Wuthering Heights

By Emily Bronte

Introduction and Notes by John S. Whitley, University of Sussex.

Wuthering Heights is a wild, passionate story of the intense and almost demonic love between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, a foundling adopted by Catherine's father. After Mr Earnshaw's death, Heathcliff is bullied and humiliated by Catherine's brother Hindley and wrongly believing that his love for Catherine is not reciprocated, leaves Wuthering Heights, only to return years later as a wealthy and polished man. He proceeds to exact a terrible revenge for his former miseries.

The action of the story is chaotic and unremittingly violent, but the accomplished handling of a complex structure, the evocative descriptions of the lonely moorland setting and the poetic grandeur of vision combine to make this unique novel a masterpiece of English literature.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wordsworth Editions
• Release date: Oct 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9781848703841

Emily Bronte

Emily Brontë (1818-1848) was an English novelist and poet known famously for her only novel, Wuthering Heights. The work was originally published in a three-volume set alongside the work of her sister Anne. Due to the politics of the time, she and her sister were given the names Ellis and Acton Bell as pseudonyms. It wasn’t until 1850 that their real names were printed on their respective works. The initial reception of Wuthering Heights by the public was not favorable. Many readers were confused by the novel structure—they had not previously encountered a frame narrative (story-within-a-story) as unique as that of Wuthering Heights. Emily Brontë died from tuberculosis at age thirty, only a year after the publication of her landmark book. Alas, she didn’t live long enough to revel in its legacy; the book later became an iconic work of English literature.

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general introduction

Wordsworth Classics are inexpensive editions designed to appeal to the general reader and students. We commissioned teachers and specialists to write wide ranging, jargon-free introductions and to provide notes that would assist the understanding of our readers rather than interpret the stories for them. In the same spirit, because the pleasures of reading are inseparable from the surprises, secrets and revelations that all narratives contain, we strongly advise you to enjoy this book before turning to the Introduction.

General Adviser

Keith Carabine

Rutherford College

University of Kent at Canterbury

introduction

But, Mr Lockwood, I forget these tales cannot divert you. I’m annoyed how I should dream of chattering on at such a rate: and your gruel cold, and you nodding for bed! I could have told Heathcliff’s history, all that you need hear, in half a dozen words.

(p. 43)

Emily Jane Brontë (1818–48) was the daughter of the curate of Haworth in West Yorkshire. She was the sister of Charlotte Brontë (1816–55), who wrote Jane Eyre (1847), Shirley (1849) Villette (1853) and The Professor (1857), and of Anne Brontë (1820–49), who wrote Agnes Grey (1847) and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), which contains a fictional account of the alcoholism of their brother Branwell (1817–48). The family has come, as far afield as Hollywood, to seem romantically doom-laden because it was ravaged by consumption. Emily, drawing, like her siblings, on the Gondal and Angria sagas they had begun as children, published Wuthering Heights, to less than rapturous acclaim, in 1847, and also wrote poetry which can be most conveniently found in the recent Penguin edition, edited by Janet Gezari. Emily, with Charlotte, had a brief and unhappy spell of education at the Cowan Bridge Clergy Daughters’ School and, later, attended a more congenial institution, Roe Head. She was a governess at a school near Halifax and, in 1842, accompanied Charlotte to Brussels, but returned to Yorkshire later that year. It is generally agreed that Emily was, of all the Brontës, the most rooted in Haworth and the West Yorkshire moors and the most knowledgeable about its flora and fauna, its character and moods. She died of consumption in 1848.

In his book The Great Tradition (1948), F. R. Leavis begins by stating that ‘the great English novelists are Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad . . . ’¹ and relegates ‘the Brontës’ to a half-page ‘note’ at the end of the first, introductory, chapter. In this he acknowledges that Emily Brontë was a genius and that Wuthering Heights, an ‘astonishing work’, should be seen, in the history of the novel in English, as a ‘ kind of sport’:²

. . . she broke completely, and in the most challenging way, both with the Scott tradition that imposed on the novelist a romantic resolution of his themes, and with the tradition coming down from the eighteenth century that demanded a plane-mirror reflection of the surface of ‘real’ life.³

Leavis seems to be using ‘sport’ in its biological/botanical sense of a mutation or some sort of deviation from the parent stock. Certainly, to a time of literary criticism so interested in pigeon-holing works into genres as this present era, this definition has considerable value. It may also be largely true, as Leavis suggests, that the author of Wuthering Heights, unlike the novelists on whom he concentrates, has had relatively little direct influence on the major traditions of the English novel (though, if he includes The House with the Green Shutters⁴ in the sparse line of descent, he could, without undue facetiousness, add Cold Comfort Farm).⁵

However, if ‘sport’ has the intimation of something unique, then that needs to be corrected, for the novel does not deviate from past traditions nearly as much as Leavis’s brief comments suggest. Rather it seems to be a joining of the two traditions he mentions, along with a strong infusion of the Gothic novel for good measure. Contemporary reviews point this way quite clearly. The Palladium reviewer, in 1850, felt that the characterisation of Heathcliff was ruined because too much detail corrupted the type: ‘The authoress . . . has allowed us a familiarity with her fiend which has ended in unequivocal contempt.’⁶ The Britannia reviewer, in 1848, was more specific in his/her comparison:

It bears a resemblance to some of those irregular German tales in which the writers, giving the reins to their fancy, represent personages as swayed and impelled to evil by supernatural influences. But they give spiritual identity to evil impulses, while Mr Bell more naturally shows them as the natural offspring of the unregulated heart.⁷

The North American Review (October 1848) again noted this kind of combination: ‘He appears to think that spiritual wickedness is a combination of animal ferocities . . . ’⁸ What the reviewers were noticing, then, was that mixture of Romance and Realism which places the most extreme motivations and actions in what seems at first sight like the usual milieu of Romance. The wild moors of West Yorkshire are allied to Scott’s Highlands, Cooper’s forests, Melville’s sea, even Mrs Radcliffe’s European wildernesses, in their remoteness from what Henry James called ‘our apprehension and our measure of what happens to us as social creatures’⁹ and their consequent appropriateness for Hawthorne’s notion of a ‘theatre, a little removed from the highway of ordinary travel, where the creatures of his brain may play their phantasmagorical antics.’¹⁰ More than forty years ago, Richard Chase pointed out that, although Emily Brontë’s novel may have seemed unusual amidst the writings of Jane Austen, Dickens, Thackeray, Disraeli and even Mrs Gaskell, who did, after all, write about the North as well as the South, it might seem a good deal less out of place among comparable nineteenth-century American writers such as Cooper, Bird, Poe, Hawthorne and Melville. Like them, she writes with ‘an imagination that is essentially melodramatic, that operates among radical contradictions and renders reality indirectly or poetically.’¹¹ Like Cooper, she is inspired ‘by the sheer romantic exhilaration of escape from culture itself, into a world where nature is dire, terrible and beautiful, where human values are personal, alien and renunciatory, and where contradictions are to be resolved only by death . . . ’¹² This is not to say that Wuthering Heights is not concerned with social issues, such as the brutality of patriarchal power, the subordination of women, the injustices of inheritance law or the fearsome influence of nonconformist religion, but to insist that these are not developed within a social texture. Instead, Wuthering Heights is concerned with oppositions and extremities, the house of the title and Thrushcross Grange, light and dark, human and animal, love and hate, life and death, and also with the often very fine line between these states. It is concerned, like the American novel, with liminality; the crossing of borders and thresholds, the breaking down of barriers between the normal and the abnormal. Scott, of course, is also concerned with this aspect: the borders between England and Scotland, between the lowlands and the highlands, between social confinements and the freedoms of nature, but he does have recourse to what James called a ‘receptive intelligence’,¹³ however limited, like Waverley in his first novel (1814), or Francis Osbaldistone in Rob Roy (1817 ). Scott writes historical fiction in which a central character’s adventures reflect a major historical crisis and lead to some sort of conciliation of these opposing forces. Wuthering Heights, despite the meticulously worked-out chronology, long ago discovered by C. P. Sanger,¹⁴ is not an historical novel. There is no relation of the action of the novel to large-scale social or political events and its convoluted narrative structure allows of no central intelligence.

