Believe it or not, not a fan.

The story itself is unique & very original, a precursor for many Victorian thrillers & haunted house spectaculars. But there was no engine in my brain to ease down the process; reading this is like reading something that is altogether mandatory. I guess its a classic because enough people have read it to distinguish it from better books.

The character of Heathcliff is a vampire who sucks the life out of everyone in the household at Wuthering Heights & its neighbors. No doubt a good actor could play the hell out of him & get the Oscar.

The work is labyrinthine & sometimes just too difficult to understand. It has incredibly unbeautiful sentences (really!) & is altogether irregular, shapeless-- not a pleasure at all.

This, "Catcher in the Rye" and "On the Road" need to vacate the canon!

I hated everyone. I mean how can you like anyone in this novel? People say Nelly Dean is a nice character but we don't know anything about her past! She is the most unreliable narrator in the history of fiction!

I've heard people say this is a love story. Well, I don't think they actually read this novel. If tormented souls literally digging up corpses of loved ones is your idea of love then you are probably Dexter or someone.

I don't even know how to review this. Near the end I had to take it chapter by chapter. It was SO depressing I couldn't even stand it! I read a chapter, then watched Clueless, read a chapter, then watched Labyrinth, read a chapter, then watched Romy and Michele's High School Reunion, I needed to flush each chapter out with teen comedies!

DO NOT read this book if you are in any way depressed or sad about something because it will drive you mental and you'll end up like Heathcliff.

Even though I hated everyone and everything was so depressing, I still loved it. It's not up there with her sister's work "Jane Eyre" but it's not as boring as "Pride and Prejudice".

Virginia Woolf says, of the two Catherines in Wuthering Heights, that “they are the most loveable women in English fiction.” I have not read nearly enough English fiction to have an informed opinion on this matter – yet still I have an opinion: I disagree wholeheartedly. In fact, I believe that this book has managed something spectacular, in housing the single most dislikeable cast of characters that I have ever had the pleasure of reading about within one novel. Despite this “setback” (as much as you could call an intentional masterstroke a setback), the story thrives. Emily’s prose is poetry in motion, and it really is a testament to her genius that this work remains a giant of world literature. In anyone else’s hands, it would have been fumbled. I found myself wanting to argue with almost every character in the book, depriving them of their dinner and sending them to their room in order to reflect on how naughty they had been.

So why did I like Wuthering Heights? I felt that it went against the grain. It did not give me what I wanted out of my preconceived notion of the Victorian novel. It made me work for a morsel of meaning, and by doing so, made me feel a lot smarter than I actually am. I would pick out nuances in situations, characters, and interactions that would excite me. Emily’s achievement reminded me of the work of Lev Vygotsky, and his idea of the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD). This idea states that there are a set number of tasks that I am capable of carrying out on my own, and these comprise the first level. The third and final level would be all of the tasks that I cannot do, no matter how I am guided. But the second and middle level is the ZPD. Here is where I can approach tasks and ideas with a bit of guidance, slowly increasing my own capabilities while learning. Emily was my guide, and she did a great job.

I suppose this was a love story. No one said it would be a typical love story. I was in awe of the numerous toxic relationships on display, and the (seemingly) perfectly ordinary patterns of back and forth that they created for the characters. Even for the standards of the Victorian era, some of the conduct between the various lovers was unbelievable, and everyone seemed to be okay with it. It would be completely alright that you could begin the day by slighting your partner, giving them an ultimatum, running out on them, coming back at night, abusing them verbally and emotionally, and go to bed angry. No problems here. I would recommend the book to many just for that aspect alone. It is a perfect study of what not to do in a romantic relationship.

Finally, and on a slightly more facetious note, WHAT IN GOD’S NAME is Joseph saying? My British friends, I am sorry, but I had to resort to a website. I have never been so flabbergasted while looking at dialogue. The seemingly random array of characters was not connecting in my brain. I hope the other Brontës spare me that pain.

