It is the characters. Tell me of another Heathcliff or another Catherine: characters not trying to be balanced or likeable, or to make any sense.
Plus the unreliable narrators is what makes it even more charming, legend-like, like listening to a story about unlikely heroes who actually lived.
It reminds me of listening to ghost (strigoi) stories as a young teen, on small benches around a tire on fire at midnight, on a side street in my grandparents’ Romanian village.
I totally agree with all of this. Wuthering Heights is one of my favorite novels of all time (yes, well above Jane Eyre) - and it is BECAUSE of Lockwood's narrative voice (and Nelly Dean's), not in spite of them. The underlying story is one of almost superhuman, supernatural (the ghost at the start, the graves at the end) passion, of a brutal world where people are driven by animalistic impulses - and that sense of the passion, the obsession, the violence, is intensified precisely BECAUSE of the way it is so clear, so intense, so unmissable, even when filtered through the perceptions of such dull (Lockwood) or down-to-earth (Nelly) people who are observing that world, embedded in it while not experiencing it directly.
I totally agree with you @Ana-Maria Ignat-Berget. I think Jane Eyre is a better book in many perspective. BUT Wuthering Heights is special for me, it had made me feel intensively everything: the love and passion, the hatred, the inexplicable of some behaviors. Catherine and Heathcliff are something else. I don't have a literature background or studies, so I'm not an expert, but as a reader, the book really made me travel from my confortable beach (I read it the first time during a summer in the north of Spain) to that cold, windy and isolated location. I've read it twice in Spanish (my mother tongue) and want to read it in English. And I'm sure I will love it again.
I get why modern readers dislike Wuthering Heights, but here’s why they are dead wrong. Yes, the characters are brutal, petty, and perpetually miserable—and yes, Heathcliff is a toxic nightmare who’d have at least three Twitter threads devoted to canceling him today—but dismissing Brontë’s masterpiece on moral grounds misses the point entirely.
Literature is not meant to deliver sanitized role models or tidy life lessons packaged for comfort; rather, it’s a reflection of human complexity in all its unsettling truth. The chaotic passions and relentless cruelty of Wuthering Heights illuminate the darker recesses of human desire and obsession—qualities that modern readers, scrolling sanitized Instagram feeds for inspiration, might be uncomfortable confronting.
Yet discomfort is precisely Brontë’s genius; she refuses easy redemption arcs or satisfying resolutions. Perhaps what irritates modern readers most isn’t the book’s cruelty, but Brontë’s refusal to assure us that love redeems all sins, or worse yet, that good taste always prevails.
Yeah, honestly when I read in college about how the Bronte sisters (particularly Charlotte) were slagging off Jane Austen without any conceivable understanding of the true genius of her works (presumably high off their own "genius" and pretentious attitude of being SO far advanced from the "drawing room romance" of her books), I lost most of my respect for them as authors. Don't get me wrong, I loved Jane Eyre back when I read it and to this day I still get chills reading passages from the book, but the second you come for my Regency-era Queen of Satire we got beef.
I so, so agree…. Always loathed it… as well as the narrative style there’s the foul abusiveness of so many of the relationships. I agree too about the perfection of Jane Eyre. I divide my reading friends into Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights fans. The Eyries are always more independent and braver, not unlike Jane herself
This is a blast, thank you! I don't like it either but I always thought it was because I read it first when I was too old (late 30s)... I too am perplexed by Lockwood.
This is an interesting take -- I love this novel but would never call it a "salacious romance." There is nothing romantic about it, except in the Byronic sense. I feel like opinions of this book tend to hinge on whether the reader needs to connect/like the characters or not - it is a difficult book to love if you are the type of reader who needs to like your characters. Either way we always love hearing contrasting opinions, so thanks for sharing! - Shruti
Ohhh this was an entertaining and thought-provoking evisceration of Wuthering Heights. As a longtime Jane Eyre fan from my early teens, I actually didn't read Wuthering Heights until it was assigned to me at university because every time I picked it up and glanced through it I was so put off by the distancing narrator! I remember actually enjoying it more than I expected when I finally did read it, yet it's Jane Eyre I go back to reread every decade or so and I've never returned to Wuthering Heights. Now, despite the cautions about the shortness of life of which I too am very mindful, this actually makes me curious enough to consider rereading it to see if it strikes me the same way (or in more the way that BDM has discussed it below). Although perhaps I just should put on the Kate Bush song every time I get this urge.
my own reading of wuthering height's structure is something like this:
first of all, I think it matters that we don't get any unmediated looks at Cathy and Heathcliff other than that one look at Cathy's diary. Lockwood is established pretty quickly as somebody who doesn't really understand what he sees (the cats that are really a heap of dead rabbits). The scene where he tortures Cathy's ghost by dragging it against the broken glass also kind of stands out to me here—like he's trying to drag the truth of the matter through the mediating material and it won't come out.