Yet Emily Brontë’s story is not, like many Gothic romances, taking place in a remote, otherworldly milieu; it is not a narrative, like Poe’s, which is located ‘Out of space – out of time’.¹⁵ Wild passions create their tempests in a world where work is being carried out and everyday tasks have considerable importance. Joseph, given the reality of a thicker dialect speech than the English novel had been used to creating, inhabits an earthy world:

‘Bud, nah, shoo’s taan my garden frough me, un’ by th’ heart! Maister, Aw cannot stand it! Yah muh bend tuh th’ yoak, an ye will – Aw’noan used to ’t and an ow’d man doesn’t sooin get used tuh new barthens – Aw’d rayther arn my bite, an’ my sup, wi’ a hammer in th’ road! . . . He’s forgotten all E done for him, un made on him, un’ goan un’ riven up a whole row ut t’ grandest currant trees, i’ t’ garden!’ (p. 231)

Note here not merely the specificity of the ‘currant’ bushes and the force of ‘riven’, but the ease with which anger and loss are channelled through the natural imagery of ‘yoak’ and ‘barthens’ (a secure and comfortable place for cattle to sleep). Isabella’s letter to Nelly, narrating her awful situation at Wuthering Heights, is given weight and comic balance by the same sort of dialect specificity when she tries to make porridge:

‘Hareton, thah willut sup thy porridge tuh neeght; they’ll be nowt bud lumps as big as maw nave. Thear, agean! Aw’d fling in bowl un all, if aw wer yah! Thear, pale t’ guilp off, un’ then yah’ll hae done wi’t. ’ (p. 103)

Of course, Scott is well-known for introducing low-class characters whose down-to earth, sarcastic speech offers a different perspective on the sweepingly Romantic utterances of the major, political characters, a trick he got, I think, from the Shakespeare of Henry IV, Part 1; but their speech marks them as types and is, therefore, rarely descriptive of a particular way of life in its essential ‘thingness’.

This balance of Romanticism and Realism, coming just at the outset of what William Dean Howells was to call the ‘new school’ which ‘derives from Hawthorne and George Eliot’ and which ‘studies human nature much more in its wonted aspects and finds its ethical and dramatic examples in the operation of lighter but not really less vital motives’,¹⁶ is also seen in Moby-Dick. In his mid-century masterpiece, Melville created a white whale which could possibly embody the ambiguities of the universe, pursued by a melting-pot of an inter-national crew aboard a whaling ship named after an extinct Native American tribe, the Pequod, and captained by a one-legged villain-hero, Ahab, who is, like Heathcliff, strongly associated with the term, ‘monomania’. The metaphysical vastness of the book, compounded by many references to arcane religions, the Bible, classical mythology and Shakespearian tragedy, is, however, embedded in a remarkable base of detailed realism, derived from Melville’s own experience of working on a whaler. In the many cetological chapters, the size, shape, history, by-products and texture of the whale are related in great detail; thus locating the book in the development of the first really indigenous American industry, seen as both a signal of American greatness and a reminder that all such greatness (and its dreams and nightmares) is based in competition and rapine. All this detail reminds us, too, that Ahab’s quest, heroic though it might be, is based on his failures as a captain. He fails to observe the codes of the sea and, at one point, destroys the quadrant, an instrument vital to the steering of the ship. Thus Herman Melville, like Emily Brontë, refuses to accept Romantic gestures at their own valuation, but tries to show their frequently powerful effects on people going about their business; business which can be seriously affected by such monomaniac impulses.

The principal element of this balance lies in the narration of Nelly Dean. Gossip, confidante, sentimental Puritan, local historian, servant and, above all, storyteller, it is Nelly who tells Lockwood and the reader most of what they can know or surmise, but she does it very much from her point of view. Nelly is what the French critic, Gérard Genette, in his typology of narrators, would call a ‘hypodiegetic-homodiegetic’ narrator;¹⁷ that is, she participates as a character in the story she tells, but is the second narrator, her tale being enveloped by Lockwood’s. It is, then, a tale-within-a-tale, told to please a recuperating gentleman with plenty of time on his hands. It is a tale told to create herself as central figure: the moral, rational hub of the tale, holding everything together. She casts herself as the purveyor of wise saws (‘Proud people breed sad sorrows for themselves’/‘A good heart will help you to a bonny face’); as the bastion of working-class rectitude (‘A person who has not done one half his day’s work by ten o’clock runs a chance of leaving the other half undone’); as a ‘steady, reasonable kind of body’, the ‘one sensible soul’ in the Grange; a relentless housekeeper (‘if I had been in the young lady’s place, I would, at least, have swept the hearth and wiped the tables with a duster’); a physically tough person in a novel containing a good deal of sickness; and one who knows her place (‘an elderly woman, and a servant merely’). Her earthiness keeps the Romantic experience in perspective for the reader and ensures that we believe this extraordinary story is taking place in an ordinary world.

Yet Nelly could also be called, to use Wayne Booth’s somewhat limited term, an ‘unreliable narrator’.¹⁸ How ‘unreliable’ Nelly is, in comparison to, say, Chaucer’s Pardoner, the governess in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898) or Jim Burden in Willa Cather’s My Antonia (1918) is not easy to answer, but she is certainly superstitious, with a capacity to demonise Heathcliff and the torments he creates which equals the Pequod’s view of Ahab. She has the bookish pomposity of the self-educated: ‘for I could only spare two or three hours, from my numerous diurnal occupations’. Whatever the difficulties of particular situations, she is not always as loyal or honest as she pretends:

The poor thing was finally got off with several delusive assurances that his absence should be short; that Mr Edgar and Cathy would visit him, and other promises, equally ill-founded, which I invented and reiterated at intervals throughout the way. (p. 149 )

She has a very Victorian, Sunday-schoolish attitude to death: ‘My mind was never in a holier frame than while I gazed on that untroubled image of Divine rest.’ Nelly Dean is a manipulative creature who will go to considerable lengths to maintain the status quo of male authority.