My first re-read*

This story is still one of a kind!

First read (November 2019)*

This book is truly one of a kind! I have never read a book so full of dislikable characters, but still feeling so attached to them at the same time.
I am in awe of the Brontë sisters and can't wait to keep reading more of their work.
Few books make me feel as if the setting is its own character, and Wuthering Heights is definitely its own entity. I could feel her descriptions in my bones! The cold harsh rain storms that overpower the Moors, the vast hills and twisting trees!! It was an incredible reading experience, and now I am so excited to delve deeper into Emily Brontë's poetry since this is unfortunately her only novel! Yet, what a novel it is!!

Love, love, loved this book! I read this many yeas ago and the story still remains a favorite. I loved the original film as well, I watched many many times. The version with Mere Oberon and Laurence Olivier and David Novel (1939 ).

There are some books that you either love of hate; there is not much middle ground. Like some types of food. Marmite or licorice come to mind. Wuthering Heights is one of those books. Since I started using GR I have read many conflicting reviews for this book and they made me increasingly curios to find out which side I would take. Unfortunately, I am more with the hate party.

I will not write a long review here as it was done thousands of times. I will only say that the book took all the joy of living from me and put me into a reading slump from which I hope to heal quickly. After I finished this last night I was considering what to read next and I realized I did not want to read anything for a while, I felt catatonic.

I believe I started the book on a wrong foot. I was expecting a love story, which in my opinion it is not. Instead, I think this is a very well done study of two sociopaths, pathologically obsessed with each other who manage to destroy the life of everyone they know for the fun of it. Their ability to hurt others and each other is so extraordinary that I might consider this book from the paranormal genre.

Yes, I appreciate that the novel is revolutionary for the period and so on but I did not enjoy it at all. Dear friends that love this novel, I am really sorry I did not like it more and I hope you will not take it personally.

Disclaimer: I read it in Romanian, the way I prefer to read all Victorian novels in order to avoid the archaic language. Maybe I was lost in translation.

Note: Content and trigger warnings are written at the end as they may contain spoilers.

"Treachery and violence are spears pointed at both ends; they wound those who resort to them worse than their enemies."

Yorkshire, England (ca. 1700s – 1800s) — Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights towers as a tight exploration of the cycles of intergenerational abuse, wrapped in a façade of exceptional Gothic romance that blinds readers from Brontë's bold efforts in challenging the safe, trite Victorian ideas of her time.

Not many a time a novel so complex exists that it can be viewed in two perspectives, as a romance novel or a tragedy, with one stealing the narrative's glory in comparison with viewing it using the other. Wuthering Heights does this perspectival paradox so well that it continues to polarize readers from its first publication when Brontë is still known as Ellis Bell, until today when the world acknowledges the book to be one of the greatest among the English literary canon. In Heights, Brontë fearlessly depicts the Gothic qualities of the story she has in mind: through the atmospheric description of the Yorkshire moors, the mentions of ghosts and ghost-like characters, and the eerily comprehensive introduction of the Heights known for the "quantity of grotesque carvings on its doors" and the "wilderness of crumbling griffins" in its premises. Through her brilliant use of doubles, juxtaposition, and parallelism to highlight the intricacies of her drama, Brontë crafts a multi-faceted story that is as messy and vicious as its characters and their genealogy can be. With Brontë's courageous efforts to challenge societal ideals and push the confines of on-page stark violence acceptability in novels, the elusive author has created a pioneering text of the Gothic genre and a definitive English classic confident enough to defy religious and moral Victorian expectations.

Wuthering Heights may certainly be unpleasant, but it is the type of unpleasant where you classify beautiful nightmares and immersive narratives under—the genius Emily Brontë did, and the genius nobody can discredit her from extraordinarily creating.

