From a Novel to a Number One: The Story of the Song Wuthering Heights

How did a work of literature turn into a music legend? Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights” isn’t just a hit song; it’s a rare meeting of literature and music that compresses the spirit of Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel “Wuthering Heights” into four and a half minutes, and has continued to captivate listeners for more than forty years.

An Idea Born From the Last Ten Minutes of a TV Broadcast

Contrary to what most sources assume, the story doesn’t begin with the novel directly, but with a television adaptation. In 1977, English singer Kate Bush, then just eighteen years old, happened to catch only the last ten minutes of a “Wuthering Heights” adaptation airing on the BBC. Even though she hadn’t read the novel up to that point, she was so struck by the visual power of the scenes she watched that she wrote the song’s lyrics and melody in a single sitting that same evening. She only read the novel afterward, in her own words, “to get my research right.”

During that reading she came across an interesting coincidence: she discovered that she and Emily Brontë were born on the very same day, July 30th. For Bush, this added an extra layer of emotional ownership to the song.

A Love Story Told Through the Mouth of a Ghost

The song’s lyrics draw on one of the novel’s most famous scenes: the nightmarish night the book’s narrator, Mr. Lockwood, spends at the abandoned Wuthering Heights farmhouse, where he witnesses the ghost of Catherine Earnshaw begging at the window to be let in. Bush wrote the song directly in Catherine’s voice, as a ghost calling out to her love, Heathcliff. The lyrics closely echo the novel’s own dialogue in that scene — the ghost complaining of the cold, pleading to be let in through the window, and describing the torment of her restless nights outside.

This choice gives the song a far more unsettling, gothic atmosphere than an ordinary love song. Bush’s high, operatic voice leaves the character’s passion and desperation almost suspended in mid-air; critic Simon Reynolds described the song as “gothic romance distilled into a four-and-a-half-minute gaseous rhapsody.”

A Disagreement With the Record Label

A lesser-known detail in the song’s story is the disagreement with EMI, her record label. The label planned to release a song called “James and the Cold Gun” as the first single from Bush’s debut album. But Bush insisted that “Wuthering Heights” be the first single instead — and she won. EMI also pushed the release date from November to January so it wouldn’t get lost in the Christmas rush; even so, when a few copies accidentally reached a radio network, the song was already getting airplay from November 1977 onward. During recording, the production team kept mixing from midnight until five in the morning; the recording that emerged from that marathon session became one of the most recognizable openings in music history.

The First Female Songwriter to Reach Number One

“Wuthering Heights” reached number one in the UK in March 1978 and stayed at the top for a full four weeks. This success gave the song a special place in music history: Kate Bush became the first woman to reach number one on the UK charts with a song she wrote entirely herself. The song also topped the charts in Australia, Ireland, Italy, New Zealand, and Portugal.

In 2016, Pitchfork magazine named it the fifth-best song of the 1970s; in 2020, The Guardian ranked it fourteenth on its list of the greatest UK number-one singles of all time. The distinctive dance moves Bush performed in her red dress in the song’s music video became so iconic that, to this day, fans around the world gather every year at events called “The Most Wuthering Heights Day Ever” to recreate the dance together en masse.

A Debt of Gratitude, Forty Years Later

In 2018, on the song’s fortieth anniversary, Kate Bush wrote a text dedicated to Emily Brontë for a memorial stone erected for the Brontë siblings on the Yorkshire moors. Bush described the invitation as “an honor, and in a way, a chance to say thank you to her.” This gesture is a beautiful example of how a novel can shape a singer’s career, and how that connection of gratitude can endure even decades later.

Wuthering Heights’ Influence on Other Art Forms

Emily Brontë’s novel wasn’t limited to Kate Bush’s song. The novel has been brought to the screen many times, from William Wyler’s classic 1939 film adaptation to the present day. Author Margaret Atwood has named “Wuthering Heights” as the book that changed her life. The novel has also been adapted for the stage; British director Emma Rice’s musical adaptation brought the story back to life on stage with songs. It’s hardly surprising that a novel that has inspired so many artists has also gained new readers worldwide through a song.

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