Finally, her immersion in the reality of day-to-day living, coupled with her sense of the supernatural as being about fairies and goblins, seriously limits her ability to apprehend the nature of the Cathy/Heathcliff relationship and its roots in the natural world. The complexity of the reader’s response can be gauged from a famous moment in Chapter 9, when Cathy tries to explain to Nelly the nature of her relationship with Heathcliff, beginning with the idea of an existence outside and greater than oneself and then modulating into a tremendous aspiration for unity with one’s partner and surroundings:

If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger . . . Nelly, I am Heathcliff. He’s always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being . . . ’ (p. 59)

Various elements of the Romantic might be discerned here, particularly the notion of an organic connection between humankind and nature, the rejection of society in favour of individual striving, freedom from social and familial oppression, and the search for forms of primal unity. Critics have pointed to the links between Romanticism here and the desire for a return to the pre-linguistic union of mother and child, as well as invoking Bakhtin and Lacan to suggest that Heathcliff and Cathy’s dialogues with each other and Nature are attempts at self-definition. Nelly’s response is typical:

‘If I can make any sense of your nonsense, Miss . . . it only goes to convince me that you are ignorant of the duties you undertake in marrying; or else that you are a wicked, unprincipled girl. But trouble me with no more secrets: I’ll not promise to keep them.’

(p. 59)

The reader’s reaction might be (a) that Nelly’s is an earth-bound mentality that cannot imagine what David Cecil called ‘demon-haunted imaginings’¹⁹ or (b) that Cathy is a tiresome, selfish, immature girl who needs more discipline. One supposes that (a) would be liable to score higher marks in a GCSE examination than (b), but the reader’s response is likely to incorporate elements of both views. This chapter, as usual, ends with Nelly’s awareness of the passage of time and Lockwood’s eager anticipation of ‘the sequel’. The reader is again reminded that the novel has two narrators, and much has always been made of this. Lockwood has less narrative time than Nelly and seems more passive; more a receiver of information, a surrogate reader, perhaps. Lockwood’s personality is important to an understanding of his narration. He hears the tale while recuperating from illness and sees it as a kind of popular novel, or perhaps a long-winded version of one of the old demon-lover ballads: ‘I remember her hero had run off, and never been heard of for three years; and the heroine was married’ (p. 65). He begins the novel as a social creature whose avoidance of society is plainly a theatrical gesture: ‘A perfect misanthropist’s Heaven’ (p. 1)/‘It is astonishing how sociable I feel myself compared with him’ (p. 5)/‘A sensible man ought to find sufficient company in himself’ (p. 19). His reason for leaving the stir of society is equally revealing. He had caught the eye of a ‘most fascinating creature . . . a real goddess’ who turns him ‘over head and ears’ (p. 3) but who, on clearly returning his interest, frightens him off. He soon, however, laments his ‘susceptible heart’ (p. 7) on meeting Catherine, for he knows ‘through experience, that I was tolerably attractive’ (p. 8).

In one of his very short ‘Lucy’ poems, Wordsworth offers a seeming conundrum. Lucy, he says, was: ‘A Maid whom there were none to praise/And very few to love’. In what ways could someone who loved Lucy not praise her? The answer must lie in the connotations of ‘praise’. This word belongs to the society from which Lockwood has temporarily fled: the world of ‘fascinating creatures’ and notions of ‘love’ which are nothing more than the language of literary sentiment. That is the ‘love’ Lockwood knows about: passion is totally beyond him and clearly frightens him. Another link to the American romancers presents itself here in that the American author often creates a bachelor as a central figure/recording intelligence, in order to show the innocent, coddled, American vision faced with an inescapable awareness of life’s complexities, as in Melville’s Bartleby (1853),²⁰ Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance (1852) and James’s The American (1877). His name, like Heathcliff’s, might seem to link him to the world of the natural, but ‘Heathcliff’ suggests both horizontal and vertical associations, and the freedom to move between the two. ‘Lockwood’, by contrast, suggests a very narrow affiliation and a very restricted one, confined within definite limits.²¹

Yet, despite his limitations, two further points need to be made about Heathcliff’s tenant He it is who sees the ghost of Cathy and so makes clear to the reader the force of the supernatural in this novel. It would be all too easy for Emily Brontë to make Cathy appear to Heathcliff. He, after all, not only believes in ghosts, he desperately wants this one to appear. Lockwood has had one dream and believes this is another, but the shock of the ice-cold hand carries the reader into a remarkably effective moment:

As it spoke, I discerned, obscurely, a child’s face looking through the window. Terror made me cruel, and, finding it useless to attempt shaking the creature off, I pulled its wrist on to the broken pane, and rubbed it to and fro till the blood ran down and soaked the bedclothes: still it wailed, ‘Let me in!’ and maintained its tenacious gripe, almost maddening me with fear. (p. 17)

The fact that he could be so cruel to a child powerfully presents the excess of his fear and the vivid detail (surely it is rare in the annals of the ghost story in English for an apparition to bleed?) anchors the unreality in reality and reminds the reader, as does Macbeth, that ‘supernatural’ need not mean ‘unnatural’, but rather nature rendered to a higher and more mysterious degree. To make as unimpressive a figure as Lockwood so impressed is a truly brilliant stroke.

Yet option (b) should not be overlooked, for Emily Brontë is no mean sociologist and psychologist. Catherine and Heathcliff show a refreshing love of liberty and nature, but that love translates itself into a passionate refusal to grow up. They lack, from the age of about eight, the steadying influence of a mother, and hence grow up without moral restraints and in an atmosphere of patriarchal brutality. Heathcliff is, in part, a victim of a cruel upbringing They have not been socialised and continue, into adulthood, to assume a direct correlation between their desires and the fulfilment of those desires without the usual filters of convention and compromise. To refer to the theories of Jacques Lacan, the two of them have failed to move from the Imaginary Order to the Symbolic Order;²² have failed to separate themselves from a notion of unity between self and ‘other’ into a world where they have accepted differences, such as male/female, father/son. Catherine asks Nelly if Heathcliff knows anything of love and Nelly warns her that, with her marriage to Edgar, Heathcliff will lose

‘friends, and love, and all! Have you considered how you’ll bear the separation, and how he’ll bear to be quite deserted in the world? Because, Miss Catherine – ’

‘He quite deserted! we separated!’ she exclaimed, with an accent of indignation. ‘Who is to separate us, pray? They’ll meet the fate of Milo!’ (p. 58)

