Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë ~ 1847. This edition: Oxford University Press, 1981. Edited and with Introduction by Ian Jack. Paperback. ISBN: 0-19-281543-1. 370 pages.
My rating: Hmmm…tough call. I appreciate that it’s a highly regarded “classic”, and Emily Bronte has my admiration for keeping me engaged all the way through, though I despised the vast majority of her characters on a personal level. Did I enjoy my read? Sort of. Okay, yes, I did. But more in a “I can’t believe this is happening!” way than in a “Oh, I’m putting this on the favourites shelf!” sort of way. So let’s try this: 6.5/10. Restrained recommendation, one might say.
What did I just read? This was the strangest book. I wonder if I can condense it into 100 words? I doubt it, but will try. Here goes.
- Sullen foundling Heathcliff forms inseparable friendship with daughter-of-wealthy-house Cathy. Cathy’s father dies. Heathcliff is downgraded in status from foster-brother to mere farm worker. A rich neighbour courts Cathy. She accepts. Heathcliff runs away. He comes back, educated and financially solvent, but still sullen. More marriages take place, babies are born. People die, including Cathy. Heathcliff through shady dealing ends up lord of the local manor. He forces a marriage between his barely teenage son and Cathy’s daughter. Son dies. Heathcliff, haunted by memory of Cathy-the-first, starves himself to death. Cathy-the-second finds true love, thus negating Heathcliff’s revenge scenario. The End.
The key characters peopling this unlikely saga are totally without inhibition. They don’t bite back their words, they act on every dark impulse, they treat each other with casual cruelty. Most of the novel concerns the cut-and-thrust of “Oh, yeah, well I’ll make YOU sorry” parrying. They brawl continuously, both verbally and physically. Heathcliff in particular specializes in random acts of impulsive brutality. He smacks his wife around, until she escapes to a faraway refuge, and then the ultimate shelter of death. (He hangs her pet dog!!!) He beats up his lost-love-Cathy’s daughter and locks her up so she can’t attend her own father’s deathbed. He refuses to have a doctor to treat his own dying son.
Having never actually read Wuthering Heights before, and having my knowledge of it only through the references of others and the various filmed adaptations which I was mildly aware of but which I’d never personally viewed, I had always pictured Heathcliff as some sort of romantic hero. And yes, for a brief few chapters I was in sympathy with his young self, for he was treated very badly by his adoptive guardian’s successors, and “kindred soul” Cathy was blithely heartless in her blindness to Heathcliff’s deep devotion and how he would be affected when she decides to marry the money next door. Heathcliff’s subsequently warped nature is quite understandable, and his increasingly awful behaviour certainly keeps the reader riveted to the tale, wondering what nasty thing the anti-hero will pull off next.
Disappointingly, the women in Wuthering Heights never really reached full life for me. Even Cathy-the-first, instigator of the reason for the story, seemed puppet-like in her role. In my opinion, upon this first reading, the novel is basically a moving portrait of Heathcliff, over-the-top scenery-buster that he is. All the other stuff sounded like rackety background noise.
This isn’t at all a proper review, is it?
I’m not sure what one could say that hasn’t already been said elsewehere by literary scholars, and by the thousands of students worrying their way through this dense melodrama in their AP English classes, poor souls.
So, Heathcliff or Rochester? Well, Rochester is a bit arrogant, but he doesn’t hang pet dogs, or disinter his dead love’s coffin so he can lie down with her corpse. (That was just icky.) Heathcliff, off to the storm-tossed moor with you. Rochester, I suppose I will accept your redemption, and forgive your previously libertine ways.
Last word, and it has to do with the inevitable comparison of these two sisters’ novels. Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre I know I will reread with pleasure. Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, not so much, though I’m happy to have ticked it off my “you really should read” list.
Dear fellow readers, your own thought are most welcome. (And if you’ve read both Brontës, are you for Rochester or for Heathcliff?) 🙂
Leaves & Pages 
I thought this was a wonderful review! One that made me want to pick it up and actually read it.
It wasn’t what I had expected! (Nor was Jane Eyre.) Good argument for actually reading these sorts of things for ourselves versus thinking we know what they’re all about through cultural references. 🙂
I had a classic life path: loved Wuthering Heights over Jane as a young girl, but now I’m old I much prefer Jane Eyre. But nowadays don’t have much time for either romantic hero.
I loved them both. Yes, the dark Heathcliff, the duplicitous Mr. Rochester. What amazes me is the scope of those Bronte women, their wild imaginations. Even Anne with her battered wives and bitter alcoholic husbands. To think of them in that forlorn village parsonage, with their siblings dying around them, and in those dreadful schools, as students, then teachers, and somehow managing to write these books we are still reading, still discussing. Astonishing.
Astonishing, indeed. What genuinely tragic circumstances these books came out of. One wonders if that is what fed the genius, and if the Brontes had lived more mainstream lives (and in an age with better medical standards) they would ever have put pen to paper. So many times it seems that adversity triggers masterworks. Yes? Sometimes?
I despised both Rochester and Heathcliff of them equally. I like Jane Eyre for giving such a relatable heroine, and I love the darkness in Wuthering Heights, but both supposedly romantic characters just give me the creeps. If I feel a deficiency of romantic guys, I lean towards Austen. How did you like Mansfield Park?
