Book Review: Catherine by Essie Fox
It’s been a month since Wuthering Heights was released in cinemas and the Cathy/Heathcliff fever is still burning. But if Emerald Fennel’s adaptation of Emily Brontë’s classic novel deviated too far from the original story for your taste, you’re likely to find more to love about Essie Fox’s recent literary reimagining, Catherine.
Shifting the perspective from the original book’s narrators – outsider Mr Lockwood and insider Nelly Dean – to that of Catherine Linton, née Earnshaw, we follow the titular character as she forms a fierce and unbreakable bond with a foundling boy her father rescues from the streets of Liverpool. As they grow older, Catherine and Heathcliff’s friendship evolves into an intense love. But everything changes when Catherine’s father dies, leaving her bitter and pitiless brother as master of the house. Heathcliff is reduced to servitude and Catherine, desperate to save him, turns to her kindly neighbour, Edgar, believing that her marriage to a wealthy heir will free Heathcliff from cruelty. Reader, it does not.
Eighteen years later, Catherine rises from her premature grave to tell her story and seek redemption. We follow her spectral form as she remembers, recounts and regrets the choices she made that led first to her and Heathcliff being separated, and later Heathcliff vowing vengeance on the entire Earnshaw/Linton family. Catherine might not be able to change the past that haunts her from beyond the grave but she refuses to abandon her daughter to Heathcliff’s spite. And though she may despise what Heathcliff has become, she’s unable to forget the boy he once was, or how very much she loved him, and loves him still.
Oh, my love, won’t you come back. Come and haunt me. Drive me mad. Send the Devil to torment me, only don’t leave me here alone for another eighteen years.”
I first read Wuthering Heights almost two decades ago and whilst the specific details of the story have faded with time, that haunting backdrop and the intensity of the characters has stuck with me ever since. It’s a relief to read Essie Fox’s take on Cathy and Heathcliff’s destructive relationship and still recognise the gothic backbone that made Brontë’s story such a seminal novel. Catherine is steeped in the kind of dark and moody atmosphere that makes you live and breathe every part of the book. It helps that the setting is almost a character in itself; Fox captures the rugged, windswept Yorkshire moors with a cinematic wildness that’s both brutal and beautiful.
The same words can be used to describe the story’s central duo too. As children, they’re equally charming in their own ways – Catherine is passionate, spirited and open with her affections, whilst Heathcliff is quiet, compassionate and empathetic. It’s easy to like their younger selves, but much harder to like who they grow up to become. As a woman and a wife, Catherine’s youthful tendency towards immaturity and selfishness is amplified. Heathcliff, on the other hand, has become an entirely different person. Having shed the softness that made Catherine love him in the first place, he’s made himself into a monster purely to torture those who tortured him. And yet, toxic and terrible as they both are, they remain sympathetic characters – which is no mean feat.
By framing the narrative around Catherine’s POV, Fox gives her novel an urgency that really delves into the character’s deep inner turmoil. The book leans more heavily into parts of Brontë’s story that were only hinted at or briefly touched upon, which really ups the tragedy, trauma and emotional torment the characters wrestle with. Wuthering Heights was never supposed to be a romantic love story but there is still love to be found in all the misery, whether it’s housekeeper and mother figure Nelly Dean’s love for the children under her care, or in Catherine’s love for the daughter she never had a chance to know, or the ghost of the boy who deserved a kinder life than he was given.
If you want to read a classic novel with a modern touch, Catherine delivers all the obsessive yearning, eerie chills and untamed insanity you could hope for in a Wuthering Heights reimagining. It’s an absorbing and detailed historical novel that will please fans of the original, whilst introducing new readers to Brontë’s literary genius – which is exactly what retellings should do.
★★★★★
Catherine was published by Orenda Books on 12 February 2026
