"Wuthering Heights" Made Kate Bush a Star at 19—Here's What Inspired the Song

Wuthering Heights has spawned countless adaptations since Emily Brontë published it under the pseudonym Ellis Bell in 1847. The earliest film version was a silent picture released in 1920, and since then, Cathy and Heathcliff's doomed romance has been the basis for countless features.

But Brontë’s moody, sweeping epic has led to the creation of more than just movies—it has also inspired many other forms of art, including an iconic song written by a then-teenage Kate Bush.

Bush’s “Wuthering Heights” is a hard song to forget. Her high-pitched vocals seem dialed in from another planet, and that was intentional, as Bush created the song to conjure up the haunting presence of Catherine Earnshaw, Wuthering Heights’s female protagonist. Unlike the novel, which never allows Cathy to actually tell her own story, Bush inserts herself directly into Cathy’s world.

What Inspired Kate Bush to Write "Wuthering Heights?"

The song was Bush’s first release, and it came out when she was just 19 years old. The seed for the track was planted years before that when Bush happened to see the last few moments of the BBC’s 1967 adaption of Wuthering Heights on television.

“Well, I hadn't read the book, that wasn't what inspired it. It was a television series they had years ago,” she told Michael Aspel in a 1978 BBC interview. “I just managed to catch the very last few minutes where there was a hand coming through the window and blood everywhere and glass,” she added. “And I just didn't know what was going on and someone explained the story.”

That image of the hand “was just hanging around for years,” Bush continued, “so I read the book in order to get the research right.” One day, she sat down at her piano to write “Wuthering Heights,” and what emerged was the mysterious, keening song that wound up making her an unconventional star. 

Interestingly, it’s possible that an image of a disembodied hand tapping on a window also could have helped inspire Emily Brontë herself. Brontë was definitely influenced by the landscape she grew up wandering through, but some historians believe that she may specifically have been inspired by High Sunderland Hall, a looming manor located near a school she briefly taught at.

The manor had its fair share of ghost stories associated with it, including one about a former master of the house cutting off his wife’s hand—only for the hand to appear for generations after, at least according to some spooked guests.

Bush was also inspired by her admiration for Brontë. “When I first read Wuthering Heights I thought the story was so strong,” she told the Record Mirror in 1978, according to the Kate Bush Encyclopedia. “This young girl in an era when the female role was so inferior and she was coming out with this passionate, heavy stuff. Great subject matter for a song. I loved writing it.”

She also added that her connection to Cathy helped inspire the track. “It’s so important to put yourself in the role of the person in a song. There’s no half measures. When I sing that song, I am Cathy. Gosh I sound so intense,” she continued in the same interview. “'Wuthering Heights' is so important to me. It had to be the single. To me it was the only one. I had to fight off a few other people’s opinions but in the end they agreed with me. I was amazed at the response.“

She also reflected on her complicated feelings about Cathy in an interview with Reaching Out in 1980. “I am sure one of the reasons it stuck so heavily in my mind was because of the spirit of Cathy, and as a child I was called Cathy. It later changed to Kate,” she said. “It was just a matter of exaggerating all my bad areas, because she's a really vile person, she's just so headstrong and passionate and...crazy, you know? And it was fun to do, and it took a night and a half?”

Apparently, actually writing the song was a smooth process. “I wrote in my flat, sitting at the upright piano one night in March at about midnight. There was a full moon, and the curtains were open, and every time I looked up for ideas, I looked at the moon,” she said in a letter to her fan club, according to the Kate Bush Encyclopedia. “Actually, it came quite easily. I couldn't seem to get out of the chorus—it had a really circular feel to it, which is why it repeats.”

Just like the novel Wuthering Heights is inextricably linked to the windswept moors that inspired Emily Brontë, the song is inextricably linked to its music videos. Bush filmed the UK music video in a studio, and the particularly popular U.S. version was filmed in Salisbury Plain, Wiltshire, England, and features Bush dancing, wide-eyed, in a red dress against a misty, forested background. It’s strange and unsettling, just like Wuthering Heights.

Together, the song and the video became an unexpected hit, even inspiring a yearly event called The Most Wuthering Heights Day Ever, where people all around the world dress as Kate Bush in the “Wuthering Heights” video and come to celebrate the song and video.

But it turns out that music executives attempted to persuade Bush to release a different song, “James and the Cold Gun,” as her first single. Bush held her own, and the song eventually made her the first female singer in Britain to have a number one hit she wrote herself.

In 2026, Wuthering Heights became the subject of yet another adaptation with the release of Emerald Fennell’s film starring Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie. The movie has received a variety of criticism, ranging from questions about Heathcliff’s race to skepticism about some of the very ahistorical fashion choices it features.

While some fans were hoping Bush’s track would be featured in the film, perhaps triggering another Kate Bush resurgence just like her song “Running Up That Hill,” instead it uses a soundtrack by Charli XCX. Still, Bush’s “Wuthering Heights” remains an iconic contribution to the list of great songs inspired by literature.