Frances O’Connor was a 15-year-old pupil at an all-girls Catholic school when she first read Wuthering Heights on the hour-long bus journey to and from her home in the hills outside Perth, Western Australia. “It was the feeling of the elements, and the environment, that I recognised so strongly from my own childhood,” she says. “I remember not wanting to leave that windy, gothic, slightly supernatural place to go back to the real world.”
She also loved “just how kickass Cathy and Heathcliff were – that feeling of being misunderstood and not belonging. As a teenager, their rebelliousness really spoke to me.” Forty years later, she has brought those sense memories to a story about the novel’s author Emily Brontë, in a directorial debut that she expects to enrage some purists while hoping it will inspire a new generation of young women as the novel once inspired her.
