Wuthering Heights in The Roundtable

Jan 25, 2010 Petra rated it really liked it

This is a keeper book, to sit on the shelves for an eventual rereading.
This story was so well told and the characters so messed up that it was fun to read.
Emily wrote of such a small, contained, isolated world and showed how such a narrow world could warp, twist and madden a person. A wonderfully mad tale.
There is some distance, though, between the characters and the reader. This story is told in a third-person way with Nelly telling the story to Lockwood, the stranger to these parts. Then Loc ...more

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Jul 14, 2013 Christopher rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, classics, british, 19th-century

Last night I read the last line of this book. I shut it, set it on the nightstand. I switched off the lamp, pulled the covers over me and closed my lids.

I woke in the middle of the night during a summer storm. Lightning intermittently set my bedroom aglow and at the foot of my bed I saw the outline of a man. A large man with a mop of hair messily piled onto one side of his head.

Paralyzed with fear, I lay there helplessly and heard these words from the specter emitted in a gravelly and woeful to ...more

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Jun 28, 2009 Wendy rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: read-more-than-once, 1001-books, blooms-western-canon, 2024, 500-women, classics, gothic, twisted-love, infp

I first encountered this book in an antique-looking Rainbow Classics hardcover 1947 edition as a teenager. I don't remember how it ended up on my shelf (perhaps it belonged to my mother or grandmother), but I was fascinated by the eerie black and white line drawings and the full page watercolor plate illustrations, and so I schlepped it along on a spring break family trip to the Grand Canyon. A quarter-odd century later, I can remember a bit about a ghost outside a window, a vague sense of twist I first encountered this book in an antique-looking Rainbow Classics hardcover 1947 edition as a teenager. I don't remember how it ended up on my shelf (perhaps it belonged to my mother or grandmother), but I was fascinated by the eerie black and white line drawings and the full page watercolor plate illustrations, and so I schlepped it along on a spring break family trip to the Grand Canyon. A quarter-odd century later, I can remember a bit about a ghost outside a window, a vague sense of twisted romance gone wrong, and a male narrator who was a bit of drip. Overall, I liked it but I couldn't tell you why beyond the gothic ambience. As I'm currently on a Charlotte kick, it was high time to revisit her sister Emily.

In 2024, with several decades of Victorian literary reading under my belt, I can better appreciate just how perverse and brutal Wuthering Heights must have struck its first readers upon publication. This tale of intergenerational trauma is spattered with vivid depictions of violence in arresting detail -- wrists sawed across broken glass, bloody noses, a dog hung by the collar on a bridle hook -- and nary a sentimental word is spoken. The story is a hulking emotional iceberg where only the tip is visible, but with vast, complicated crags underneath, occasionally glimpsed in flashes of evocate prose.

Despite its depiction in popular culture, this tale is less romantic and more Romantic, a tale of intense and paradoxical longing that reminds me far more of Ahab's unhinged quest for Moby Dick than the attainment and domestication of Rochester or Darcy. (As an aside, I also found the early sections with narrator Lockwood humorously failing to "read the room", as it were, and stepping into various social faux pas reminiscent of the early pages of Moby Dick.) Rather like the claustrophobic ship Pequod, this isolated estate on the moors evinces a similar claustrophobia, the inhabitants trapped both physically and socially. Heathcliff and Catherine chafe against their positions in society, one as a (mixed-race?) outsider, the other as a strong-willed woman, with attitudes of entitlement that fail to endear them to the people around them. Interestingly, the servant narrator Nelly Dean also plays this game of class-jockeying in an underhanded way, starting the book in a stratum above young foundling "plowboy" Heathcliff, yet far below "the Master" by the end, complicating her relationship with the central players in the story she tells Lockwood in ways I'm still wrapping my head around. The layers, oh, the layers!

"Liking" the characters (or not) in Wuthering Heights is not the point. That said, my single disappointment in this read was that while I appreciate the heck out of it, I didn't emotionally connect with it on the same level as I did with Villette earlier this year, though trying to compare the two is a kiwis to kumquats dilemma. Charlotte wrote from personal experience, where Emily in contrast is drawing from a darkly fantastical well, yet both lash out at the world to wound us with words. ...more

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Mar 21, 2007 Rachel rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: classics, 1001-books-to-read-before-you-die

Mar. 21, 2007: 1 star.

I'm sorry, but I usually love classics, but I could just not get through this one. I couldn't stand anyone in it, and it went on and on and on and on with people flinging themselves into hysteria and wringing their hands. I really wanted to finish it too, but I just couldn't. I got halfway through, which is better than the last time I tried, but I just have so many other books I really want to read. Maybe I'll try again in 10 years.

Almost 10 years later...