In terms of trans-actional analysis, they have remained too much ‘in child’, with both the positive aspects of that (spontaneity, love of nature) and the negative (narcissism, wilfulness).²³ Wordsworth viewed the development of a person’s life as a movement from a pre-natal knowledge of eternity, through socialisation, ‘the light of common day’, to an adulthood of compensations arising from the ‘shadowy recollections’ of eternal truths which come from a contemplation of nature.²⁴ When that myth travels to America and is taken up by Edgar Allan Poe, those compensations are no longer available. Poe, who took a child bride, presumably in quest for his lost innocence, could only think of a return to a oneness with the universe in terms of eliding the barriers between life and death, particularly through a vampiric union with a dead beloved. In ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ (1839) and ‘Ligeia’ (1838), this process of merging is as full of horror as of satisfaction. Heathcliff, in his refusal to accept final separation from Catherine, opts for a Poe-like solution:

‘I’ll tell you what I did yesterday! I got a sexton, who was digging Linton’s grave, to remove the earth off her coffin-lid, and I opened it. I thought, once, I would have stayed there, when I saw her face again – it is hers yet – he had hard work to stir me; but he said it would change, if the air blew on it, and so I struck one side of the coffin loose, and covered it up: not Linton’s side, damn him! I wish he’d been soldered in lead – and I bribed the sexton to pull it away, when I’m laid there, and slide mine out too. I’ll have it made so, and then, by the time Linton gets to us, he’ll not know which is which!’ (p. 209)

At the end of the novel, Lockwood’s pious view of death is as a sentimental closure –

I lingered round them, under that benign sky, watched the moths fluttering among the heath and hare-bells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.

(p. 245)

is more than counter-balanced by the ghosts the little boy sees: it is a deliberately daytime scene for a timid narrator who is afraid of the dark. The reader’s wish for closure is not easily met. Indeed, contemporary critical approaches to this novel have insisted on its competing narrative voices, its various ‘framing’ devices, its almost melodramatic use of opposites, as constructing a play of meanings which always seems to promise a central revelation but never quite manages to do so. Like ‘The Doubloon’ and ‘The Try-Works’ chapters of Moby-Dick, structuralist and post-structuralist readings of Wuthering Heights attest to the peculiar modernity of the Romance at mid-nineteenth century.

Also, Lockwood acts both as an introduction to Nelly’s tale, and as a validation of it. Nelly knows more than Lockwood and is, hence, more persuasive. The reader, moving through his narrative to hers, is moving closer to the essential truth(s) of the novel. The movement could be diagrammed thus:

The reader (R) thus moves through Lockwood’s narration (L) and then through Nelly’s (N), sorting out what seems to be genuine information from the vagaries of each story, until he/she arrives at the core of the novel (C). Which is what? A passionate unity which transcends death? A vindication of love/passion as being greater than social conventions? A ghost story? A complex view of Nature versus Civilisation?

Two aspects of the book must be born in mind here, neither accorded anything like their full force until relatively recently. First, the novel is about history (it is, in some ways, as much a historical novel as Waverley or Cooper’s The Pioneers [1823]) and British society. The historical chronology of the novel is extremely detailed and accurate but it tells the reader more about the world of the Early Victorians than the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Early Victorian England was a place and time of great change and the novel reflects that, principally in the character of Heathcliff.

It is important that Heathcliff’s origins are very obscure. He is found, by Mr Earnshaw, in Liverpool, the main port of entry into England from many parts of the world. Lockwood’s first description of him is as ‘a dark-skinned gypsy in aspect’, thus linking him to a nomadic people whose origins remain shrouded in mystery and who are linked in legend, as is Heathcliff by name, to notions of the heathen. He is not unlike the Demon Lover of British ballads which would have been known to the Brontës, and, as many critics have pointed out, he has definite affinities with the Gothic villain-hero, such as Montoni in Mrs Radcliffe’s Tbe Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) or Ambrosio in Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796). Like such figures (again, surely very familiar to the Brontës), he is possessed of a determination, love of power, great desire for individual freedom and undoubted sexual potency which lead to tremendous capacities misdirected and thwarted.

He represents an outside energy, an ‘other’, as Dorothy Van Ghent has put it,²⁵ possibly related to the lower classes or the Industrial Revolution. He has the same complexion as Blake’s ‘dark, satanic mills’. Certainly, when he arrives at Wuthering Heights, his appearance, coupled with Earnshaw’s description of the circumstances in which he found this ‘cuckoo in the nest’, argue for Heathcliff as a representative of the dispossessed. He is ‘dirty’, ‘ragged’, ‘starving’ and ‘houseless’: some kin to Blake’s Chimney Sweeper, or Jo the crossing sweeper in Dickens’s Bleak House (1852). He is ill-treated by the patriarchal, land-owning class and refused education. Therefore, the opposition of his energy to the listless Earnshaws and Lintons results in disharmony. Heathcliff has considerable sexual presence: he repeatedly crosses thresholds by brute force and with phallic implements. This is contrasted both with Lockwood’s possible reference to masturbation, his failure with the poker and, even in his dream, his significant lack of a ‘weapon’. More importantly, it is contrasted with Edgar’s general limpness, for Nelly calls him a ‘soft thing’ and he is ever ready to cry if crossed. Heathcliff changes directly from oppressed to oppressor and his ‘fleecing’ of these two families can be taken as a savage parody of that fierce capitalist activity which was, even now, driving the Industrial Revolution and creating the British Empire. It is difficult to make much of a social novel out of Wuthering Heights, given the very sparseness of its social texture and the melodramatic confrontation between the titular house and Thrushcross Grange (for a ‘grange’ often signifies a lonely place). However, the initial description of Thrushcross Grange and its inhabitants suggests a place of conspicuous consumption; an acknowledgment that, by the middle of the nineteenth century, ‘progress’, if it meant many things, was, as in America, the more recognised as it was material and visible. We must also remember that the creator of the term ‘conspicuous consumption’, Thorsten Veblen,²⁶ was in no doubt that one of its main visible manifestations occurred in a palpable lack of energy in its recipients.

The family, which, in Victorian times, according to H. L. Beales. would be considered, ideally, ‘as a complete social commonwealth in miniature’,²⁷ gets a poor press in this novel. Even the centre of civilised consumption, Thrushcross Grange, harbours its own kind of chaos:

‘Isabella – I believe she is eleven, a year younger than Cathy – lay screaming at the farther end of the room, shrieking as if witches were running red-hot needles into her. Edgar stood on the hearth weeping silently, and in the middle of the table sat a little dog, shaking its paw and yelping; which, from their mutual accusations, we understood they had nearly pulled in two between them.