And this commitment to seeing the events of the novel only through mediated and fractured forms is important, I think. Because Heathcliff and Cathy are simultaneously redeemed and damned by what they feel and do for each other, they live in their own country that nobody else can reach or understand.
But secondly, the next generation aspect of the novel is important. It is a story about how all of this hate and violence and fear is reconciled and turned into something that is more than a private society of two, something that can heal its participants and the wider world around them.
eta II: IN OTHER WORDS, Wuthering Heights is both a novel with distinct characters blah blah but Wuthering Heights is also a system that begins in violence and hatred and ends somewhere else, and the play through generations, the forms of incomprehension, are part of it…
Barbara!!! But why can't that mediated/fractured telling be via a strange visiting mystic? Or a child wanting a bedtime story? I'm okay with a level of inhibited access to the two lovers but my issue is why does it have to be Lockwood! Sure, he's meant to be a somewhat neutral figure, but his disruptions truly diffuse all the erotic tension that's builds up. Rhythmically, it feels so uneven to read...
Yes I agree entirely. I think Lockwood (in his Lockwoodness, in his being such a bore, in his utter inability to understand anything OR feel anything, is essential to what she's doing there; as are the other narrators (including Cathy herself, also opaque in her diary).
But then I never could read this book as a love story between Cathy the First and Heathcliff (and I read it for the first time as a teenager), because even to a 16 year old me who romanticised tormented emotions just a li'l bit, it was really way too much into "humans do not really behave in this way and if they did they should likely be locked up" territory. It is -- of course -- a story of love that develops between Cathy the Second and Hareton, but most adaptations carefully excise this one.
...so it was only on rereading it as a REALLY sophisticated piece of writing, in my dotage, and for actual class on literary theory, rather than anything even remotely resembling "escapist romance", that I saw it for how very very good a writer she was.
I dooooooo think it's a love story in both cases… I think Cathy I and Heathcliff fail to overcome their circumstances in part through what really seems to be a lack of courage (Cathy won't act on her love of Heathcliff because it would degrade her, Heathcliff won't admit he heard her). But the love is real.… It's just not enough.
In general cowardice and weakness feel like the besetting vices of the first generation and the subsequent generation is partly able to change their fate because they have courage (and the weakness ends up localized in Linton, who dies).
I simply don't understand such a hot discussion in the 21st century about a very regular romantic-style novel as Wuthering Heights. If I don't like Jane Austen's novels because of their uninteresting characters, at least I appreciate and value her and the sisters Bronte for their contribution to the world of literature. These women opened romantic and realistic directions in literature.
Thank you, Marianne for noticing and liking my note. I think we should be happy to have enough time to read and appreciate at least a part of the world literature and love deeply some of them, who close to us spiritually.
I am totally with you. it's mainly a boring Cold Comfort Farm, but no humour. Heathcliffe is just deranged. Doesn't he lock up Nelly Dean for days on end? What about Habeas Corpus? The law was surely on her side.
I am no fan of Jane Eyre (*gasp*) and barely remember Wuthering Heights. However, I read Agnes Grey by Anne Brontë this month and loved it. I plan to read The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.
Anne may turn out to be the only Brontë I truly enjoy reading.
Anne was a REVELATION to me, very underrated (probably because a bit priggish). There's an Austenesque slight viciousness to her that's really enjoyable.
I really need to reread Jane Eyre to get a middle aged look at all of them. I do remember liking it greatly at the same time I did not like WH...
I remember enjoying Wuthering Heights as a teenager but haven't reread it. I rather like Klara's fresh perspective on the novel. I will tuck her essay into my copy so it's there when I come to read it again, one day.
Thank you for this delightful take on a book I love to hate. I adore all the Bronte sisters, but I'm always confused when people talk about Wuthering Heights like it's a love story. A tale of obsession and madness? A cautionary ghost story with a sliver of redemption? Okay I can read those into the text, but a love story? I just don't get it! Thoroughly enjoyed your reflection.
It is the characters. Tell me of another Heathcliff or another Catherine: characters not trying to be balanced or likeable, or to make any sense.
Plus the unreliable narrators is what makes it even more charming, legend-like, like listening to a story about unlikely heroes who actually lived.
It reminds me of listening to ghost (strigoi) stories as a young teen, on small benches around a tire on fire at midnight, on a side street in my grandparents’ Romanian village.
I like that comparison. I can imagine Emily telling it...
In case I was not explicit enough: I LOVE Wuthering Heights with a passion, the same goes for Jane Eyre.
