The day has finally come: Emerald Fennell’s third feature film, “Wuthering Heights”, is out in the UK, and it’s already dividing opinion. After the contrasting reviews from the Independent, which gave it a one-star rating and the Telegraph, which gave it five, many of us are eager to find out whether the gothic tragedy is the best thing we will ever see, the worst, or a secret third thing (an OK-but-kind-of-mid period drama?) We already know that Fennell’s adaptation is not a faithful retelling of Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel, but this hasn’t stopped droves of young people buying the book ahead of its release, to be better equipped to engage with the film. According to Penguin, UK sales of Wuthering Heights have risen by 469 per cent in the last year. When you look at TikTok, however, it’s clear that actually finishing the book may be easier said than done.

“Is this book actually that hard to read, or am I just dumb?” asks one TikTokker, Laura (@elitereading), who is far from the only person to admit they’re having a tough time. Bellz (@heyitsbelz) remarks that her reading experience has “literally turned into homework”, citing in particular the Yorkshire dialect which Brontë evokes for the character of Joseph. Her copy is filled with annotations, and she writes a synopsis of each chapter in a separate notebook. If people are going to attempt the book, Bellz warns, “they’ve got a big storm coming”.

Predictably, certain critics have used these videos to lambast young people for their inability to read. For Liam Kelly at the Telegraph, they are evidence of the disastrous effect which TikTok has had on our attention spans. Unlike the good old days, he argues, when “literature students could move from discussing Pride and Prejudice one week to Crime and Punishment the next,” we’re now at a point when young people can’t get through a novel that uses “fairly accessible” language. But is it fair or accurate to say that we are living in a “post-literate” society, purely because of social media?

In its 2024 survey of Adult Skills, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development found that millions of British adults “struggle with basic literacy”, with one in five Britons aged 16 to 65 only being able to read below the level expected of a ten-year-old. In that same year, the Atlantic spoke to 33 professors at elite US universities, who noticed that students were arriving on campus with a “narrower vocabulary and less understanding of language than they used to”. This year, the Atlantic also spoke to film professors, who reported that their students are now struggling to sit through films. The problem? Our attention spans are being stolen by short-form media, infinite scrolling, incessant text messages, emails, notifications, and whatever else. As we get more and more addicted to our phones, movies and TV shows are dumbing themselves down – overstating scenes and speaking out obvious plot points because they know that, as we are watching, we are likely to be distracted by a second screen. If we can barely watch TV without being on our phones, what hope do we have in getting through a book, especially one written in the 1840s?

This is the consensus when we talk about the state of literacy today: our waning attention spans can be blamed entirely on our phones. It’s not just Netflix shows which are adapting to this new era, spoon-feeding an audience presumed to be incapable of maintaining focus. Even books – particularly popular romantasy BookTok books – are being accused of being “TikTok-ified” (meaning unchallenging). As Arianna Marmol writes for the Drew Acron, they have become “conduits for instant gratification and spoon-fed metaphors where subtlety goes to die.”

However, there is a larger reason why people opt out of reading more challenging novels, watching more difficult films, or doing anything else they perceive as requiring deep, effortful concentration: modern life leaves so many of us exhausted and unable to find the time for personal pleasures and pursuits. After a hard day of selling our time and bodies, people want to relax and not use their brains. Social media and other forms of easily digestible content facilitate that sense of comfort and recovery, demanding nothing from us other than our time. Obviously, we need to fight the fact that social media wants to turn us into passive, inactive zombies, but to do that, we need to recognise why we are so susceptible in the first place.

People should be reading more and grappling with the friction of denser texts, but, like most things in life, literature is not one-size-fits-all

It’s clear that social media isn’t helping our attention spans, but it’s not the only reason young people might struggle with Wuthering Heights. As Claire O’Callaghan told the Telegraph, Wuthering Heights is a “difficult text”. Along with its often archaic language, it features a “convoluted structure, multiple narrators and overlapping names. You have several generations and movement across time – you go backwards and forwards. It’s a book that, in my experience, often takes quite a few reads to really get a sense of all those things clearly.”

Wuthering Heights is not the easiest text in the world to read, and that is OK to admit. Is it really that offensive or such a moral failing? In the UK, we are made to read these classic texts, described to us as masterpieces, at a young age. But lots of people, whether in this country or around the world, may not be familiar with them, or struggle to engage with them for all sorts of socio-economic and political reasons. This doesn’t inherently make them dumb or stupid, but it does make you a snob for thinking so. It’s a good thing for people to read more and grapple with the friction of denser texts, but, like most things in life, literature is not one-size-fits-all. 

I think it’s beautiful that people are creating TikTok guides on how to tackle each section of the novel for those who don’t understand it immediately. As a friend told me recently, “Reading something requires you to sit with a certain degree of friction. Focusing, slowly getting into the flow of the text and either stopping to look up the period, location, specific language or glossing over it – it’s all a part of reading.” Instead of sneering at people for admitting that they find something difficult, we should recognise that we’re all just trying to use our brains, even as capitalism is trying its best to turn them to mush.