(p. 33)

The novel spends a good deal of time demystifying the position of the family and showing that, just as savagery can lurk beneath the gentility of Thrushcross Grange, so the family cannot, in the privacy of its home, maintain the unity and cohesion thought to be essential to its place at the centre of early Victorian society. The importance of education and nonconformist religion, especially Methodism, while not denied, is also viciously lampooned in the character of Joseph (a facet of the novel adopted and adapted triumphantly by Stella Gibbons in Cold Comfort Farm). But perhaps the most constant target of the parodic tendency of this novel is male authority. The historian J. F. C Harrison says of the husband in the middle-class family at this time: ‘There could be little doubt about his authority over all other members – wife, children, servants – for his effective economic control was backed up by legal sanctions.’²⁸ The demonism of Heathcliff is, in part, an extended and excessive version of the power over others, particularly women, shown by Earnshaw, Hindley, Edgar and, embryonically, Linton. One might even, not too fancifully, extend this observation to Lockwood’s treatment of the ghost of Cathy. After all, Lockwood has no idea how to deal with women even when they are alive. Some aspects of Catherine’s wilful behaviour may be put down to her inability to achieve anything significant in this society and, despite the relative inactivity of their lives, few women writers of the nineteenth century had as much to say about the disadvantaged nature of female lives in their society as the Brontë sisters. The women of this novel seem to be stronger than the men and more securely a part of the lived-in world of the West Yorkshire moors. At the beginning of the novel, Lockwood is rescued from the dogs of Wuthering Heights by a ‘ lusty dame’ who is ‘an inhabitant of the kitchen’.

Wuthering Heights could easily be seen as a novel of two halves. A very recent book, Edward Chitham’s, The Birth of ‘Wuthering Heights’: Emily Brontë at Work, offers some support for this reading. Chitham argues that Emily Brontë might well have altered her initial conception of the novel in order to provide another volume to give two volumes alongside the one volume of Agnes Grey, in the strong likelihood that, when Wuthering Heights, Agnes Grey and The Master (the original version of Charlotte’s The Professor) were returned by the publisher, The Master was not thought acceptable and Wuthering Henghts was considered in need of substantial revision. Chitham argues that, in addition, Anne and Charlotte were unhappy about the excesses of the first part of Wuthering Heights and Anne’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall can thus be seen as a deliberately deromanticised version of Emily’s story. Emily, therefore, would have been ready to ‘redress the artistic and moral balance in her novel’.²⁹ Cathy becomes less moody in the first half and Heathcliff increasingly less charismatic and appealing to the reader. Chitham thus refers to the second half as a ‘palinode’,³⁰ a term used to describe a poem written as a recantation of the sentiments expressed in a previous work by the same author, as Chaucer claimed he was condemned by the god of Love to write The Legend of Good Women as a penance for describing the infidelity of Criseyde in Troilus and Criseyde.³¹

This view of the novel as two halves offers no criticism of the work, no implication that it is in any way broken-backed. On the contrary, the two halves speak to one another constantly in terms of comparisons, contrasts and developments. The two form a diptych, a pair of tablets, paintings, photographs, in which the two leaves are in careful thematic connection. This is the method of Melville’s three pairs of short stories (‘The Two Temples’, ‘Poor Man’s Pudding and Rich Man’s Crumbs’, ‘The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids’), all from the mid-1850s, which form an important part of his short fiction.³² The division can be demonstrated with almost mathematical precision. In this edition, Chapter 16 begins with the birth of Cathy and the almost immediate death of her mother, and ends with a breakpoint, linking the place of Catherine’s interment with that of her husband, who dies years later:

Her husband lies in the same spot now; and they have each a simple headstone above, and a plain grey block at their feet, to mark the graves. (p. 123)

Chapter 17 deals with the visit of Isabella to Nelly at Thrushcross Grange, the day after the funeral, and her subsequent flight to the South where, we are told, Linton was born a few months later. In the same chapter, Hindley dies, his funeral takes place and it becomes clear that Heathcliff is now the master of Wuthering Heights, usurping Hareton’s inheritance and reducing the unfortunate boy to living in his own house ‘as a servant’. We are also told, in the course of this chapter, that Isabella died some thirteen years after Catherine. The conclusion of Chapter 17 brings the reader to the halfway point in the total chapter count (34), after presenting him/her with a welter of deaths, departures and massive changes in the small world of the novel. Chapter 18 then emphasises the break still further by a significant chronological leap and a marked underlining of a new growth which signifies some move towards commonalty: ‘The twelve years, continued Mrs Dean, following that dismal period, were the happiest of my life: my greatest troubles in their passage rose from our little lady’s trifling illnesses, which she had to experience in common with all children rich and poor’ (p. 137).

The emphasis on the growing girl in this first paragraph seeks to separate her from her mother and the preceding angst of the story. Like her mother, she is beautiful and high-spirited, but sensitive of heart and lacking in furious anger or fierce love. There is an emphasis on her education, under the tutelage of her father: ‘Fortunately, curiosity and a quick intellect urged her into an apt scholar: she learnt rapidly and eagerly, and did honour to his teaching’ (p. 137). Education, particularly in terms of reading, forms an increasingly important drive in the novel. I have already remarked on the limitations of Nelly as an autodidact, and the first half of the novel also suggests Lockwood’s and Joseph’s limitations as readers. Catherine, in keeping with the subjugation of women underlined in the novel, writes secretly in the empty spaces of the biblical text. This forms a diary which counteracts Joseph’s insistence on the value of the ‘good book’, a nonconformist enshrining of such drivel as The Helmet of Salvation and The Broad Way to Destruction, which Joseph clearly equates with worldly success: ‘His emotion was only revealed by the immense sighs he drew, as he solemnly spread his large bible on the table, and overlaid it with dirty bank-notes from his pocket-book, the produce of the day’s transactions’ (p. 229).

As has been pointed out, Lockwood’s reading of the diary is described as a masturbatory activity, the nearest he can get to penetrating Catherine. Edgar reads a great deal, a background which allows him to act as a dedicated tutor to his daughter, but his reading, in the first half of the book, is primarily a means of escape from the emotional turmoil which surrounds him, and Nelly believes that he often fails to open his books. Catherine is appalled at his selfishness:

‘And Edgar standing solemnly by to see it over; then offering prayers of thanks to God for restoring peace to his house, and going back to his books! What in the name of all that feels, has he to do with books, when I am dying?’ (p. 88 )

By the time we reach Chapter 18, just as the second half gets underway, Nelly gives her opinion that Hareton is capable of much but is being raised in such a way as to prevent his natural abilities from being developed: ‘he was

Reviews for Wuthering Heights

[rosemarie.herbert · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I originally reviewed this book on my blog - The Cosy Dragon. For more recent reviews by me, please hop over there.

This is a classic novel that I have been assigned to study in literature. This is not something I would choose to read by myself by any means. I didn't love the language, I didn't feel for the characters, but I read it anyway! Do I think anything is good about this novel? Well, maybe.

This novel starts out slowly, and painfully, and I had to entice myself to read onwards with not allowing myself to read anything else (or is that punishment?). The drivel that is written, complete with personal endearing terms that I'm sure the author felt added colour, but just irritated me because I had to look to the back of the book to see what they meant.

Eventually the storytelling gets going, and it is focused on the past for a time, with Mr Lockwood being told stories by his housekeeper. This part did keep me reading to an extent, mainly because I was ignoring another task I needed to be doing.

I have to admit I did not finish reading this book. I haven't locked myself in for studying the unit that this book is required for this semester, and so I have abandoned it in favour of other things I need to read first. If I do end up taking the unit, I will finish reading this book, and post another review of my feelings about the whole thing.

