Wuthering Heights in The Dusty Bookshelf

May 16, 2011 Anne (Booklady) Molinarolo rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: spring-2012, womens-fiction, great-literary-fiction, favorites, classics, permanent-library

Wuthering Heights is a novel that people love or hate, just as Heathcliff both loves and hates Catherine. Emily Bronte has created a masterpiece with all the juicy ingredients: love, hate, obsession, ghosts, and beatific wild setting – the moors of Yorkshire. The novel is told in the form of an extended flashback. After a visit to his strange landlord, foppish Mr. Lockwood requests to know more about the Earnshaws, especially about Catherine after finding what seems to be her diary. And Nelly De Wuthering Heights is a novel that people love or hate, just as Heathcliff both loves and hates Catherine. Emily Bronte has created a masterpiece with all the juicy ingredients: love, hate, obsession, ghosts, and beatific wild setting – the moors of Yorkshire. The novel is told in the form of an extended flashback. After a visit to his strange landlord, foppish Mr. Lockwood requests to know more about the Earnshaws, especially about Catherine after finding what seems to be her diary. And Nelly Dean, the former servant at Wuthering Heights begins her tale.

Mr. Earnshaw had returned from a business trip to Liverpool with a “ gypsy” foundling, a dark-haired, handsome orphan boy. He had taken quite a fancy to the quiet, stoic boy, because he names him Heathcliff after a son who died. Catherine befriends Heathcliff instantly. They are able to communicate with each other easily. Possessing wildly creative imaginations the pair roams the moorland wilderness, where they're most at home, and becoming inseparable. But the young Earnshaw, Hindley, detests Heathcliff from the first time he laid eyes on Heathcliff. He is jealous and derides his foster brother, because Mr. Earnshaw demonstrates his preference for Heathcliff over his own blood. Hindley is sent away to school and Heathcliff is kept at Wuthering Heights by Earnshaw's side.

Hindley comes into his inheritance when his father dies and seeks vicious revenge for having his rights usurped by a wretched gypsy urchin. The 12 year-old Heathcliff is totally dependent on Hindley, and the young heir knows it. Even though he is now a forced field laborer and treated harshly, Heathcliff and Cathy maintain their closeness, wandering the wild North Country and sharing Catherine’s studies. One night they pay a clandestine visit to Thrushcross Grange., the home of cultured, spoiled and very well behaved, young Edgar and Isabella Linton. A dog severely bites Cathy revealing that the two youngsters been hiding in the brush spying on the Lintons. Cathy is forced to stay at the Grange for several weeks to recover. Mrs. Linton becomes intent on turning wild, mischievous Cathy into a young lady. She encourages her to become a young woman with manners and actions appropriate to her social standing in society, rather than the wild, headstrong creature she is while roaming the moors with Heathcliff. By the time Catherine returns home, in elegant new clothes, she has become infatuated with Edgar Linton. Catherine’s relationship with Heathcliff has deteriorated significantly, and Heathcliff knows that the only person he ever loved is lost to him.

Catherine’s desire for social advancement prompts her to accept Edgar’s proposal. However, she does not love him. She may care for him, but her feelings are much less than what her passionate nature requires. "Here and here!' replied Catherine, striking one hand on her forehead and the other on her breast: 'in which ever place the soul lives. In my soul and in my heart, I'm convinced I'm wrong…My greatest thought in living is Heathcliff. If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be... Nelly, I am Heathcliff! He's always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure... but as my own being. Although she knows that Heathcliff is her true love, however, she cannot marry him because he has been so debased by the Lintons. "It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now; so he shall never know how I love him: and that, not because he's handsome, Nelly, but because he's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same; and Linton's is as different as a moonbeam from lightening, or frost from fire.” Heathcliff leaves Wuthering Heights a bitter man with the knowledge that if he had come from a better social class, or had wealth, Cathy would have married him. When he finally returns, years later, a self-possessed, successful, wealthy man, he is obsessed with revenge, and is very adept in exacting it.

Bronte's extraordinary prose is filled with powerful imagery. No doubt this is why Wuthering Heights has stood the test of time and will continue to do so!
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Mar 16, 2013 Cassie Johnson rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Ugh, blah.
My English teacher loves this book, especially over Jane Eyre. But I have to say, after reading both around the same time, I would take Jane Eyre ALWAYS. Because even though she might seem too good (according to my English teacher, I didn't even notice until she pointed it out), at least she's not as awful and ire-raising as Cathy, Heathcliff, Cathy Jr., Hareton, Linton, basically EVERYONE in this book. There were no happy endings, only "FINALLY HE DIED" deaths. This book just made me ...more

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