The hype over Wuthering Heights has reached fever pitch. A new podcast from the team behind The Rest Is History is cutting through the noise
Historian Dominic Sandbrook is teaming up with his longtime producer, Tabitha Syrett, on their new programme The Book Club. They tell Country Life about their own favourite books and what everyone gets wrong about Brontë's novel.
I wonder what Dominic Sandbrook made of all the romping in Wuthering Heights. I watched Emerald Fennell’s new film last Friday as did hundreds of thousands of others, having discussed the source material with Britain’s favourite historian two weeks earlier. ‘I’ve been poring over the novel's Victorian reviews,’ Dr Sandbrook says, ‘which described it as over the top and melodramatic.’ At the time, his only exposure to Fennell’s Wuthering Heights had been via its trailer — which he says was enough to suggest a ‘shocking’ and ‘exploitative’ film.
Dr Sandbrook is best-known as the co-host of The Rest Is History, a podcast that was launched during the pandemic and consistently ranks among Britain’s most popular. The show’s producer, Tabitha Syrett, now joins the historian before the microphone on their new programme, The Book Club, produced by the über-talented Nicole Maslen, whose own credits include The Rest Is Politics and Bella Freud's Fashion Neurosis. The inaugural episode, out yesterday, focuses on Wuthering Heights, with upcoming instalments on The Secret History, East of Eden and, naturally, Hamnet.
Dominic Sandbrook and Tabitha Styrett are cutting through the noise surrounding the Wuthering Heights movie, with their new podcast 'The Book Club'
‘Wuthering Heights captures different people’s imagination in different ways,’ notes Tabitha, who went through a phase of reading the novel at least once every year. Emerald Fennell, who read it for the first time aged 14, based her own adaptation on her teenage self’s interpretation of the text: yearning, glamorous and sexually inquisitive. It is, by far, the most polemical release of the year. On Letterboxd, a social network where users catalogue and review what they've watched, the movie has scored a middling average of 2.9 stars — belying a way-above-average proportion of five- and one-star reviews. One witty Substack review was headlined 'Wuthering Shites'.
The movie's Marmite status was messily captured by The Times, on whose bestsellers' list Wuthering Heights (the book) has once more reappeared. No fewer than four writers across the daily and Sunday papers reviewed the film, two of them heaping praise and the other two, ire. ‘There is no person or inanimate object safe in a film where Fennell’s main directorial note to [Jacob] Elordi seems to have been, “Great, but can you also lick it?”,' Kevin Maher whinnied.
Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi star as Cathy and Heathcliff in Emerald Fennell's frothy and stirring adaptation of 'Wuthering Heights'
The film's defendants have pointed to the initial reception of Brontë’s own novel, and how that was little better (‘shocking’ and ‘exploitative’, indeed). Yet, as Syrett argues, ‘Brontë was not trying to ruffle feathers' like Fennell has. More so, ‘she was trying to do something retro and harking back to an earlier style.’ ‘The novel is very Gothic,’ concurs Dr Sandbrook, ‘all howling gales and claustrophobic interiors.’ Fennell’s production designer, Suzie Davies, designed the walls on set to resemble skin (suffocating) and human-hand moulds (creepy). At least they got that bit right.
Amid the noise currently surrounding (swirling around?) Brontë's classic, The Book Club stands out as providing a nuanced and informative view. Yet it's not so much the hosts' erudition as their accessibility that makes it compelling. When I ask Dr Sandbrook which book he'd bring with him if cast away to a desert island, he answers the complete collection of Richmal Crompton's Just William (Tabitha chooses Hilary Mantel's A Place Of Greater Safety). When cycling through Bram Stoker's secondary characters in their episode about Dracula, it sounds almost as though two friends are discussing online dating profiles.
The Book Club captures a conversation that’s far greater than Wuthering Heights (the latter is merely a starting point). The Government has named 2026 the National Year of Reading, campaigning to quell illiteracy and get people — notably children — off their phones. ‘The late literary critic, John Carey, believed that literature was the greatest form of art,’ Dr Sandbrook says, ‘because it stimulates our imagination rather than forcing another’s vision onto us. Tabby’s Heathcliff, for example, is never going to be the same as my Heathcliff.’ ‘Indeed,’ his co-host agrees. ‘Mine bears a remarkable resemblance to Jacob Elordi.’
The Book Club is available on YouTube and all podcast platforms now.
This feature originally appeared in the February 18, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.