I got through it ...more

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Dec 29, 2007 Meghan rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: brit-lit, own, british, hh-bookclub, classics, movie, book-club, challenge

I had read this book years ago for one bookclub. From the first page, it was excruciating agony. Every character detestable and loathsome. The plot depressing. The language old and ornery and difficult to understand. And thus, I would have given it zero stars if one could possiblely give a book that--negative stars even.

And then I read more books. And these books would sometimes referenced Wuthering Heights or characters or plots and I would wonder what I really had missed out on. All I could re I had read this book years ago for one bookclub. From the first page, it was excruciating agony. Every character detestable and loathsome. The plot depressing. The language old and ornery and difficult to understand. And thus, I would have given it zero stars if one could possiblely give a book that--negative stars even.

And then I read more books. And these books would sometimes referenced Wuthering Heights or characters or plots and I would wonder what I really had missed out on. All I could recall was that Heathcliff was truly the most horrible character ever created in the history of storytelling and there was a lot of misty moors and other Scottish things.

And so I decided that I should re-read this odious book again to see if I had really given it a fair shake. Thus, I bought a different version (B&N Classics vs my 60s hard cover with no footnotes or endnotes or notes of any sort). And thus it sat on my shelf collecting dust never to be handled again.

And then I decided on my personal challenge this year--I should read 10 authors that I truly dread reading. Many of these books are ones I half attempted and put down due to my inability to get past one more word. Others, I have read a work and did not enjoy, but so many references are made about other works, that I feel I should try them again. So here was a wonderful opportunity for me to add Ms. Bronte. And then a book club was going to read this book in January and I knew that I had been forced by fate to finally pick this tome up again.

I had late last fall read Rebecca, not expecting to like it at all. I do not like gothic fare (Frankenstein, Jane Eyre, et al). But to my surprise, I found it engaging and I quickly turned the page, eager to read more of my poor narrator's plight. So I had some hope this January that perhaps, just perhaps, I may experience some glimmer of similar enjoyment with WH.

And the book gods were kind and bestowed upon me a truly marvelous read. Gone was my frustration with the language--thank you B&N for all your wonderful footnotes, giving away no important plotlines, yet keeping the notes informative to the story. Gone was the shock of encountering such truly horrible people. Having read this before, I already knew that these people were detestable and going into the story knowing that made their actions less distracting.

This is not a book that I would ever go "gee I'd just craving to pick up WH and reread again." But I am heartily glad that I have given it another chance. The writing is superb and I truly understand now all the praise for Bronte's skill is merited.

What struck me this second time around is the utter desolation these people lived with every day. Granted some lived amongst other people, but truly, they were a lonely bunch. There were only a handful of incidences where their company to each other gave any sort of comfort. And the comfort seemingly was short lived. And it made me realize that all the horrible actions and hatred that swelled withn the breasts of these characters stemmed from the fact that their happiness lay in someone else and that someone else was always taken from them. And having gone through that personally myself, I recognize the path to bitterness and hate is easily come by when you are devastated in such a way. And so I found the story itself moving.

*One last note. In a bookclub for another book, someone mentioned that all (love) stories are based on one of three concepts--Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, or Romeo & Juliet. And then in a discussion for this book, I saw someone had posted that Hareton and Cathy's relationship was like Cinderella. But really, I thought it much more like Beauty & the Beast. But either way, I thought the concept of how stories are influenced by other stories interesting and am noticing it now in all the books I read. ...more

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Jan 29, 2008 Sera rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: kindle, own, classics, 1001-books

I was really rolling along on this one until I read about 2/3 of the way through and thought "I really don't like any of the characters in this story, except for Lockwood, but he's not in it enough for me to have developed an antipathy toward him." I'm very impressed with Emily Bronte's best known work and find both the story and her writing itself to be top notch - she blows her sister, Charlotte, away. However, I gave Jane Eyre 5 stars, but I can only give WH 3, because by the time that I fini ...more

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Feb 22, 2008 Rosana rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2010, classic

I had all the good intentions of writing a review for this book until I read Elizabeth’s review. She says it all and more and better! So here is a link to what I think about it – and what I hadn’t thought about it until I read from Elizabeth but now agree with her so completely that her thoughts are also my thoughts:

http://www.goodreads.com/review/show....

But, because Elizabeth is a bit long winded, if you are not in the mood to read it all, in this paragraph she summarizes it beautifully:

My sor ...more

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May 10, 2013 Heather(Gibby) rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 1001-to-read

I really loved this book! Can't believe I waited so long to read it, and what shame that Emily Bronte did not write any further novels. She created a mysterious world in which the reader is an avid listener as the tale is told from the housekeeper Nelly, to the visitor Mr. Lockwood. The isolation of the characters from regular social norms leads to relationships of intense emotions. I kept thinking that these poor souls would not be so polarized if they would just attend a public school and be e ...more

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