I reread Wuthering Heights every couple of years, and every time I'm struck by how contemporary it feels. Not in its language — the Yorkshire dialect alone can slow you down — but in its appetite for ugly feelings. Heathcliff and Cathy don't love each other in a way that's good for either of them. That's the whole point.
The original morally gray hero
Heathcliff gets described as the first Byronic hero in English fiction, but he's actually something darker. Byronic heroes have tragic dignity. Heathcliff is just obsessive and cruel. Brontë lets him hurt people who didn't hurt him. She lets him be petty. She refuses to redeem him.
A modern editor would almost certainly tell her to soften him. Give him a moment of grace near the end. Let the reader off the hook. She doesn't. That refusal is why the book still feels dangerous.
The ghost of the book in contemporary romance
Half the dark romance I read now is Heathcliff with the edges filed off — the outsider, the grudge, the woman who should know better. When it works, it's because the author understood what Brontë understood: obsession isn't romantic because it's pretty, it's romantic because it's terrible and the characters can't stop.
You can see that lineage in almost every modern dark romance worth reading — the outsider hero, the doomed pull, the refusal to soften. The bones of the genre are still Brontë's, even when nobody's talking about her.
Brontë's great trick is that she makes you root for a relationship you would never wish on anyone you loved.
What the adaptations keep missing
Most film versions of Wuthering Heights try to turn it into a love story. They cut the second half — the revenge arc, the next generation — because it's bleak and complicated and not what anyone wants out of a romance film. But the second half is where the book's thesis lives. Obsession outlives the people who started it.
The 2011 Andrea Arnold version is the only adaptation I've seen that understood this. It's beautiful and strange and almost silent, and it treats the moors like a character. Most people hated it. I think it's the closest anyone's gotten.