’s father saved from the streets of Liverpool.

Various characters then describe him as being “dark as the devil”, a “swarthy gipsy”, a “black villain”, or “a foreign castaway”. However, there are also more exotic images, with Nelly Dean (the main narrator, and once housekeeper at the Heights) referring to Heathcliff as being handsome, with black eyes that are flashing with fire; even suggesting that his father was the Emperor of China, and his mother had perhaps been an Indian queen.

The novel never reveals the truth of Heathcliff’s birth.

But his otherness does lead to his cruel isolation, and an obsession with revenge when the love of his life chooses to marry someone else. In her rash naivety, Cathy truly believes she can have her cake and eat it, walking out on the arm of her wealthy “golden” husband while keeping Heathcliff as her lover. She has no idea of the misery and pain that her actions will cause.

How far will Emerald Fennell go when exploring the truth of Heathcliff’s origins, and what he does in the three years when he leaves Wuthering Heights, before returning a rich man obsessed with stealing Cathy back from the husband he hates?

One thing is for sure, the run of teasing trailers already released have caused some heated discussions on social media. Those less familiar with the book express excitement at what promises to be the whirling chaos of a stylised romance. Those who know it somewhat better are perhaps less convinced.

It is true that some bold choices have been made with the casting, one of the main ones being Cathy, who is dark-haired and just 18 when she dies in the book, whereas her image in this film is fair-haired and more mature. When it comes to the costumes, from a purist’s point of view they are wrong for the era – which is the late 1700s.

Although the scenes on the moors look authentically wild, some of the views of Thrushcross Grange, where Cathy lives when she weds, are so luridly designed they could well have been lifted from the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland.

Does Fennell want us to be shocked – to view the story through a luridly psychedelic lens and that way heighten the gothic and erotic qualities as Cathy descends into madness and despair?

Fennell has said in interviews that this film reflects the vision she imagined when she first read Wuthering Heights at the age of 14 – whereas my own introduction was when I was six or seven, when my mother and I spent one winter Sunday afternoon, hearing the wind and the rain thrashing loudly on the windows, while immersed in the melodramatic old black-and-white film.

I may have been much too young to comprehend the sexual tension, but could Laurence Olivier be more broodingly romantic? And Merle Oberon – so beguiling as Cathy?

Oh, how desolate I felt when the two of them had died and the ghosts of the doomed lovers disappeared into the snow drifting down across the moors. Like Fennell, I first read the novel in my teens and was entirely caught up in the simmering doomed passion, weeping for hours when Cathy died, but really having little interest in the characters whose lives
carried on afterwards.

But the genius of this novel is how it changes with each reading, depending on age and life experience. As well as depicting a bond that transcends death and the grave, it is the starkest portrayal of life’s brutalities and hardships, with an acute understanding of how abuse and grief in childhood can corrupt an adult psyche.

Now I see Cathy’s fall into a chasm of despair. I see Heathcliff as a man warped by hatred and revenge, intent on the sadistic destruction of the families he views as instrumental in the ruin of his life. And I can now appreciate the synergy that exists between the novel’s two halves, and how the second generation provides the mirror to reflect all the wrongs of the past.

But will it put those wrongs to right?

Ultimately, this is a story of redemption, and in my own retelling I have focussed on the aspect that so obsessed me as a child – the story of a ghost.

What if Heathcliff does raise the spirit of the woman who’s already been dead for more than 18 years when he desecrates her grave to hold her in his arms again?

What would that ghost recall of the life she’d known before, with all the intimate scenes that the maid, Nelly Dean, was never present to see? What would my Catherine hope to do when she observes the wickedness of the boy she once adored, comparing him with the man now intent on the destruction of the daughter who was born on the day when she died?

And what would she think, feel, when she saw her daughter’s fate – now imprisoned and the victim of so much cruelty?

Have I dared to be as bold as Emerald Fennell? Perhaps not visually, because I’ve done my very best to be true to the era, to the language and dress, and the settings of the book.

But I have conjured new scenes – and whatever I’ve imagined as hidden between the lines, no one could deny that Emily Brontë’s gothic novel is a cauldron of passion, of jealousy, and madness. It is a novel that has had the power to shock, not only today but since the time of its creation, with many early critics calling it scandalous – suggesting that with such immoral characters, it should never have been published.

To my mind it is the depth of Emily’s understanding of the good and the bad that can exist in every soul, that makes her story so profound and still relevant today. Cathy and Heathcliff are not sanitised ideals as I imagined them at first in that old black-and-white film.

They are flawed, and they are real. Real to such an extent that they seem to exist beyond the pages of the book. It is as if we’re looking through a mirror where the glass is wavering and strange. I can only hope my readers enjoy the mirror I’ve held up, showing Catherine as a ghost. She haunts my dreams to this day. I believe she always will.

• Catherine: A Retelling of Wuthering Heights, by Essie Fox (Orenda Books, £20) is published on February 12