Lovesick or sick of love: romance through the ages

Ella Whelan on Wuthering Heights, Normal People and Jane Eyre - what has changed about our relationship with love stories?

Ideas Matter has just launched the open call for applications for its Living Freedom Summer School 2026. This year’s three-day residential summer school takes place from Thursday 9 July to Saturday 11 July in central London. The summer school is open to anyone aged 18 to 30, from the UK and beyond. Find out more about the programme and how to apply here.

---

A love story can tell you a lot about the society in which it was written. Jane Austen had her commitment to socially appropriate marriage in Pride and Prejudice, DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover explored the boundaries of lust and Stephenie Meyer’s stories of vampiric love in the Twilight series encapsulated the modern teen experience so successfully that it sold over 100million copies worldwide in 37 languages. The basics might be the same – boy meets girl, hurdles abound, will they won’t they? – but the telling of the stories reveal their readers’ attitudes towards sex, relationships and even their belief in love itself.

Perhaps even more interesting is when old love stories are remade for a modern audience, as happened recently with Emerald Fennell’s screen adaptation of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. The tale of two people so entwined and yet so doomed has shaken teenage hearts for centuries, and Fennell’s interpretation promised to be a high-drama dive into the passion, lust and wind-beaten pining hinted at in much of the book - at least in the trailers. In these prudish times of fearmongering about sexual freedom, Fennell’s sexy, glossy reimagining of one of literature’s greatest loves promised to deliver.

You should never believe a trailer. In fact, the film was so sexless, joyless and cruel that many cinema goers in my screening laughed their way through its key emotional highpoints. Yes, Brontë’s main characters, Cathy and Heathcliffe - two foster siblings who fall in love and try to ruin each other with revenge when the possibility of their union is thwarted by mistake and subterfuge - are cruel and immature, but Fennell’s adaptation depicted them as all pouting and no poignancy. I have yet to meet anyone who truly believed that the actors Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie looked like they were in love, despite sticking their tongues down each other’s throats at every opportunity.

How could such a passionate love story fall so flat? Perhaps it’s not just Fennell’s fault (although she is to blame for terrible costumes and butchering the storyline) but a sign that our own commitment to love, risk, passion and the true vulnerability that comes with the concept of sharing a life with someone seems too much in a modern world where ‘self care’ trumps all. Wuthering Heights show’s love’s darker side - the horror and misery that can come from infatuation, longing and the loss of a soulmate. Perhaps we are too scared of the prospect of what a leap into the unknown falling in love really is, and so Fennell’s Wuthering Heights decided to play it safe, relying on innuendos and good-looking actors.

Whether or not you loved the film, Fennell’s adaptation and the disagreements it has posed an interesting question - is our understanding of love and what it should look like changed over the generations? Today’s youngsters are allegedly less sexually active - or romantically interested - than their parents. Is this true? And, if so, why are fewer of us falling head over heels? Are we more scared of love because we’re more scared of each other?

At last year’s Living Freedom Summer School - the annual residential event for freedom-loving 18- to 30-year-olds run by Ideas Matter - I explored this idea of our loss of faith in love while looking at two of my favourite depictions: Jane Eyre and Normal People. What follows is an edited version of my speech. You can also watch me deliver the speech using the video link below.

---

---

Your soul sleeps; the shock is yet to be given which shall waken it. You think all existence lapses in as quiet a flow as that in which your youth has hitherto slid away. Floating on with closed eyes and muffled ears, you neither see the rocks bristling not far off in the bed of the flood, nor hear the breakers boil at their base. But I tell you - and you may mark my words - you will come some day to a craggy pass in the channel, where the whole of life’s stream will be broken up into whirl and tumult, foam and noise: either you will be dashed to atoms on crag points, or lifted up and borne on by some master-wave into a calmer current.

What is Rochester talking about here in Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 novel Jane Eyre? Love. Love is a challenge to life - it requires struggle and pain. His description is fatalistic - you will be dashed or you will be saved. It is Jane who teaches him that she has a third option: to swim against the current and save herself.

1847 was a good year for romance, and a good year for the Brontë sisters. Two of the greatest love stories ever written were published: Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights by Charlotte’s younger sister Emily. Anne, the youngest Brontë, published The Tenant of Wildfell Hall in 1848, arguably the first feminist novel. Raised by an Irish clergyman, sent to filthy schools where their sisters died, and eventually dying young themselves - Emily and Anne of tuberculosis, Charlotte of something similar along with pregnancy complications - for short and tragic lives, the Brontë’s wild romances marked a shift in literary depictions of love, away from the neat and tidy portrayals in Austen’s early 1800 works like Pride and Prejudice. Jane Eyre is a poor orphan who goes to work as a governess, where she falls in love with the master of the house. Complications - and already existing wives - get in the way, but Jane’s challenge to prove herself not only the equal but the stronger of the couple explores the balance between passion and desire and what it means to live freely and live truly.

Fast forward 171 years later, and love in literature reads like this:

Ever since school he has understood his power over her. How she responds to his look or the touch of his hand. The way her face colours, and she goes still as if awaiting some spoken order. His effortless tyranny over someone who seems, to other people, so invulnerable. He has never been able to reconcile himself to the idea of losing this hold over her, like a key to an empty property, left available for future use. In fact, he has cultivated it, and he knows he has.