Personal Enjoyment: 4.75 stars
Quality of the Book: 4.4 stars
- Use of Language: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
- Plot and Narrative Arc: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
- Characters: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
- Integrity: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
- Message: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

AVG: 4.58 stars | RAVE

-----
CW/TW: physical violence, physical abuse, mental abuse, self-harm, suicide¹

-----
Note:
[1] SPOILER: It is important to scrutinize the context of the suicide of Heathcliff as it may be different from those rooted on contemporary mental health issues. Due to the novel being categorized as a Gothic romance, elements of love and death are incorporated by Brontë in ways that are faithful in the tragedy her narrative wants to portray.

-----
[Some comments in this post are for the pre-review I wrote which contained highlighted reactions from my status updates. You may check the actual status updates through the links below to understand the context behind the comments.]

Status Updates:
[START] i'm still alive | two chapters in and i'm already confused!!! | this gothic realness will give me nightmares | if people nowadays are this poetic | does Brontë know about me? | Heathcliff, king of the abusers | Loving! Did anybody even hear the like! | Linton is me, I am Linton | that pure gothic realness of an ending [END]

“Sea cual sea la sustancia de la que están hechas nuestras almas, la suya y la mía son idénticas.”

El escritor H.P. Lovecraft en su famoso ensayo “El horror sobrenatural en la literatura” ubicaba a esta inmortal novela de Emily Brontë entre las mejores del género del terror.
Para él, el hecho de que Heathcliff profanara dos veces la tumba de Catherine era tremendo.
Debe haber sido verdaderamente shockeante para el editor Henri Colburn permitir publicar “Cumbres borrascosas” en 1847, luego del escozor que le habrá causado leer esta novela que Emily, bajo el seudónimo de Ellis Bell dio a luz en una época completamente vedada para las mujeres en todo aspecto. Y la literatura no era la excepción.
Su hermana Charlotte se transformó en Currer Bell y Anne en Acton Bell. Los editores pensaban que todos los Bell eran en realidad un solo escritor (hombre), pero se equivocaron completamente.
La vida de las tres hermanas Brontë y de su único hermano Branwell está signada por la tuberculosis y la muerte: en 1848, la malograda vida de Emily se apaga: muere de tuberculosis en diciembre. Su hermano Branwell había muerto tres meses antes y un año después su hermana Anne correría la misma suerte.
Charlotte duraría algunos años más y también moriría en 1855. Una verdadera desgracia se las llevó a todas estas autoras que habrían dejado más novelas inmortales además de “Jane Eyre”, “Agnes Grey”, “Villette” y esta obra de arte, “Cumbres borrascosas” en donde se nos ofrece la idea del punto sin retorno al que el amor puede arrastrar a algunas personas.
Esta historia tuvo características emblemáticas, poderosas y revolucionarias para la época en que se escribió, dado la violencia implícita en todos los órdenes en que Emily Brontë la escribió: desde el lugar donde transcurre toda la acción, que no es la cosmopolita Londres sino los desolados páramos de Yorkshire donde todo el tiempo el clima es horrible, el terreno es agreste, la vegetación espantosa y el viento no da tregua a nadie, a punto tal de que no está mejor puesto el nombre de la finca al llamarse “Cumbres borrascosas”
La violencia también está en el lenguaje, los personajes, tanto hombres como mujeres vociferan, insultan, gritan y se maltrata. Violencia en los gestos, en los constantes golpes entre los personajes, en las actitudes desafiantes y las continuas amenazas.
Es increíble comprender que toda esta novela fue escrita por una señorita de treinta años, educada en una familia de buena posición y que no sufrió ni hambre ni miserias aunque sí de una salud muy frágil.
Es más, su hermana Charlotte, promotora de la literatura de Emily y defensora a ultranza de alguna calumnia surgida por allí supo decir que su hermana era “más fuerte que un hombre, más simple que un niño y su naturaleza no tenía igual”. Brillante manera de describir a alguien, ¿verdad?
