From the Bookshelf of The Rory Gilmore Reading Challenge…

Wuthering Heights

Emily Brontë

Start date: July 1, 2024

Finish date: September 1, 2024

Discussion: Book Discussions (Archive)

Discussion leader: Stephanie Johnson

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What Members Thought

Feb 16, 2019 Amanda rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: gothic-fiction, classics, pbs-great-american-read, 5-star-favorites, read-in-2019, romance, 1001-books-to-read-before-you-die

Simply: Heathcliff and Catherine grew up together as childhood lovers. He is a man without a past (sometimes called a "gypsy"). Catherine is a spunky, free spirited, headstrong woman. Catherine marries Edgar Linton and Heathcliff seeks vengeance. The unresolved passion between Heathcliff and Catherine destroys them, their family and those around them. This is not a tale of romance, instead it is a very deep and dark story about revenge and the generations of families that live on the properties Simply: Heathcliff and Catherine grew up together as childhood lovers. He is a man without a past (sometimes called a "gypsy"). Catherine is a spunky, free spirited, headstrong woman. Catherine marries Edgar Linton and Heathcliff seeks vengeance. The unresolved passion between Heathcliff and Catherine destroys them, their family and those around them. This is not a tale of romance, instead it is a very deep and dark story about revenge and the generations of families that live on the properties of Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange.

****

My first Brontë was Jane Eyre and I fell in love with Jane as a character. Unlike my love for Jane I don't "love" any of the characters in Wuthering Heights; however, I can say I love Wuthering Heights. I wasn't sure what to expect but I knew I was in for a twisted, dark brooding Gothic Fiction tale (my favorite).

The novel is full of complicated characters and this is a book for readers who understand and can appreciate flawed characters. While the characters are unlikable, I did fall in love with with the atmosphere - the dreariness, the two ancient manors of Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange, and the four miles that separate them.

Heathcliff's character is comprised of the abusive and unloved childhood he experienced, his love and obsession with the only person who ever showed him any kindness (Catherine), and an adulthood as an angry, vengeful and violent man.

Catherine is selfish and vindictive. She married Edgar Linton but still loves Heathcliff. Catherine admits, "My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I'm well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff! He's always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being. So don't talk of our separation again: it is impracticable."

While this is a bleak novel that deals with some very complicated people, in the end we are offered the possibility of peace and happiness through Cathy (younger) and Hareton's relationship, and the suggestion that Catherine and Heathcliff were reunited in the afterlife. ...more

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Apr 21, 2018 Ron rated it it was ok

This is a gloomy melodrama told in the third person mostly by a servant to a tenant about the dark figure (Heathcliff) who had become lord of a weather-beaten and dreary Yorkshire estate. Old Heathcliff was once a dark young adopted gypsy orphan with an impossible crush on his foster sister, and since that romance could not consummate two generations of interrelated families are destined to ill-advised, hateful marriages, and protracted periods of isolation and verbal abuse.

I started out with hi ...more

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