Oh, dear, I’m behind on bookish posts. I’ve been musing about the mortality of classicists and wishing poets and novelists would write satire.
But you might want to know if I’ve read anything. This week it’s been Emily Bronte’s hair-raising Gothic, Wuthering Heights.
Wuthering Heights was my favorite Bronte novel until I switched in early middle age to Charlotte’s fierce spinster novel, Villette. But I still love Wuthering Heights:. It transports me to the moors, which I’ll never probably see, and to a kind of love I haven’t, thank God, experienced in decades. In 2014 I said of this gorgeous, intriguing novel about doomed love: “It is a short, perfect novel, with lyrical yet muscular prose, brilliantly narrated by two unreliable narrators: Lockwood, who rents Thrushcross Grange, spends a harrowing night at Wuthering Heights with his moody landlord, Heathcliff, after he is caught in a blizzard; and Nelly Dean, Lockwood’s housekeeper, tells him the story of Heathcliff.”
Bronte also describes the ramifications of the intense love between Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw, with whom he was brought up at Wuthering Heights. The consequences of their separation after Catherine’s marriage to mild Edgar Linton are tempestuous. And Heathcliff’s rage affects the next generation, too.
The royal what? I’m refusing to acknowledge such an obscene waste of money…
I always loved Wuthering Heights – so dark! But a long time since I read it, so ripe for a re-read one day I think!
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LOL! I missed the last wedding, but when I caught a few glimpses of it on TV I was enthralled.
WH IS very dark.
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“It is of all novels I ever read the one I should least like to be a character in myself.”
Lewis Carroll’s opinion of Wuthering Heights. Mind you, I’d be interested in a sequel featuring the Rev. C.L. Dodgson’s visit to Bronteland.
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You should write it!
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It’s been years since I read any Bronte. I’ve always loved Wuthering Heights. The Folio edition is beautiful, but I’ve always had a fondness for the set of Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre illustrated by Fritz Eichenberg. Those were the editions I read first, when I was a young teen.
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Oh, Fritz Eichenberg’s illustrations are the best!
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