I love Mansfield Park. Total Jane Austen fan here. 🙂 Hey, I just checked out your blog. Looking very good! It looks shiny new – is this your first go at blogging? Be careful, it’s addictive… 😉
Yep, new blogger. I really do love it, I feel its going to be kind of a stress reliever from the pains of high school. 😉
Wonderful. I hope it gives you much pleasure. 🙂
Have never liked this book, despise the characters and though it’s well-written, it’s very much a So What.
Yes, the characters are none of them particularly admirable. Interesting how pop culture has turned the Cathy and Heathcliff saga into a stereotypical “love story”. No, no, no…
Your review sums up how I feel about Wuthering Heights. I read this years ago for high school, and I admit I did not love it or the characters. But I kept on reading, and I recognise that it is a well written book. Personally I think Heathcliff is a psychopath, and have never gotten why he is considered a romantic hero. Rochester I sort of get. He is charming, which makes it easy to sometimes overlook his faults.
Very well written. Even allowing for the overblown language of that era. I am really confused as to why Heathcliff is considered a romantic hero. Romantic in the picturesque sense, yes indeed, but romantic in a swoon-worthy manner, not really. Unless one is a masochist… 😉
I had tried WH several times and hated it, but last year I reread it and I loved it, I think partly because I knew it was going to be bizarre. Heathcliff is decidedly NOT a romantic hero — he is a psychopath! Popular culture has really gotten the book wrong there. But the interesting thing about the book is how, as you say, Bronte causes us to relate to him anyway. I’m not a big fan of the manipulative, controlling Rochester either, but I love Jane, and she gets the upper hand in the end.
Yes, Jane is a loveable heroine, if a titch misguided here and there. And Heathcliff, for as much as I despised him, was great fun to read about. The Cathys – well – couldn’t whip up much enthusiasm for either. Nelly Dean I sort of sympathized with – she is witness of the whole saga and hence one of the more important characters, in my opinion, if only because we must rely on her version of events, unreliable as it might be. Everyone else remained a bit nebulous – Heathcliff alone stood out. Deliberate on the part of the author? I suspect so.
Team Rochester! But I need to reread this one. 🙂
Awesome. Me too. Though Rochester isn’t really my ideal romantic hero, he runs rings around Heathcliff. I must also confess that after plunking WH down after my reading and thinking to myself, “Well, I’m never reading this one again…” I’m already admitting to myself that it is indeed re-read worthy. Some future day…
I almost warned you off in the Jane Eyre comments, but decided to let you go for it with an open mind.
Jasper Fforde does a good take on Cathy & Heathcliff in The Well of Lost Plots (Rage Management, anyone?)
Thank you. (I think! 😉 ) I do admit that coming to it cold was an interesting experience. I kept thinking, “Where’s the kissy-lovey part where they wander hand in hand on the stormy moor?!” Rage Management – most apt – there’s a thought!
Hahahahaha, is there ever a competition between Rochester and Heathcliff? I thought when people had that argument, they make you choose between Rochester and Darcy. Because Heathcliff’s the damn worst.
I read Wuthering Heights as an adult too, having never read it in school or as a young and foolish teenage lass, and I had basically every part of the reaction that you had. I’d probably rate Wuthering Heights a little lower out of ten, because I loathed everyone in it and couldn’t wait to be finished.
Rochester and Darcy? Is that even a competition? (Ducking quickly.) Team Darcy! Yeah! (Think about it. The mad wife in the attic, the discarded mistresses and the scorn he speaks of them with, the weird flirting thing with the snooty neighbour girl…Rochester come with some baggage, people! Though he was rather sweet about the little illegitimate daughter; big redeeming point.)
I also greatly dislike Wuthering Heights & Heathcliff in particular. I much, much prefer Jane and Rochester! (have you read Alice Hoffman’s “Here on Earth”, her retelling of WH in which the Heathcliff character is indeed a psychopath?)
I’ve never read “Here on Earth”, but you interest me. I shall look into that.
Yes, I found Here on Earth an absorbing read, even knowing it was WH.
I’m French, so thank God this was not part of mandatory reads in high school.
I loved your review and I totally agree with you. It’s well-written but for the rest…
I’ve read it once in French, didn’t like it , I thought I was too young. I tried again in English as an adult, I thought my English wasn’t good enough.
I read it again and it’s official, I really can’t see the draw. Heathcliff and Cathy are both insane. Feelings are exagerated to a point that it’s not plausible at all.
So I’m “team Rochester” too if I have to choose between the two. But my favorite one is Gilbert Markham from The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. He’s sensible.
Not plausible at all!!! I am happy to have read the book at last after thinking I knew what it was about all these years. It was quite a shock. Well written, yes, but rather over-the-top, and I could not find any affection for either Cathy or Heathcliff – they were very much the instruments of their own ill fortune, don’t you think? Bad decisions! But it certainly was a melodramatic story. 🙂
Yes, their behavior fueled their misery and created some out of nowhere. You can’t help thinking it’s a toxic relationship and that they both need therapy.
I’m a very down-to-earth person and that kind of drama doesn’t appeal to me at all.