I totally agree with all of this. Wuthering Heights is one of my favorite novels of all time (yes, well above Jane Eyre) - and it is BECAUSE of Lockwood's narrative voice (and Nelly Dean's), not in spite of them. The underlying story is one of almost superhuman, supernatural (the ghost at the start, the graves at the end) passion, of a brutal world where people are driven by animalistic impulses - and that sense of the passion, the obsession, the violence, is intensified precisely BECAUSE of the way it is so clear, so intense, so unmissable, even when filtered through the perceptions of such dull (Lockwood) or down-to-earth (Nelly) people who are observing that world, embedded in it while not experiencing it directly.
I totally agree with you @Ana-Maria Ignat-Berget. I think Jane Eyre is a better book in many perspective. BUT Wuthering Heights is special for me, it had made me feel intensively everything: the love and passion, the hatred, the inexplicable of some behaviors. Catherine and Heathcliff are something else. I don't have a literature background or studies, so I'm not an expert, but as a reader, the book really made me travel from my confortable beach (I read it the first time during a summer in the north of Spain) to that cold, windy and isolated location. I've read it twice in Spanish (my mother tongue) and want to read it in English. And I'm sure I will love it again.
I get why modern readers dislike Wuthering Heights, but here’s why they are dead wrong. Yes, the characters are brutal, petty, and perpetually miserable—and yes, Heathcliff is a toxic nightmare who’d have at least three Twitter threads devoted to canceling him today—but dismissing Brontë’s masterpiece on moral grounds misses the point entirely.
Literature is not meant to deliver sanitized role models or tidy life lessons packaged for comfort; rather, it’s a reflection of human complexity in all its unsettling truth. The chaotic passions and relentless cruelty of Wuthering Heights illuminate the darker recesses of human desire and obsession—qualities that modern readers, scrolling sanitized Instagram feeds for inspiration, might be uncomfortable confronting.
Yet discomfort is precisely Brontë’s genius; she refuses easy redemption arcs or satisfying resolutions. Perhaps what irritates modern readers most isn’t the book’s cruelty, but Brontë’s refusal to assure us that love redeems all sins, or worse yet, that good taste always prevails.
Yeah, honestly when I read in college about how the Bronte sisters (particularly Charlotte) were slagging off Jane Austen without any conceivable understanding of the true genius of her works (presumably high off their own "genius" and pretentious attitude of being SO far advanced from the "drawing room romance" of her books), I lost most of my respect for them as authors. Don't get me wrong, I loved Jane Eyre back when I read it and to this day I still get chills reading passages from the book, but the second you come for my Regency-era Queen of Satire we got beef.
I so, so agree…. Always loathed it… as well as the narrative style there’s the foul abusiveness of so many of the relationships. I agree too about the perfection of Jane Eyre. I divide my reading friends into Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights fans. The Eyries are always more independent and braver, not unlike Jane herself
This is a blast, thank you! I don't like it either but I always thought it was because I read it first when I was too old (late 30s)... I too am perplexed by Lockwood.
Charlotte, now, I ADORE.
In this house, we love Jane Eyre.
Oh yes. I also love Villette. So wonderfully ill-tempered. And that ending…
A poem I once wrote for a friend who also despised Wuthering Heights:
Maybe the problem
Is that you were looking for
A different book
This is an interesting take -- I love this novel but would never call it a "salacious romance." There is nothing romantic about it, except in the Byronic sense. I feel like opinions of this book tend to hinge on whether the reader needs to connect/like the characters or not - it is a difficult book to love if you are the type of reader who needs to like your characters. Either way we always love hearing contrasting opinions, so thanks for sharing! - Shruti
Ohhh this was an entertaining and thought-provoking evisceration of Wuthering Heights. As a longtime Jane Eyre fan from my early teens, I actually didn't read Wuthering Heights until it was assigned to me at university because every time I picked it up and glanced through it I was so put off by the distancing narrator! I remember actually enjoying it more than I expected when I finally did read it, yet it's Jane Eyre I go back to reread every decade or so and I've never returned to Wuthering Heights. Now, despite the cautions about the shortness of life of which I too am very mindful, this actually makes me curious enough to consider rereading it to see if it strikes me the same way (or in more the way that BDM has discussed it below). Although perhaps I just should put on the Kate Bush song every time I get this urge.
Klara!!! No!!! Nooo!!! NOOOO.
on a different note, you might find this book interesting: https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781590512036 I think it illuminates a lot about the structure of Wuthering Heights.
my own reading of wuthering height's structure is something like this:
first of all, I think it matters that we don't get any unmediated looks at Cathy and Heathcliff other than that one look at Cathy's diary. Lockwood is established pretty quickly as somebody who doesn't really understand what he sees (the cats that are really a heap of dead rabbits). The scene where he tortures Cathy's ghost by dragging it against the broken glass also kind of stands out to me here—like he's trying to drag the truth of the matter through the mediating material and it won't come out.