I'm sure there are Bronte fans out there that are going to hate me for saying this - but I really didn't feel for Heathcliff. I felt that he brought so many of his troubles upon himself, he didn't deserve any sympathy, not matter how bad things were for him.

I find the cover of this book visually appealing at least. It fits in with the storms that seem to plague the countryside now that Lockwood has moved it (or at least it seems that way!).

I'm not sure why you would want to read this book, except that it is a classic, and therefore is probably worth reading just to say yo have. I know that there is a movie based on it, and on the parts I saw of it, it is relatively violent. I'd recommend this book for adults I guess. But really - there are so many other good things to read out there, you don't need to waste your time on this one!

[amanda4242_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

300-odd pages of unpleasant people being hateful to each other.

[olivia_atlet_writer · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Very few novels have intrigued me as much as "Wuthering Heights" by Emily Brontë has, and I have read many great books in my life. It captures a significant theme of the Victorian Era, one that so many writers chose to overlook: death, destruction, and the melancholy gardens we sow. Among other authors, Emily Brontë transformed the faux pas of a bad ending into an approachable- nay controversial- subject. Her novel helped revolutionize the overall tone of pre-contemporary literature.“Wuthering Heights” was originally published in 1847, and authentically captures daily life in that time-period. There are scenes that many of us recognize as being entirely victorian: maids and manservants, ruffled dresses, and the diction of their everyday conversation; however, drops of reality sneak into this realistic portrayal of life as it was in the 1800s. Prejudice, abuse; premature death, hysteria; unseen killers hidden in the walls and beauty products. Each flaw has a story that has finally revealed by scientists with knowledge of lead and formaldehyde. In just the same way, every character has a purpose... which is why less than twenty people can be seen from the beginning to the end. Intentionality reeves in between the binding of this enthralling novel. "Wuthering Heights" is steeped in melancholy and draped in veils of woe. Readers follow Heathcliff across the moors of the UK. His story is much different than the romantic tale of “Pride and Prejudice”, where two people fall in love and eventually marry. Instead, the story is founded upon turmoil, which leads to inevitable failure, though it brazes the mark so often throughout its pages. It crafts an understanding of the phrase "too little, too late", which becomes the main focus of the entire story. Heathcliff did not stir this on his own, at least not entirely; he is abused and neglected after his adoptive father passes, outcasted and named a "g*psy" and "bastard" due to his uncertain heritage. He resents most of his house mates, excluding the girl who opened- and tore- his heart: Catherine Earnshaw. Readers learn and discover the truth about Heathcliff through memories recalled by Nelly, the house maid, a majority of the time. By the end, one is left wondering whether they pity, love, or hate Heathcliff, leaving many with a sense of familiar dread (this time, in literature rather than reality). The purposeful writing of Brontë is revealed again and again, but never more so than when one analyzes her incredible skill for building characters. This book is disturbing at times, and I admit it; but this aspect adds depth and truth to an otherwise perfect novel. It has become my favourite book, and one I will recommend to others as long as I have strength to speak. The year that I first read it was the year I reread it 15-16 other times. It truly has a certain magnetism that pulled me towards it, and for that reason, I give it a 5 star rating.

[solitaryfossil · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

An excellent novel, and I really enjoyed it! I highly recommend this book.

[antao-3 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

(Original Review, 1981-01-02)The “dog scene” does not exist in the book as some sort of sick foreplay; it’s actually an extremely clever piece of writing. Besides showing Heathcliff total disregard for Isabella, it’s a reality check for those girls with romantic notions about Byronesque “bad boys”. Isabella is so infatuated, that she cannot understand, although he flaunts it on her face ( that’s what makes the scene interesting) that what she takes for intensity and romantic darkness is actually plain cruelty. Isabella is selective in what she chooses to see, she wants to run away with this man everyone calls dangerous and not even the fact he hangs her pet dog stops her on her tracks. As we will see later in the book she does eventually find out he’s actually a plain domestic abuser, but by then she has been totally crushed.It’s not Emily’s fault people see Heathcliff as some sort of romantic hero, just like Isabella readers have been choosing what they want to highlight or disregard.The book has been adapted many times - mostly very badly and there a misunderstanding that this is a romantic novel so people are confused and disappointed in it. It’s also been lampooned many times. Actually it’s an extraordinary brilliant observation of the effect of neglect in early childhood, long before child psychiatry. There is no whitewashing and the damage done as an infant to Heathcliffe is permanent despite the kindness of the Earnshaws. He destroys what he loves and others with him. The character of Nelli Dean is also brilliantly drawn. She understands more than anyone but is forced to observe on the sidelines as a servant as the family and then another family is pulled into the tragedy. I love the story of her refusal to accommodate her precious piano pupils play time and her preference to the dog.The Brontës lived though a traumatic childhood and survived a boarding school which sounded like a pro type for the workhouses. Haworth at the time had greater social deprivation than the east end of London, with all the alcoholism, drugs, disease and violence that went with it and their brother brought home daily. Orphans and abandoned children were bought like slaves from London to work in the mill towns and as vicarage daughters were expected to help out with the night schools their father had organised. They weren’t sheltered - they saw the lot which is why no doubt Emily Brontë drew the character of an abandoned orphan child so well. Emily Brontë refused to admit to her consumption and was kneading bread the morning she died. Like Elizabeth, first she remained standing for as long as possible only finally lying down just before she died.Child neglect, for whatever reason, it was one of the themes in “Wuthering Heights” that stroked a chord with me, and I do not think it’s explored enough. The fact that Heathcliff decided to replicate his own abuse by inflicting it on Hareton, with the expectation that he would turn out as “twisted” as him as form of vengeance is quite interesting. Even more interesting is the fact Emily chose to make that experiment a failed one; even before that advent of child psychology, she clearly understood that the experience of abuse and neglect is unique to the individual, and the way people react to it unpredictable. That’s something that bewildered Heathcliff, and in a way, the realisation that he could not make people as detestable as he was, even though they have also been victimised, contributed to, by the end to make him him even more unstable.

[lukerik-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This novel exists in two texts: that written and published by Emily, and Charlotte's revised edition. I can't remember which version I read first time around, but this time I read the original and I don't see anything in it that needs to be changed. That said, I did find the character of Joseph to be virtually unintelligible. I understand Charlotte partially translates his dialogue so get her version if you must understand everything he says, or get a copy with notes.Happily, someone has invented the internet since I last read this. I remember getting very confused as to who was related to who and how, and really, you need to know to realise the import of what Heathcliff is doing. These days you can find a variety of family trees on tinternet… though none that I found showed Heathcliff as being related by blood to anyone else. But come one, old Mr Earnshaw comes home with Heathcliff and a story about how he found him in the street. Pull the other one mate. Heathcliff and Catherine are obviously half-siblings.Lots going on in the novel. I can see why it's so richly studied. I get the impression it's one of those books that doesn't give up all its interpretations at one. What I found particularly interesting was the idea of the interloper that's played out again and again throughout. Not just Heathcliff, but everyone who comes to the Grange and the Heights, including the narrator; and also the way the servants intrude into the private lives of their employers.

