Since I’m presenting my list of the “100 Most Lovable Novels in the English Language,” alphabetically by author’s last name, and since Charlotte Bronte had Tuesday’s #12 book, it’s probably no surprise that today’s honoree should be Emily Bronte’s Gothic romance Wuthering Heights, coming in at book #13 on my list. Though unlike Jane Eyre, Emily’s novel met with a fair amount of confusion and distaste upon its initial publication in 1847, it has since accumulated its own fair share of ardent admirers, and is currently perhaps even mor acclaimed than its sister novel (see what I did there?).
BBC Culture ranked Wuthering Heights as #7 in its list of the “100 Greatest British Novels.” Similarly the Guardianranked it #17 on its 2003 list of the “100 Greatest Novels of All Time.” It appeared on Penguin Classics list of the 100 favorite novels as voted on by their readers, and on the Observer’s list of greatest English novels. And it was chosen by the Norwegian book clubs, in association with the Norwegian Nobel committee, as one of the greatest novels in world literature. If al that isn’t enough to get you to read this novel if you haven’t already done so, maybe the rest of this post will help.
What’s always hooked readers and kept them coming back to this dark story is the unrestrained passion and wild undercurrents of brutality in the fierce love between Heathcliff and Catherine, the protagonists of the novel—a fierceness that reflects the harsh natural world of the rugged west Yorkshire moors on which the story takes place. Cathy’s rejection of her soul-mate Heathcliff and marriage to her neighbor, the aristocratic Edgar Linton of Thrushcross Grange, is the event that sets in motion the tragedy of the novel, which catalogues Heathcliff’s long and inexorable revenge on Linton and all his family—including Linton’s sister, whom he marries and emotionally abuses, and his daughter, even though she is also his beloved Catherine’s.
The novel also informatively reflects social tensions in Europe at the time of its composition, tensions that were to erupt the year after its publication in France, Italy, Austria, the German states, Denmark, the Netherlands, Poland, and elsewhere. Heathcliff, the foundling orphan adopted by the Earnshaw family of Wuthering Heights, is bullied by the wealthy family’s heir, Hindley, and thwarted in his ambitions toward the Earnshaw daughter Catherine by the patrician Linton, but ultimately triumphs and essentially overthrows his oppressors—though the regime he establishes following his insurgency becomes a reign of terror.
But more significantly for modern readers, it seems to me—the aspect of the novel that marks it as a cut above other novels in its Gothic genre—is what Bronte does with the narration. There are two first-person narrators of the story, each of whom has his or her own attitude toward the events and characters, and neither of whom the reader can trust as an objective and wholly reliable narrator.
We first see things from the perspective of Mr. Lockwood, who has just rented Thrushcross Grange, as he visits his landlord Heathcliff at Wuthering Heights, where he finds the landlord, his servant, and the strange young man Hareton and young woman Cathy Linton, and finds them all to be rude and surly. Forced by a snowstorm to stay in Heathcliff’s house overnight, Lockwood finds the diary of the room’s one-time occupant, Catherine Earnshaw, and has a nightmare in which the ghost of Catherine scratches at his window. Making his way back to Thrushcross Grange through the snow, Lockwood falls ill, and during his recovery is told the story of the Earnshaws and the Lintons by his housekeeper Ellen Dean.
Ellen, or “Nelly,” has been a servant in the Earnshaw family for thirty years, and her narration, which makes up most of the novel, begins with Heathcliff’s adoption into the family. She speaks of Heathcliff and Catherine’s close ties, of how Hindley reduced Heathcliff’s role to that of a servant upon inheriting Wuthering Heights, and of how Catherine decided to marry Edgar, confiding to Nelly her love of Heathcliff but her reluctance to marry him because of his low social status. Nelly goes on to tell how Heathcliff fled the country, returning three years later as a wealthy man, and how he married Linton’s sister Isabella as a form of revenge on both Linton and Catherine herself. Ellen goes on to tell of Catherine’s death and Heathcliff’s despair, and of the sorrows of the next generation of the family, largely cause by Heathcliff’s poisoned psyche.
When Nelly’s tale concludes, having brought Lockwood, and the reader, up to the present day, Lockwood goes on to tell how he moved away from the moors, but returned to wuthering Heights eight months later to find a number of things altered. I won’t go into detail so as not to include too many spoilers here. But in the end, it’s fair to say that Nelly is hardly an objective observer of events, and presents a more sympathetic attitude toward Heathcliff and Catherine than other characters might have. Lockwood himself is a bit of a snob, and so may not be so trustworthy himself. Ultimately readers are left to puzzle things out for themselves.
But challenging the reader in that way makes Wuthering Heights a boo one must keep thinking about. No less a critic than Virginia Woolf wrote this about Wuthering Heights in 1916:
“Wuthering Heights is a more difficult book to understand than Jane Eyre, because Emily was a greater poet than Charlotte. When Charlotte wrote she said with eloquence and splendour and passion ‘I love’, ‘I hate’, ‘I suffer’. Her experience, though more intense, is on a level with our own. But there is no ‘I’ in Wuthering Heights. There are no governesses. There are no employers. There is love, but it is not the love of men and women. Emily was inspired by some more general conception. The impulse which urged her to create was not her own suffering or her own injuries. She looked out upon a world cleft into gigantic disorder and felt within her the power to unite it in a book.”
Read Wuthering Heights, or go back and read it again, and see if you can feel what Woolf was feeling. I guarantee you’ll feel something strange, even chilling, but a terrible kind of beauty as well.