Todos los acontecimientos que rodean a la tormentosa historia de amor (para ponerle el adjetivo calificativo exacto) entre Heathcliff y Catherine –especialmente en la primera parte- se complementa de pasajes sobrenaturales, estados alterados, pasiones descontroladas y crueldad aterradora.
La novela se sale de canon del tradicional del romanticismo y del Romanticismo de tal manera que adquiere una entidad y características propias, dado que la autora maneja las atmósferas de tensión a la perfección y todo el conjunto de la relación tanto de los dos personajes principales como de los demás está ensamblada y sin fisuras.
Es importante destacar algo importante a la hora de leer “Cumbres Borrascosas” y es que será esencial contar con un árbol genealógico de las dos familias que se enfrentan (algo que no hice en mi primera lectura), ya que al igual que en “Cien años de soledad” los personajes se llaman igual o tienen el mismo apellido con la complicación de que algunos son primos y se casan entre sí y de este modo leeremos repetidas veces el nombre Catherine, el apellido Earnshaw, el apellido Linton (que también es un nombre).
Es tanta la confusión si el lector no está prevenido, que se encontrará a lo largo de la historia con Catherine Earnshaw, Catherine Linton y Catherine Heathcliff. Mismo caso para los Linton a partir de que Heathcliff como despecho por el casamiento de Catherine con Hindley Linton se casará con Isabella, hermana de este que le dará un niño que se llamará Linton. Realmente complejo.
Volviendo a la novela y como explicara anteriormente, debido a la naturaleza de los personajes y las situaciones y de la violencia que los rodea a todos además del agreste lugar en el que viven, es muy difícil encontrar algo parecido en las otras novelas de su época.
Y diría que ni siquiera podemos trazar una similitud ni con “Jane Eyre” ni con “Agnes Grey” o “La inquilina de Wildfell Hall”, ya que la naturaleza de estas otras historias están caracterizadas principalmente por la lucha desventajosa de la mujer del siglo XIX por sobrevivir en un mundo de hombres quienes a su vez son los dueños de todo.
Aquí la cuestión es otra y pasa por la descontrolada y salvaje manera de zanjar las diferencias del corazón y de poseer (usualmente a la fuerza en el caso de Heathcliff) al otro.
Heathcliff es un personaje que a partir de que crece y se hace hombre se transforma en el típico villano que todo lo controla y que a la vez todo destruye y se nota el trabajo que Emily Brontë se tomó para delinear sus características, ya que no se encuadra en el típico arquetipo del caballero o gentleman inglés de su época. Suele ser violento, iracundo, despreciable, atemorizante y déspota. No existe ningún resquicio de bondad en él y probablemente nunca la haya tenido. Para muchos lectores es uno de los personajes odiosos de la literatura.
El amor y la pasión y el odio visceral entre Heathcliff y Catherine queda inmortalizada en frases como la que dice ella cuando admite que “mis mayores miserias en este mundo han sido las de Heathcliff, y desde el principio he observado y sentido cada una de ellas. Él es mi gran razón de existir. Si todo lo demás pereciera pero él quedara él, yo quedaría existiendo. Sí en cambio, quedara todo lo demás y él fuera aniquilado, el universo se me volvería totalmente extraño, no me parecería formar parte de él.”
Incluso va más allá: “Pero Heathcliff, me quedaré contigo. No quiero yacer allí yo sola. Aunque me entierren a cuatro metros de profundidad y me echen la iglesia entera encima no descansaré hasta que te reúnas conmigo… ¡No descansaré nunca!”
Él le responde: “Dos palabras abarcarían mi vida: muerte e infierno; porque mi vida, después de perderla a ella, sería un infierno” y termina rematando: “¿No le basta a tu egoísmo infernal con saber que cuando tú halles la paz yo estaré retorciéndome en los tormentos del infierno?”
Leer “Cumbres borrascosas” es dejarse llevar por todo tipo de sentimientos encontrados tanto como lector como ser humano y aunque Emily Brontë solamente escribió este libro, adquirió gloria eterna al relatarnos esta tormentosa e inolvidable historia de amor que pocos escritores (prácticamente ninguno) llegaron a igualar.