And this commitment to seeing the events of the novel only through mediated and fractured forms is important, I think. Because Heathcliff and Cathy are simultaneously redeemed and damned by what they feel and do for each other, they live in their own country that nobody else can reach or understand.
But secondly, the next generation aspect of the novel is important. It is a story about how all of this hate and violence and fear is reconciled and turned into something that is more than a private society of two, something that can heal its participants and the wider world around them.
eta: also i wrote a bit about it here (i think henry can prob gift you a month subscription since he subscribes) https://www.notebook.bdmcclay.com/p/oh-cathy-oh-my-life
eta II: IN OTHER WORDS, Wuthering Heights is both a novel with distinct characters blah blah but Wuthering Heights is also a system that begins in violence and hatred and ends somewhere else, and the play through generations, the forms of incomprehension, are part of it…
Barbara!!! But why can't that mediated/fractured telling be via a strange visiting mystic? Or a child wanting a bedtime story? I'm okay with a level of inhibited access to the two lovers but my issue is why does it have to be Lockwood! Sure, he's meant to be a somewhat neutral figure, but his disruptions truly diffuse all the erotic tension that's builds up. Rhythmically, it feels so uneven to read...
but I think he's precisely not a neutral figure! that's what I'm trying to say. like, the gap between what he sees and what is there.
I just can't take that man seriously..
i bet there's a great jungian reading of wuthering heights…
Yes I agree entirely. I think Lockwood (in his Lockwoodness, in his being such a bore, in his utter inability to understand anything OR feel anything, is essential to what she's doing there; as are the other narrators (including Cathy herself, also opaque in her diary).
But then I never could read this book as a love story between Cathy the First and Heathcliff (and I read it for the first time as a teenager), because even to a 16 year old me who romanticised tormented emotions just a li'l bit, it was really way too much into "humans do not really behave in this way and if they did they should likely be locked up" territory. It is -- of course -- a story of love that develops between Cathy the Second and Hareton, but most adaptations carefully excise this one.
...so it was only on rereading it as a REALLY sophisticated piece of writing, in my dotage, and for actual class on literary theory, rather than anything even remotely resembling "escapist romance", that I saw it for how very very good a writer she was.
I dooooooo think it's a love story in both cases… I think Cathy I and Heathcliff fail to overcome their circumstances in part through what really seems to be a lack of courage (Cathy won't act on her love of Heathcliff because it would degrade her, Heathcliff won't admit he heard her). But the love is real.… It's just not enough.
In general cowardice and weakness feel like the besetting vices of the first generation and the subsequent generation is partly able to change their fate because they have courage (and the weakness ends up localized in Linton, who dies).
Ooo thanks for sharing this link!
I simply don't understand such a hot discussion in the 21st century about a very regular romantic-style novel as Wuthering Heights. If I don't like Jane Austen's novels because of their uninteresting characters, at least I appreciate and value her and the sisters Bronte for their contribution to the world of literature. These women opened romantic and realistic directions in literature.
Thank you, Marianne for noticing and liking my note. I think we should be happy to have enough time to read and appreciate at least a part of the world literature and love deeply some of them, who close to us spiritually.
I am totally with you. it's mainly a boring Cold Comfort Farm, but no humour. Heathcliffe is just deranged. Doesn't he lock up Nelly Dean for days on end? What about Habeas Corpus? The law was surely on her side.
Great description, it's totally a boring, humourless Cold Comfort Farm!
I am no fan of Jane Eyre (*gasp*) and barely remember Wuthering Heights. However, I read Agnes Grey by Anne Brontë this month and loved it. I plan to read The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.
Anne may turn out to be the only Brontë I truly enjoy reading.
Anne was a REVELATION to me, very underrated (probably because a bit priggish). There's an Austenesque slight viciousness to her that's really enjoyable.
I really need to reread Jane Eyre to get a middle aged look at all of them. I do remember liking it greatly at the same time I did not like WH...
I read it first in the form of a "Classics Illustrated" comic book adaptation. That helped make it work.
I remember enjoying Wuthering Heights as a teenager but haven't reread it. I rather like Klara's fresh perspective on the novel. I will tuck her essay into my copy so it's there when I come to read it again, one day.
nice!
Thank you for this delightful take on a book I love to hate. I adore all the Bronte sisters, but I'm always confused when people talk about Wuthering Heights like it's a love story. A tale of obsession and madness? A cautionary ghost story with a sliver of redemption? Okay I can read those into the text, but a love story? I just don't get it! Thoroughly enjoyed your reflection.
Great piece. I read Wuthering Heights a long time ago and felt the same way tbh.