[benuathanasia · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

 Yawn. Truly uninspiring.

[marwanbadri · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A great classic.

[bookomaniac-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Krachtig verhaal, 2de helft iets minderGedragen door passies: liefde en wraakThema’s van de civilisatie versus natuur en instinct, romantiek-elementen (storm, park, moors, spoken en dromen)Donkere stijl door suggestieve bijvoegelijke naamwoorden; alleen op het einde: zon barst door de wolken.)

[lord_boris-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Seldom must a book have differed between its commonly held perception and its actuality, as much as Wuthering Heights. I came to this book from the camp of the former with some reservations about some doomed love affair on the Yorkshire moors. Perhaps the realisation of how far removed any preconceptions were added to the subsequent enjoyment of the story.

Wuthering Heights is a story of revenge fed by obsession crossing over the generations of two families. And it is much more gothic than romantic. The plot rolls along with the drama rising and falling. Ok, few if any of the characters elicit much sympathy but they are complex and so well drawn that it is difficult not to be drawn into their isolated world or to anticipate what happens next.

Ultimately it's all madness. Grave tampering madness.

[baswood · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Wonderfully Overwrought - Confusingly Incestuous

[rontyler-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

An excellent novel, and I really enjoyed it! I highly recommend this book.

[deusxmachina-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Loved it, Heathcliff is a wonderful broken villain. Incredible the atmospheric analogies between the landscape and the characters - everything's dark, hopeless and obsessive. Only the ejaculations of Joseph are a real challenge for a non-native speaker.

[mariannehusbands · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Wuthering Heights has been in my consciousness ever since the 70's when Kate Bush was wailing out her high pitched ethereal lyrics -Out on the wiley, windy moorsWe'd roll and fall in green.You had a temper like my jealousy:Too hot, too greedy.How could you leave me, When I needed to possess you?I hated you. I loved you, too. I watched the TV adaptaion with Tom Hardy some years ago and still have vague recollections of it - mostly of Tom Hardy's brooding gorgeousness. And as I have said before seeing any tv or film adaptation before reading the book for me is a mistake. When I first started reading I found myself trying to link in the story to what I had seen and thought I already knew which detracted somewhat for allowing the story to unfold.What surprised me most on reading was it wasn't all about Cathy and Heathcliff as my memory had held it. So much of this tale is about the children of the initial characters. If there is any place for pathetic fallacy in literature then Wuthering Heights is the perfect venue. Not only does the weather provide the sometimes wild, sometimes brooding, sometimes oppressive atmosphere of the book but for me it is also a metaphor for the characters themselves. Many like myself come to the story thinking it will be a tale of love and passion only to discover that the pervading emotions are childish petulance and hatred and revenge. I have learnt much about life and love in nearly half a century on the planet and one thing I have learnt is that, when it comes to human relationships, hate is not the opposite of love - apathy is. So for me there is still more love in the story than hatred. It just manifests itself in an immature way. When I think of Heathcliff then the word repression comes to mind. I was once told that Wuthering Heights is best read when young and I can see why - there is for me is an immaturity in Cathy Earnshaw's behaviour in particular.The amazing thing for me about Wuthering Height's is held in the author herself - how on earth did a young woman in victorian England come up with all of this? The initial reviews of the book were not favourable and critics thought it morally reprehensible drivel. I need to find out more about Emily Bronte and her life and experiences - ooh a trip to Haworth when I am next back up in the Motherland. I have the 1939 film adaptation waiting with Larry O and Merle Oberon which I will watch with interest - although a more unlikely Heathcliff I cannot imagine. And a final note - having seen Tom Hardy digging up Cathy from her grave to embrace her again like a deranged lunatic ( my favourite scene ) I was eaer for it to come up in the book - it was there at last, so very near the end although the writing of it a very different less urgent account than the one I experienced in viewing.

[etxgardener · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

This is one of those classics that I've never rread, and now I know why. I thought I knew the3 story since I've seen the 1939 movie starring Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon probably 50 times. But, of course, Hollywood left a lot out when they made the film.The movie is a Gothic tale of obsessive love, and maybe the physical beauty of the stars who played Kathy and Heathcliff, covered over what to me, is just a sick story of feminine submission and male abuse. The prose if over wrought and the plot, especially in the last third of the book just defies belief. Forget the novel & watch the movie.

[kristelh_15 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a story of the Earnshaw and the Linton family who are quite isolated in their homes of Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange. The homes represent the opposition that exists throughout the novel. There is a lot of death in the book but there is also the hopeful happy ending. That being said, I did feel the ending was a little bit off for me. The sudden decline and death of Heathcliff didn't make sense as it was presented. I see the need for the author to kill him off, I just didn't feel that the way made any sense. The novel is also told through the voice of a stranger who takes up a temporary residence and observes this dysfunctional family and the servant who has lived since childhood with these children.

[tabatha014 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

This book has so much hype so I expected it to be amazing. Boy was I let down! I didn't really care for this book at all. And people say Heathcliff and Catherine's love was so epic, but he was a horrible person who did nothing but torment others. I don't know, maybe I just didn't get it, but I wasn't impressed in the slightest.

[jaynee_9 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I love classic literature, and finally decided to give this one a try. It was awful - such a terrible book! I couldn't even finish it. About halfway through I declared myself done with it. Clearly not all the Bronte sisters should have been writers.

[tinasbookreviews · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I refuse to review this title, but I can say its one of my favorites and not just because of twisted dark romance, but the sheer elegance of the writing and the topic which was shocking for the time period.

[vlucia_61166 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A most unusual novel. Dark tale of wretched and unlikable characters, of a tormented and bold - yet unable to change his fate subjected to his time (the Victorian England) - tragic soul and his other-worldly passionate and dark love relationship, with vengeful, selfish or pathetic actions, obsessions and great tragedy, which is irritating and painful while reading; but somehow turns into a fluffy(?!), moderately sunny and comforting ending.

Not quite pleasant and easy to read but definitely one of the most thought-provoking after: it is compelled to read it more than once.

No. It's not about love. And it certainly is not a romance! Cathy and Heathcliff's relationship is much more complicated, messy and profound than a simple romantic love.

On another note, has anyone been "vexed" by the narrative of this story as I was? The choice of the narrator has left much to be desired, too ambiguous and unrealiable to my liking, which, in a positive way, gives the readers the freedom to interpret as well, obviously.

[suzanne81 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Wuthering Heights is known as a gothic romance. I do not consider it a romantic story. It is dark, and "disagreeable", and utterly fascinating. It is difficult to feel sympathy for any of the characters, yet the story stays in your mind long after you finish it. What was this character's motivation? Why did that happen? What if.... Could it be.... One is compelled to reflect on human nature and the author's goals in telling the story.

