Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

Set on the bleak moors of Yorkshire, Lockwood is forced to seek shelter at Wuthering Heights, the home of his new landlord, Heathcliff. The intense and wildly passionate Heathcliff tells the story of his life, his all-consuming love for Catherine Earnshaw and the doomed outcome of that relationship, leading to his revenge. Poetic, complex and grand in its scope, Emily Brontë’s masterpiece is considered one of the most unique gothic novels of its time.

I have to agree with the general literary assessment that this book is a masterpiece. Published when Brontë was just 29, her striking perceptiveness and willingness to explore the most extreme qualities of her characters made the book highly unusual for its time, leading to it becoming one of the best-known books ever published.

The story is told to Mr Lockwood by a servant, Ellen Dean. Ellen represents an omnipresent and relatively dispassionate narrator, reporting other characters’ testimony when events occurred in her absence. I thought this was an effective way of recounting the story and it brings the reader into the story more than if it were told in the third person.

Wuthering Heights is ultimately a ghost story but the book did not contain as much supernatural content as I had anticipated. I had thought Catherine as a ghost would be a constant feature of the story but she only really appears at the beginning and towards the end. However, the ghostly theme runs deep; the characters are haunted by the lasting effects of their choices, dwelling on them and punishing themselves and those around them. The setting is also unquestionably gothic: dark moors, deaths and bleak winters set the scene for the dramatic and tragic plot.

In my view, part of the shock factor of Wuthering Heights is in the fullness in which each character is portrayed. Brontë did not hesitate to emphasise some of their very worst features. She is perceptive, portraying each one from another character’s perspective but also betraying the true ‘self’ of each character, complete with flaws and sometimes fatally poor judgment.

I have to say it is remarkable that Brontë was in fact so perceptive and empathetic to such a range of characters. Although she had experienced personal tragedy as a child with the death of her mother and two of her older sisters, she was reportedly very shy and reclusive, wrapped up in her own imagination and hardly ever travelled away from her home as she became too homesick. With that background, I am struck by how far the content of her book exceeded her life experience. How can she even have been aware of the concept of Heathcliff’s extreme hatred and spite, and his obsessive and self-destructive love for Catherine? Would she ever have come across someone as self-centred and petulant as Linton? Very evidently, she had a rare ability to truly understand people and then to use that understanding to depict her characters so shrewdly. It is a loss to the literary world that she had such a limited time to deploy her extraordinary imagination, as she died the year after Wuthering Heights was published.

One contemporary critic described Wuthering Heights as having “a sort of rugged power”. I would agree with that summary. It’s dramatic, anguished and filled with tragedy, some unavoidable and some self-inflicted. It’s such a departure from the usual content of literature at that time that it is no wonder Wuthering Heights is hailed as one of the greatest books ever written.