I had not intended to attend. I do not, as a rule, attend things. It was Charlotte who insisted, and Charlotte who then spent the first quarter-hour weeping into her popcorn, for what reason I cannot say. Certainly it was not admiration. My own feelings inclined more toward horror. I did share her confusion, though certainly not her tears.

The landscapes are correct. I will grant them that. Someone has walked the moors in proper weather — not the golden-hour nonsense that lesser imaginations impose upon Yorkshire, but the genuine grey, the heather beaten flat, the sky that does not so much lower as oppress. For approximately eleven minutes, I felt something resembling recognition.

Then Miss Robbie removed her corset, and we were in different territory entirely.

I am not, as certain biographers have insisted upon suggesting, a prude. I created Heathcliff. I am aware of what he is. What I created, however, was a wound that walks — a man shaped entirely by dispossession and fury, and a love between him and Catherine designed to disturb rather than warm, to crawl beneath the skin rather than flush the cheeks. Miss Fennell understands this, I believe, in the abstract. Nevertheless she appears to have conflated disturbing for titillating, which are near neighbours only in the way that a cliff edge and a fainting couch are both places one might fall.

The result is less Wuthering Heights than a fourteen-year-old's vivid imagining of what Wuthering Heights must be about, before she has actually read it — assembled from whispers, from raised eyebrows, from the word transgressive deployed by adults in tones suggesting she is not yet old enough to understand. The film has that quality exactly: the breathless certainty of someone who has heard that something is scandalous and has resolved to be equal to it. Miss Fennell has been very equal to it. The corset comes off at regular intervals.

The audience seemed satisfied. They gasped at the correct moments. They fanned themselves. A young woman behind me whispered he's so damaged in a tone that suggested she found this desirable rather than tragic, which is precisely the misreading I had hoped to forestall by writing the book in the first place. These were not readers of my novel. They were readers of its reputation — drawn in by a trailer that promised them something the book never was and, to be fair to them, never claimed to be. They came for a very expensive and handsomely photographed feeling. They received it. I cannot entirely blame them. They are children, and they were given sweets, and they left happy, and there is nothing wrong with any of that.

I am told that in the adjacent theatre, a goat was playing basketball.

Charlotte found this information distressing. I did not. A goat is exactly what a goat is. It makes no claim to Brontë. It does not remove its corset and call the result literature. The children in that theatre also received sweets, and also left happy, but their sweets were honestly labelled, and the goat did not ask them to feel sophisticated for eating them.

The GOAT audience and the Wuthering Heights audience are, I suspect, largely the same children. The difference is that one group spent the afternoon watching an animal pursue its appetite with complete and uncomplicating honesty, while the other spent it watching my characters pursue theirs while someone held a gilt frame around the proceedings and asked the audience to call it art.

The goat did not require a gilt frame.

I find I prefer the goat.

Had Miss Fennell been faithful to what I actually wrote — a story in which love is not warming but catastrophic, in which Heathcliff is not damaged and therefore desirable but damaged and therefore dangerous, in which no one leaves feeling uplifted or flushed or satisfied — the children would not have come. They would have gone to see the goat, which is precisely where they belonged. We would all have been happier. The moors would have kept their dignity. Charlotte would have had no occasion to weep.

Instead we have this: a child's dream of my book, dressed in my book's clothing, wearing my book's name, and making my book's characters perform feelings they were never designed to survive. "Wuthering Heights" is a very expensive artistic travesty that will nonetheless make a great deal of money which, in its way, is the most Heathcliff outcome imaginable.

He would have burned it down. I confess I sympathise.

Two stars. The moors were right. The goat gets five.