Heathcliff Incoming...

A nursling of the moors hikes Brontë country, with art as her companion

There it was, sitting innocently on a bookshelf in the drawing room: a dark green, Morocco-bound volume with gold script at the top of the spine that read, ‘WUTHERING HEIGHTS ETC. – E. & A. BRONTË.’

My baby-faced interns thought the date scrawled in this book was 1999 but - duh - I told them to go back a century. It was given to my great grandfather on Christmas Day, 1899. God knows how it’s still in my bookcase, but it is. I re-read it by a roaring fire, at night, spooked.

I couldn’t help but pick it up – I had just read Cami Fateh’s witty piece about the Vogue Book Club choosing Wuthering Heights as its inaugural read, and with my excitement about Emerald Fennell’s adaptation having now lasted since the day it started shooting last year, encouraged by my occasionally-Goth daughter Tess, who can barely wait until we can see the movie together next week, I saw this as A Sign - I was meant to re-read this novel, but I had to do it before I saw the movie. That would be the only way to properly enjoy the film and be able to knowingly appreciate-slash-critique it afterwards, which I plan to do for the next several weeks: after all, Margot Robbie as Cathy – what could be more delicious? The girl is a fabulous actress, clearly a formidable businesswoman and producer, and dresses beautifully. Jacob Elordi, mostly ditto. Who cares what all the pre-reviews are saying? I just wanted to see Margot and Jacob gallivanting among the gorse bushes in costume. If the movie turns out to be a pink-hued syrupy-sexy confection no probs - we can all go back to the novel for the real horror story.

I walked past this remote dwelling on the North Yorkshire moors. It’s just how I imagine Wuthering Heights looked.

I digress. To get back to the drawing room: another interminable day of rain last Saturday, and I was casting around for something to occupy myself while Tess was revising for her mock GCSEs. I had lit the fire, and was preparing to put my feet up on the sofa, as is my wont on a weekend afternoon, have a little read and then fall sound asleep. But Wuthering Heights was still staring at me from the bookcase.

I already knew that if I started the book now, sleep would be impossible this afternoon: as a teenager I had never been more frightened than when I read the scene where Lockwood stays the night with his ghastly host Heathcliff, hears a tapping at the window and sees Cathy’s pale hand appear at the glass which then snatches his arm. Of all the fictional scenes I have read, this is without doubt is the ghostliest, most haunting image that words on a page have ever created for me: the imagined scenario gave me night terrors for years, keeping me awake in the darkness at the lonely farmhouse where I grew up, petrified that there was a ghost just outside my window. But it was also the beginning of my lifelong love affair with Gothic literature. Nightmares? Bring them on, I dared myself. For more dreadful dreams I read Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier. (I think I’ve read each of these books at least seven or eight times each.)

Top Withens, on Haworth Moor, near to Emily’s home, had long been imagined as ‘the real Wuthering Heights.’ It wasn’t, as the plaque at the site informs Brontë pilgrims.

No, a nap would be impossible if I started Wuthering Heights today – for I would not be able to put it down, and I’d be in a state of dread