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I first read Wuthering Heights when I was 10 years old, growing up in Paris. Or rather, it was read aloud to me in French by my babysitter, every Wednesday night, one chapter at a time, as I lay in bed. I remember the anticipation more than anything, counting the days until the next installment. But I also remember a persistent dread that felt inseparable from the thrill of the story. I could see it all so clearly in my mind: the wild windswept moors, the oppressive house, the dark Victorian clothes. Heathcliff especially felt terrifyingly, seductively alive. I was afraid of him and drawn to him in equal measure.
Nearly 30 years later, I picked up the novel again and read it in English for the first time. What surprised me most wasn’t just how different it felt but how difficult it was. The language is dense, complicated. I realized how much I had misremembered—or maybe how much I had romanticized. What I had held onto from childhood was the heat, the drama. But what I encountered as an adult was something dark and violent. Wuthering Heights offers very little comfort. It is a novel steeped in resentment and cruelty, in emotional and physical violence. There is very little tenderness or intimacy anywhere to be found.
And yet my attachment to the book never faded. In fact, it deepened. I loved Wuthering Heights so much that it became the starting point for my fall-winter 2025 collection. I was drawn to its severity, the way desire and repression exist side by side. I loved its darkness, its melancholy, and translating that emotional landscape into clothes felt instinctive. I even gifted the book to everyone who came to see the show, tucking small mementos and pictures within its pages to invite them into the same world that had shaped the collection.
When I reread Wuthering Heights for the third time recently, in anticipation of the upcoming film adaptation, I was also, like many people, absorbed (to use a euphemism!) in Heated Rivalry, a contemporary romance that shares, at least on the surface, striking similarities with Emily Brontë’s novel. Both stories are fueled by obsession, by that feeling that certain connections are inevitable, magnetic, impossible to resist. Both are about people who cannot stay away from one another, no matter the cost.
Yes, there are the obvious differences of time and place. And in Wuthering Heights, passion is not so much a choice as it is a sentence. Catherine and Heathcliff don’t just fall in love; they are overtaken and destroyed by it. Their love, which Catherine compares to “the eternal rocks beneath—a source of little visible delight, but necessary” (ouch), leaves no space for tenderness, compromise, or peace. Heated Rivalry, by contrast, begins with obsession but doesn’t end there. Desire is acknowledged; feelings are named. Vulnerability is allowed to enter the story. Passion is not punished; it is tested, shared, and ultimately transformed. Love becomes something Shane and Ilya actively choose, not just something that happens to them. It is something that eventually heals them.
But both works—separated by two centuries—are not just stories of passionate love but of something more specific: exquisite, almost painful yearning. (You could add Bridgerton and The Summer I Turned Pretty to this genre.) Time and time again, we return to narratives built around ache and longing, stretched over long periods.
I wonder if this says something about what we are collectively missing. We live in a world of constant stimulation and access—to people, to images, to desire itself. Romance has become efficient, frictionless. Connection is everywhere, yet true intimacy often feels elusive or absent. We have, as a culture, become so good at swiping, ghosting, blocking, moving on, keeping things light that yearning almost feels subversive.
These stories don’t just promise romance; they promise intensity. They make desire feel consequential. In Heated Rivalry it shows up in the constant texting, the sense that Shane and Ilya are always thinking about each other, reaching for one another when they are apart. In Wuthering Heights, it takes a more feral form: an obsession that lingers long after separation and even death, an excitement bordering on mania when Catherine and Heathcliff are reunited. To want something—or someone—badly and over long periods of time feels almost radical in an age defined by immediacy and ease.
And both stories are about a fear of transgression that interferes with love. Brontë, of course, was writing in a world that allowed romantic love very few viable happy endings, especially for women and especially across class lines. Wuthering Heights was written at the dawn of the Victorian era, in a culture defined by rigid class hierarchy and strict gender roles. Marriage was economic.
Heated Rivalry is also shaped by constraint, just a modern version of it. Set within the hypermasculine world of professional hockey, where being openly gay can define—and destroy—a career, the risks are real. This is a love story between two men unfolding at a moment when “traditional” puritanical values are being reasserted, when gender roles are once again being tightly policed and social conformity is rewarded. And yet the story allows for the possibility of love blooming; it insists that intensity and tenderness can coexist.
Maybe this is why stories of yearning continue to grip us: They remind us that feeling deeply still matters, no matter what societal or other lines it crosses. That we all deserve passion, to yearn, to be yearned for. But where Wuthering Heights imagines love as destructive, contemporary stories like Heated Rivalry allow for revision. For choice, agency, care.
That evolution mirrors my own. I was once seduced by the idea of a love that overwhelmed, that burned. Today I am moved by passion that endures, that evolves, that makes room for tenderness, vulnerability, and intimacy without losing heat. If Wuthering Heights is a warning about what happens when love has no future, Heated Rivalry is a hopeful rewrite. Together they trace an arc from fatalism to agency, from tragedy to happy ending. And isn’t that an ending worth believing in?
Share your own thoughts on the parallels between Wuthering Heights and Heated Rivalry—and the art of yearning—in today’s group chat on the Vogue app!