Jesu ludzie idźcie na terapie

Vastly overrated hysterical nonsense.

One feels there is a good novel in there somewhere, and a more experienced writer might have been more successful. There are Gothic elements which could have been explored, characters who deserved to be more fully fleshed out (the only believable character is the narrator, the servant Nellie Dean) and surely a world outside the two houses and their navel-gazing inmates, which is never mentioned. Not to mention incredibly complicated time shifts and an unnecessary flashback structure which only serves to distract the reader from the plot. As if 3 generations of similarly named characters were not difficult enough to keep track of; all the Haretons, Hindleys, Heathcliffe (Was Emily disappointed in love, one wonders - let down by a suitor named H______ much as Jane (Austen) had been by her W______? But I digress.) This much-lauded "mastery of an extremely complex structure" (as one critic will have it) seems to me extremely amateurish. Every so often, the author recollects that the narrator is an actual character, and breaks off at a random moment to bring the reader back to the present. Irritating.

I find myself wondering why this novel attracts so much adoration from modern readers. Is it because it is the only novel by the middle one of the Brontë sisters? The one who died tragically young, blah-di-blah-di-blah? Has it just been lumped with all the Haworth hyperbole? I find all the Brontë trio deficient when compared with the sheer breadth of compass of many other 19th Century writers, and Emily seems by far the weakest. In fact I've suspected for a long time that because the Parsonage at Haworth (the family home) and many of their childhood artefacts still exist, this may be almost entirely responsible for firing the public's imagination.

Maybe a lot of the self-absorption of the writers and their characters can be attributed to the fact that the Brontë's water supply ran through the graveyard. This in itself must be enough to make anyone feel unwell and inclined to emote all the time. "Cathy" surely needed a good slap. In fact most of the characters' agonising may have mysteriously disappeared if they'd only had something to DO!! (Now I'm revealing my origins - fully Yorkshire Protestant Work Ethic….)

Every decade or so I have taken this down from the bookshelf to give it another chance. Never again. It has now been consigned for ever more to someone else's. May they have joy of it. For me it remains the most overrated classic of all time.

"I am Heathcliff - he's always, always in my mind - not as a pleasure, any more then I am always a pleasure to myself - but, as my own being.”--Catherine

Last year I read Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre with my YA class as a way of introducing them to a historical context for romance novels and the gothic and I loved it. Jane, Jane, Jane! This year I read Wuthering Heights with my YA class for similar reasons, and I liked it quite a lot, but not nearly as much as I did Jane Eyre. Such was the case with reviewers when WH came out in 1847, by Charlotte’s younger sister Emily. It’s not a bildungsroman, we want a bildungsroman! In other words, a more straightforward coming-of-age, rags-to-riches story with an ending we are happy with.

Emily Bronte puzzled her readers and reviewers in 1847 with this essentially two part generational narrative structure, and, well, if you think the brooding Rochester is complicated, okay, but the brooding Heathcliff?! I mean, there is something to consider in many of the great nineteenth century female authors creating their beloved famous dark and brooding heroes: Darcy (from Pride and Prejudice), Rochester (from Jane Eyre) and now the beastiest of the broodiest beast of all, Heathcliff. What’s a young man reading these books to think he should do to become attractive to women?! Is this how frogs in desks and pigtails in ink came about as a signal to attraction? Marry me or I will go insane and torment you forever?!

“Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living. You said I killed you--haunt me then. The murdered do haunt their murderers. I believe--I know that ghosts have wandered the earth. Be with me always--take any form--drive me mad. Only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! It is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!”--Heathcliff

I won’t review the plot in great detail, you have 2,000 reviews for that, but well, this is a gothic story (with moors and wild dogs and storms and ghosts and over-the-top wild and passionate speeches) which may indeed be a romance, if you can count being driven to animality (the beast to Catherine’s beauty?) and if driven-to-insanity can count as a kind of love. If obsession can count as a kind of love. And if Heathcliff is a hard sell as romantic hero (to me, but I’m not the target audience for his vibe), Catherine Earnshaw is no typically romantic heroine, either, choosing wealthier and saner Edgar Linton to marry against her baser and more elemental instincts. As she admits, she is in love with both Linton and Heathcliff, yin/yang, wants both of them in her life, but of Heathcliff she says,

“He's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.”

