From Oxford to the Moors: A scholar’s pilgrimage to Brontë country | Books and Literature News
With the release of Emerald Fennell’s adaptation of Wuthering Heights, I, like many devoted readers of Emily Brontë’s novel, have found myself thinking again about the discomfort it elicits. The casting of Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff has revived a long-standing debate around the character’s racial identity. In the novel, Heathcliff’s origins are deliberately ambiguous, yet he is consistently marked as non-white. Variously described as a ‘dark-skinned gipsy’, ‘black-eyed’, and even a ‘Lascar’—a nineteenth-century term for sailors from South Asia—these labels intensify his otherness. Heathcliff’s racialised outsider status is central to his social ostracism and alienation. This unease is not incidental. Nineteenth-century British fiction emerged alongside imperial expansion, and novelistic worlds were implicitly shaped by imperial encounters. The Brontës were writing at a time when India occupied a powerful place in the British imagination, not only as a site of economic extraction but also as a moral and religious project. In Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë presents an alternative future for her heroine: marriage to her cousin St. John Rivers and a life of missionary work in …
