There is an article on the Telegraph by Liam Kelly dated 12 February 2026 which I had to read. Its title was “Why Gen Z are too stupid to read Wuthering Heights”. My interest was simple: I have a few relatives who are Gen Z, and I always thought they are quite bright.

Liam Kelly is a senior culture writer and covers the full sweep of arts and entertainment, from literary prizes to Eurovision. He reported live from Oasis’s reunion gigs and played The Traitors on location in Scotland with Claudia Winkleman. Liam has been shortlisted for a number of awards. He has even won a few.

“The hotly anticipated film adaptation of Wuthering Heights, starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, has led to a surge in sales of Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel. Bookshops shifted more than five times as many copies last month (10,670) as in January last year (1,875), according to publisher Penguin.

Many of the books have been bought by young people eager to understand the story of Cathy and Heathcliff before Emerald Fennell’s big-screen version hits cinemas on Friday. But if stories circulating online are to be believed, many of these newly bought novels are being left largely unread.

Social media is awash with Gen Z readers who claim to love literature but lament that they find Wuthering Heights – a book regularly taught at GCSE and A-level – too difficult.

“Guys, this is testing me for real. I feel so stupid,” says Grace Deutsch, whose profile goes by the name Grace’s Mini Library, in a typical TikTok post about Wuthering Heights. “And I have a theory that anyone who says that they absolutely loved this book only says that to sound smart. I’m so serious, because, like, what do you mean?!”

Another TikTok user, who goes by the alias Wagesylie, has put together a popular five-part plan to help readers tackle Brontë “if you’re overwhelmed and don’t know what’s going on”. It includes alternating between chapters and study guides – a “gut check” to see if you are “understanding the plot” – and listening to the audiobook while reading a hard copy.

These struggles are not confined to social media. A colleague reports that at a press screening for the film earlier this week, two women discussed their thoughts on the book. One, who was reading it for the first time, said her “brain rot” – a Gen Z term for chronic short attention span – had left her unable to grasp much of the plot or language.

What is going on? There appears to be a growing consensus that the prevalence of smartphones has systematically eroded attention spans, particularly among the generation that has grown up knowing nothing else.

Is it really so surprising that, as we enter what critics have described as a “post-literate” age, young people who have spent much of their lives scrolling through mindless videos might find a masterpiece of Victorian literature a struggle? After all, university professors in the UK and the US have reported that literature undergraduates are increasingly unable to get through a whole novel. That it may not be surprising, of course, does not make it any less depressing.

Gone are the days when literature students could move from discussing Pride and Prejudice one week to Crime and Punishment the next. A viral piece in American online magazine The Atlantic in October 2024 featured professors who said students were struggling to read full novels, or even poetry. One reported that only extracts from Homer’s Odyssey are now set, supplemented with “music, articles and Ted Talks”, because even elite students are unable to grasp the full text or its themes.

We all know that people read less than they used to. A survey conducted for World Book Day last year found that 40 per cent of Britons had not read a single book in the past 12 months, a worrying trend that is even more pronounced among children. According to the National Literacy Trust, only a third of those aged eight to 18 now read books in their free time. It is not hard to conclude that comprehension skills are being diminished as a result.

The commentator James Marriott has described the collapse of reading as “one of the most profound social and cultural developments of modern times”, given that the spread of mass literacy was one of the foundations on which stable, prosperous democracies were built. If people do not – or cannot – read, but instead take their cultural sustenance from short videos or podcasts, there is a risk that society could drift back towards oral storytelling, which largely faded centuries ago. Surely nobody wants to return to the Dark Ages?

That so many people appear to be struggling with Wuthering Heights is no surprise to experts. Claire O’Callaghan, a senior lecturer in English at Loughborough University who has written extensively on the Brontës, tells me the novel is a “difficult text” with a “convoluted structure, multiple narrators and overlapping names. You have several generations and movement across time – you go backwards and forwards”.

O’Callaghan, whose biography of Emily Bronte has been expanded and updated ahead of its republication in June, adds: “It’s a book that, in my experience, often takes quite a few reads to really get a sense of all those things clearly.”

The corner of TikTok that has helped encourage young people to read – inevitably called “BookTok” – has largely been a boon for publishers of schlocky, unchallenging “romantasy” titles and thrillers rather than classics. Perhaps the marketing of the new film has led would-be readers to assume the source text was a romcom, rather than an at-times-harrowing account of unrequited love and generational trauma. That may be what a Valentine’s Day weekend release does to potential cinemagoers.

The marketing machine behind the film has been in overdrive. Press tours have featured Robbie – practising “method dressing”in elaborate corseted gowns – and Elordi walking the red carpet together, embracing embracing and swooning. Official merchandise tie-ins range from snacks to lingerie, bedclothes and massage oil. All are a far cry from the desolation of the Yorkshire moors.

There is some self-awareness among those who now find themselves unable to get through Wuthering Heights about what has hindered their comprehension skills. “It has not taken me long to realise that there is some brain rot happening,” Mary Skinner, another bookish TikTokker, says in a recent video. “It’s actually been a wake-up call for me. I don’t think I’ve read anything other than books that were extremely easily digestible in… it’s got to be over six months. I’m finding this much more challenging than I would have a couple of years ago.”

 Declining literacy skills have also fuelled an explosion in AI reading apps, including Clippit, Reedy and Amazon Kindle’s “Ask” feature, which promise to simplify language (often by modernising it), signpost plots and explain characters’ intentions before they are fully fleshed out by the author. Don’t have time to pore over hundreds of pages before bed? Simply scan the text and get the gist of the story, without exercising your brain or stretching your intellectual capacities. How very dystopian.

But how hard is it to get through Wuthering Heights, really? My recent re-read was largely trouble-free – and not because I am some sort of singular genius. There was the odd word to look up, such as when Heathcliff is described as “an arid wilderness of furze and whinstone”, or when the narrator says, “I had no desire to aggravate his impatience previous to inspecting the penetralium” – but Brontë’s language is, for the most part, fairly accessible (though the same cannot be said for her eccentric use of commas). This is hardly late Joyce.

While the new film has been criticised in some quarters for straying too far from the source text, it includes plenty of verbatim quotations (think “Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same” and “I have not broken your heart – you have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine”). “There’s just no better dialogue than Brontë’s,” Fennell said at a British Film Institute talk last week. “She’s got these extraordinary, extraordinary words.”

One reason readers may find Wuthering Heights challenging comes down to expectations. Is the novel a love story? A tale of revenge? Some combination of the two? Or something else entirely? “We tend not to make people comfortable with ambiguity, and that requires deeper reading, more critical reading, and reflection on the multiple perspectives within a novel,” says O’Callaghan.

That is all well and good – laudable, even. But if we really are entering a post-literate age, are people who struggle with a book such as Wuthering Heights capable of deeper, more critical reading? Or are we drifting towards a bleak future in which novels must guide readers by the hand?