The second half, in which Heathcliff tries to wed his frail and whiny son Linton (whom he fathered with Isabella, Edgar Linton’s sister; I know, you need a character map with multiple highlighters to follow this one) to young Catherine, his real love Catherine’s daughter, well it just isn’t as interesting as the first half, with a less memorable conclusion, though there are powerful moments, such as Heathcliff’s dramatic confrontation with the married and pregnant Catherine. And there’s ghost sightings, always good to have ghost sightings in a gothic tale.

Overall, worthy of a classic, I’d say!

I was not prepared for how bleak this book was. I had seen movie versions of Wuthering Heights, but this was my first time reading the novel, and it was much darker than I expected.

So many of the characters are utterly unlikable! Cathy is selfish and foolish and obstinate; Heathcliff is brutal and vengeful and psychotic; Hindley is spiteful and venomous and a drunkard. And when Edgar and Isabella Linton enter the story, everything goes to hell in a handbasket.

Why, oh why, did Cathy marry Edgar when she admitted she loved Heathcliff? As a reader, I wanted to shake her and scream at her that she was making a disastrous choice. Let's hear it from Cathy herself:

I've no more business to marry Edgar Linton than I have to be in heaven; and if the wicked man in there had not brought Heathcliff so low, I shouldn't have thought of it. It would degrade me to marry Heatchliff 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 lightning, or frost from fire.

Yes, I know Cathy felt she couldn't marry Heathcliff because of his low birth and lack of education, but considering how isolated they were in Yorkshire, did it really matter that much? Was that Bronte's point -- that disobeying one's heart by following the courtship rules of one's social class caused suicidal and homicidal ravings?

I agreed with Heathcliff when he later scolded Cathy for her decision:

You teach me now how cruel you've been -- cruel and false. Why did you despise me? Why did you betray your own heart, Cathy? I have not one word of comfort. You deserve this. You have killed yourself. Yes, you may kiss me, and cry; and wring out my kisses and tears: they'll blight you -- they'll damn you. You loved me -- then what right had you to leave me? What right -- answer me -- for the poor fancy you felt for Linton? Because misery and degradation, and death, and nothing that God or Satan could inflict would have parted us, you, of your own will, did it. I have not broken your heart -- you have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine.

There was such violence in this book! Women are beaten and locked up; children are bullied and abused; punches are thrown, shots are fired, and even dogs are kicked and hung. Egad. I can imagine how shocking it must have been to the good folks of England when it was published in 1847, learning that not only did a woman write it, but that she was a clergyman's daughter, and the story involved a married woman having a tryst with another man. Wowsers.

Despite not liking the darkness of the novel, I thought the writing was good and the structure was interesting: the servant Nelly Dean relates the history of the doomed love affair to an outsider. The servant was an interloper and kept informed on events in both houses. I can't imagine a more effective way to tell the story of the love triangle. I wouldn't trust either Heathcliff or Cathy or one of the children as a narrator, they might only tell their parent's side of things. Of course, it's also interesting that Nelly Dean may not be a reliable narrator either. She often edits and omits what she tells the master; why should we believe she'd tell an outsider the whole truth?

It took me twice as long to get through this novel as it should have -- it was so bleak that I was hesitant to pick it up. The only other Bronte sister book I've read was Jane Eyre, which I liked very much, but that love story at least has some warmth in it. In contrast, Wuthering Heights left me feeling cold and bitter. I'm glad I've read it, but I don't think it's one I'll be rereading anytime soon.