That’s Connell Waldron considering his relationship with Marianne Sheridan in Sally Rooney’s hit novel Normal People. About the same age as the Brontës when she published her first novel, Rooney grew up in rural Ireland in County Mayo to a normal, lower-middle-class family, leaving for the big city, much like her characters, to attend Trinity College where she became a top scholar and a debater. Normal People, her second book, is an international bestseller - it manages to perfectly encapsulate what contemporary love is like. Full of emails, texts, awkward silences and fumbling moments at house parties, the book captures the zeitgeist of anxiety-ridden modern, young love. The two main characters - Marianne and Connell - follow the longstanding ‘will they, won’t they?’ narrative arc of romance fiction, but with a twist. Rather than the external barriers that usually hinder love stories - recalcitrant relatives, clashing backgrounds, wars or literal mad women in the attic - the barriers to Rooney’s modern love are all internal. The worst enemy of this story of love is the people in it, and what’s going on in their own heads.

Jane Eyre and Normal People are almost too perfect to compare. Both written by women about oddball women - plain Jane and social outcast Marianne. Both women are ‘damaged’ but understand and deal with that fact in very different ways. Both seem, at times, completely incapacitated by the love they feel for the men in their lives. The context for these two women’s lives is almost mirrored, albeit in different societal contexts. Jane’s brutalisation at the hands of her extended family is a little more severe than Marianne’s (who, as far as we’re aware, never had to wake up next to a dead best friend), but they are both women who have suffered and find themselves on the fringes.

And yet, while Rooney’s heroine is irrevocably damaged, controlled and seemingly unable to do anything about the difficulties life has dealt her, Brontë’s heroine - written at a time when Jane’s experience would have reflected real life for great numbers of women - proves herself stronger than that which would make her weak. Indeed, Lowood school is based on the school experience that Brontë suffered herself.

Brontë never uses the word ‘damaged’ about Jane, but Rooney uses it all over the place. Connell describes Marianne as having ‘a wildness that got into him for a while and made him feel that he was like her, that they had the same unnameable spiritual injury, and that neither of them could ever fit into the world. But he was never damaged like she was. She just made him feel that way.’ The damage is not something to overcome, but part of Marianne’s identity. Connell is also damaged - anxiety-ridden to the point of suicide later in the book.

To be able to love you need resilience, courage, strength. The differences in power balance within the love interests of Jane Eyre and Normal people are striking. While Jane cannot allow herself to marry Rochester until she is master - he blinded and at her mercy - Marianne finds freedom in a kind of surrender to Connell. ‘She was in his power, he had chosen to redeem her, she was redeemed… How strange to feel herself so completely under the control of another person, but also how ordinary.’

Again, the two books are almost too easy to compare. Let’s look at how the characters view their relationships. First, Jane talking to Rochester:

You are no ruin, sir--no lightning-struck tree: you are green and vigorous. Plants will grow about your roots, whether you ask them or not, because they take delight in your bountiful shadow; and as they grow they will lean towards you, and wind round you, because your strength offers them so safe a prop.

And now Connell thinking about Marianne:

All these years they’ve been like two little plants sharing the same plot of soil, growing around one another, contorting to make room, taking certain unlikely positions.

In Jane Eyre, love conquers all. In Normal People, all seems to conquer love. What is the difference? While Jane’s barrier is flesh and blood - Bertha Mason, who has stolen her dream by already existing as a wife - Marianne and Connell’s barrier is their own heads. Yes, Connell is poorer than Marianne; yes, Marianne’s family is awful. But everything else is easy for them. Jane had to crawl along the rain-soaked moors to hear Rochester calling her name - that was communication in the nineteenth century. Marianne and Connell can’t seem to hold it together despite living in an era of mobile phones, emails and endless, instant communication.

Love stories often provide insights into the lives and relationships of their original audiences. Madness in Jane Eyre is a raving lunatic in the attic - in Normal People, it’s a multiple-choice form Connell ticks at the therapist’s office asking how suicidal he is. Yes, the Georgians and the Victorians’ view of mental health was cruder than ours, but Rooney’s story about two people trapped by their own anxieties, unable to open up and love each other as they want to, reveals the central difference between these two love stories.

While Jane is one of literature’s greatest defenders of agency - ‘I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will, which I now exert to leave you’ she tells Rochester. Marianne and Connell constantly voice their feeling of powerlessness. During her particularly upsetting interaction with Lukas - an abusive photographer - during her year abroad, Marianne ‘experiences a depression so deep it is tranquillising, she eats whatever he tells her to eat, she experiences no more ownership over her own body than if it were a piece of litter’.

Rooney’s woman is the product of the bad things that have happened to her, and, in the face of it, she is without power or agency. Brontë’s woman, on the contrary, when she thinks the worst has happened - that Rochester is going to marry Miss Ingram - responds like this:

Do you think I am an automaton?--a machine without feelings? and can bear to have my morsel of bread snatched from my lips, and my drop of living water dashed from my cup? Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong!--I have as much soul as you,--and full as much heart! And if God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you.

I loved Normal People. I still love it. But the more I re-read and re-watch it (the BBC’s sweaty adaptation with Paul Mescal and Daisy Edgar Jones set sofas alight throughout the pandemic), the more today’s obsession with mental health and anxiety overpowers what could be a classic and well-written love story. Today, surveys of young people constantly return results that are grim - they’re allegedly not having sex, not taking risks and not really interested in love. What does seem apparent is that the very nature of love - to return to Rochester’s description, one that is terrifying, deep and rocky - seems an impossible challenge to a generation who have been told to understand adversity as something insurmountable for their mental health.

Love is, after all, at least half to do with someone who isn’t you. It takes two to tango and all that. Contemporary romance is full of damaged women and anxiety-ridden men. We live in the era of ‘it’s not you, it’s me’, ‘I need to work on myself’ and ‘I need some time to be me’. I wonder what the Brontës, conjuring up powerful men and even more powerful women with their pens on the Yorkshire Moors, would have made of such weakness.

Ella Whelan is a journalist and author of What Women Want: Fun, Freedom and an End to Feminism. Ella is also the author of The Case for Women’s Freedom, a Letter on Liberty published by the Academy of Ideas.