[quaintlittlehead · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

"Wuthering Heights" is a writer's novel. The twists and turns of its frame narrative style, along with the reincarnation of Heathcliff's love and vengeance on so many different (but similarly named) instantiations of their initial targets, leave the reader constantly wondering who is talking, who is being talked about, and why more of the characters don't just speak for themselves. In a masterful way, this confusion calls out the subjugation inherent in Brontë's own society. The author shrieks back at a world that relegated women to subservience, and that on occasion dismissed her own and her sister Anne's writing as likely the product of their sister Charlotte's imagination, by voicing the eternity of her characters' hearts through the words of others. This, metaphorically, is what her writing did for her, and what all great writing does for its author. On first reading, the narrative structure consumed all of my attention, but left me entranced by its power. On second reading, ten years later, I vowed to focus on the characterisation of the novel and discovered some of the most unlikeable and least relatable personalities that literature has ever produced. This is not a book club read for gabbing with your girlfriends, but a manifesto on the power of words to haunt the minds of generations. I linger on Brontë's writing, and wonder how any one could ever imagine quiet slumbers for an author who continues to speak so powerfully today.The Barnes and Noble edition of this book contains a selection of famous quotations, a timeline of Brontë's life, an introduction by Daphne Merkin, a note on the text and dialect, a genealogical chart of the characters, the original biography of Ellis and Acton Bell and the editor's preface to the 1850 edition of the book written by Currer Bell (Charlotte Brontë), footnotes (of dialect and translation) and endnotes, an exploration of works inspired by the novel, a set of critical opinions and questions for the reader, and a suggested bibliography for further reading.

[tanya8dogearedcopy · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

> In Lord John and the Private Matter, Lord John opines that honour sacrificed on the altar of love renders the love dishonourable and the lesser of pure lust. Heathcliff’s love for Catherine is an example of just such dishonourable love and is hardly the stuff of any romantic sensibility nor of the philosophical bent of Nietschze (“Beyond good and evil there is love.”) Heathcliff’s feeling for Catherine is egocentric, destructive and, a fearful thing not unlike the wuthering moors. Like the twisted tangles of brush that somehow manage to survive on the moors, the people that come into contact with Heathcliff are bowed and bent under the sheer force of his will, passion and temper. The idea of such an unrelenting, aggressive and unsparing devotion is both shocking and frightening. Beyond the linear narrative, this novel merits re-examination (re-reading) for its dense language, its allegorical associations and, the ideas about human nature itself.

[aelizabethj · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I still consider this one of my favorite books, possibly of all time, and that just further solidifies with each reread. One of the easier 'classic' novels to read, at least in my opinion. Cathy Heathcliff are my model couple for crazy love, and then Cathy 2.0 Hareton are a prime example of opposites attracting. Ahhhh I seriously just love this dark, twisted little book, plain and simple.

[aharey · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Wuthering Heights tells the tortured story of Catherine Earnshaw, the orphan Heathcliff, and the people who surround them. The story depicts a stark environment that surrounds the two soul mates and the passion that destroys almost everyone.

Wuthering Heights, published in 1847, was the only novel written by Emily Bronte. It is classified as a Victorian Gothic novel, with a strong leaning toward Byronic Romanticism. Indeed, this novel is the epitome of a Gothic Romance- tortured souls, regret, a love that surpasses time. At the time of its publishing, it was met with mixed reviews. However, in the 20th century, it was deemed a superior classic.

Emily Bronte was a masterful writer, who seems almost more in line with modern writers than those of her day. Wuthering Heights is the true model for the tortured love stories that seem to dominate the media these days. Heathcliff and Cathy are the ultimate tortured soul mates- one of the most well-known lines is when Cathy declares she is Heathcliff- meaning that they cannot live without the other.
Heathcliff proves this when his life becomes a shell when she is gone. He allows the worst parts of himself to take over and treats everyone around him worse than he was treated as a child.

I wasn't expecting to like this novel as much as I did. I tried to read it in high school, but couldn't get very far. I'd seen the movie with Laurence Olivier and thought the characters were insipid. A friend of mine and I were talking one day in April about classics and she wanted to read this, so I agreed to try it again. Boy, was I surprised. I literally couldn’t put the novel down. This book proves to me that everything deserves a second chance.

[cnolin-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

No book has made me more grateful to have been born in the latter half of the 20th century. The writing was fine, and the story moved along, but good lord, I wanted to slap every single character upside the head at some point in the novel. Nelly, 3 weeks in bed after a walk that got her shoes and hose wet?? Catherine, who swoons, then rebounds, then swoons again based on a raised eyebrow or not very sharp word?? Don't get me started on Linton.

[miguelnunonave · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Masterpiece of English literature. Gothic, mysterious, enthralling. Unforgettable characters (Heathcliff and Catherine), unforgettable landscapes, violent love. First got it as a gift, in Portuguese, but waited to buy it in English and read the original. I usually avoid translations whenever I can - and, in this case, it would have been a crime to read a translation.

[deepikasd_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Though, in my opinion, not as great as Jane Eyre, I will say this is one book that people should read to explore the darkest of human nature. This tragic gothic romance really is piercing and haunting. Though this is not the love story that will gripe you and make you want more, it does show how dark love and passion can get. The characters do throw "tantrums" and make you want to go up to them and shake them or slap them into realization that they are acting stupid. However, this is their story, and the reader will learn how passions and emotions can control how a person acts.The main character is not the loveable, dark and dreamy kind of hero that girls swoon over. He is very anti-heroic and very cruel. But there is something about him and the abusive relationships that he creates around him that makes you want to keep on reading, not out of pittance or because one might like cruelty or anti-feminism, but because you will have the hope that things will change and turn around for the better.I would recommend this book, however with a warning that the reader will either hate or love it. I would recommend however that the reader look at the book critically instead of for a thrilling read. The story really illustrates and gives examples on how dangerous and pure love can be and especially how different love can be to different people.

[elaineruss · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Having read and loved this book when I was about 14, I decided that 17 years later a reread could be in order.

To be honest I struggled, a lot, at the start. While there is no denying how well written it is, it's all so unrelentingly depressing. However I perservered and came to remember why I loved it so much. All the moodiness, madness and passion is still there and that's why I loved it.

I'm happy to say it remains one of the most atmospheric books I've ever read.

That being said I imagine it will be another 17 years before I even think about venturing back to the Heights!

[feelinglistless · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Piecing my way through the narrative fog of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights with its many layers of narrators, I was reminded of the found footage genre of films, in which the viewer’s entire understanding of the story is whatever is visually made apparent to them through the first person gaze of the whoever’s holding the camera in the fictional world and then the film’s editor, a figure who sits between that world and our reality. Everything we know about the love story is filtered through the recollections of Lockwood and Nelly and others, characters who Bronte employs to imply that Heathcliffe and Cathy and their decedents exist in a subjectively cruel, sadistic place cut off from a more benign reality. All are apparently reliable narrators, but throughout I couldn’t help a nagging suspicion, and that like The Blair Witch Project et al, there are multiple layers of fiction at play.