It was a novel the French had forgotten, a tale of wild passions on the Yorkshire moors by an author whose style had limited appeal for modern urban youngsters. But after intense debate on teenage chat forums, Wuthering Heights is now attracting adolescent readers in their droves.

The interest in Emily Brontë’s 19th-century novel is a by-product of the teenage passion for another work: Twilight, the vampire novels by the American author Stephenie Meyer. These have sold 42 million copies worldwide, including 2.5 million in France.

References to Wuthering Heights abound in Eclipse, the third of the four-book series, and Belle Swan, the heroine, emerges as a Brontë fan. The upshot in France is that the 13 to 16-year-old girls who form Meyer’s core readership have been keen to find out more about Brontë and her work.

Sales of Les Hauts de Hurlevent increased by 50 per cent last year but have risen even faster since the release in January of the film Twilight, which is based on the first of the Meyer series and stars Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson. “We have sold as many copies of Wuthering Heights in the first two months of 2009 as we usually sell in a whole year,” said a spokeswoman for Le Livre de Poche, the publisher of the French translation.

“We are on course to sell several tens of thousands of copies this year, which is exceptional. The enthusiasm has prompted a lot of bookshops to put Brontë on display next to Stephenie Meyer, and that has obviously encouraged people to buy both of them.”

There has been no such trend in Britain, according to Penguin. “Perhaps Wuthering Heights is so much part of British culture that it’s not a discovery for Stephenie Meyer’s readers,” said Le Livre de Poche spokeswoman. “Here, it is.”

Stéphane Hun, who owns Pages d’Encre, a bookshop in Amiens, northern France, said that Brontë’s newfound popularity was wholly unexpected. “Wuthering Heights is studied in a few schools but, apart from that, I don’t think young people ever bought it to read at all. If teenagers are going from Stephenie Meyer to Emily Brontë, then that’s fantastic. It’s a bookshop’s job to take readers towards other books.”

Judging by French teenage chat forums, Brontë has made a profound impact on her new readers, who almost all appear to be adolescent girls. “The atmosphere is so dense that you are left breathless. It’s strange,” one said.

“Emily Brontë’s writing is astonishing,” said another. “Heathcliff and Catherine are figures of a really surprising blackness.”

“I dream of going to the place where the novel is set, in Le Yorkshire beaten by the wind,” said a third.

Not all appreciated the writer, however. “I have to admit that I couldn’t get into the novel,” said a detractor. “Someone gave me the DVD, but I can’t be bothered to watch it.”

In the US there has also been debate over parallels between the two works, which both centre on tragic romance: between Cathy and Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, and between Belle and her vampire lover, Edward, in Twilight.

Hachette, Meyer’s publisher, even suggested that Twilight was the greatest novel in its genre since Wuthering Heights, a notion that enhanced Meyer’s status among her adolescent readers but won little support from critics.

Shelfmates

Other literary pairings akin to Stephenie Meyer and Emily Brontë:

— Paradise Lost by John Milton next to His Dark Materials, by Philip Pullman: Pullman’s trilogy is in part a retelling of Milton’s epic poem

— Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë next to Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys: Rhys’s novel acts as a prequel to Brontë's 1847 novel

— Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy next to Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being: Tereza arrives at Tomas’s apartment with Tolstoy’s novel under her arm