The crucial point here is that Tyler read the book as a “grown-up”. Most of us read Wuthering Heights in our teens. In other words, when we’re wildly impressionable and at an age when our crush on that kid in the year above feels like the greatest love story ever. Heathcliff’s desire is beyond obsessive, and for self-dramatising, ego-hungry teenage girls, that’s potent stuff. There’s also this to note: despite the operatic intensity of it all, there remains something safe about Heathcliff and his passion, because he’s always filtered through a narrator or two. At one point, we’re reading Isabella’s account as told to Nelly as told to Lockwood. And their love, remember, is never consummated. It’s all very – well, teenage. It makes absolute sense that it should be the favourite novel of Twilight’s Bella and Edward.

Bad romance

Cinematic renderings of the text have much to answer for, too. Heathcliff has been portrayed by Laurence Olivier, Ralph Fiennes and… Cliff Richard. Most of these adaptations only deal with the first half of the novel, dodging the raw bleakness of its later chapters, which can feel claustrophobic in their portrayal of unpleasant characters being utterly vile to one another. Remember when Gordon Brown likened himself to Heathcliff? It was assumed he meant the character’s filmic incarnation, especially when he qualified it by saying “maybe an older Heathcliff and a wiser Heathcliff”. In the novel, we actually get to meet an older Heathcliff, and he’s even more difficult – a tyrannical landlord consumed by his desire for revenge.