I’ll be honest, 2020 wasn’t a great year in books for me. Lockdown should have been the perfect opportunity to crack on with some reading and finally meet my Goodreads goal of a book a week (last accomplished in 2015), but that didn’t really happen. While the books I read last year were mostly great, the desire to sink into a good book was clouded by the constant anxiety of the state of things. It’s hard to commit to a book a week when you feel like you’ve got hundreds of other, more important things to sort out to keep everything ticking over as the world shifts around you. So, with the situation still constantly shifting, how do you get out of that hole and start reading great literature again?
I have the answer: Wuthering Heights. Hear me out.
I have the answer: Wuthering Heights. Hear me out.
Most people have had an interaction with Wuthering Heights before, whether it be reading the novel itself, listening to Kate Bush’s immense 1978 hit, or analysing an extract about Cathy’s ghost for a GCSE English paper - perhaps you, as I was, were sitting in the school gym, uncomfortable at a tiny, rickety exam table, belly rumbling, trying to make sense of this little piece of writing in a way that would get you marks. Perhaps, like me, you enjoyed the tiny fragment fed to you by AQA, but the idea of reading Wuthering Heights was quite intimidating, and the copy you already owned had size 9 font and couldn’t be read easily in the dark of your bedroom at 3am. Perhaps, like me, you thought more about that Rainbow Magic book your sibling had left on the coffee table, its easy prose and conventional naming techniques a comfort in the face of a literary mammoth, so you just read that instead, leaving Emily Bronte to gather dust. It wasn’t until A-Level that I thought about this book again, needing a text for a particular piece of coursework, and it changed my approach to literature for life. A zest for literature written by, and about, sad women began to emerge, one that shaped the course of my further academic career, but it all began with Cathy, Heathcliff, and the strong gusts of the Yorkshire moors.
Wuthering Heights is perhaps the best reading experience I’ve ever had. From the moment the novel opens, we are thrown into a bleak, romantic landscape, and the relationship between these concepts is at the heart of the rest of the story. The characters are rich and vivid, complex, and sometimes a terror to read about - the infamous Heathcliff has made a name for himself on screen as a tragically flawed anti-hero, but the novel itself does little to suggest he’s anything other than awful. Cathy’s ghost haunts the novel, and us, as much as she does everyone else (also she can bleed? What’s that about?). Even the moors have character, and it seeps through the core of the novel, inescapably present.
After having read Jane Eyre last year (one of the few that I did), I found that everyone I spoke to about it had read Jane Eyre, but never picked up Wuthering Heights. I very much enjoyed it, and while I regret having put it off for years, there is a part of me that feels the need to defend Wuthering Heights, and encourage every single person I encounter to read it. That’s where you come in, dear reader. If you’ve read Wuthering Heights, consider revisiting it with me, or passing a copy to a friend with a note that says ‘Hey, you should read this book.’ If you’ve never read Wuthering Heights, I cannot recommend it enough. The Great Gatsby gets a lot of love for being a book where everyone kind of sucks and the ending isn’t happy, and Wuthering Heights is just like that, only its about a ghost, a really terrible man, and escaping the repetitive nature of time.
Doesn’t that just sound like a hoot?
Wuthering Heights is perhaps the best reading experience I’ve ever had. From the moment the novel opens, we are thrown into a bleak, romantic landscape, and the relationship between these concepts is at the heart of the rest of the story. The characters are rich and vivid, complex, and sometimes a terror to read about - the infamous Heathcliff has made a name for himself on screen as a tragically flawed anti-hero, but the novel itself does little to suggest he’s anything other than awful. Cathy’s ghost haunts the novel, and us, as much as she does everyone else (also she can bleed? What’s that about?). Even the moors have character, and it seeps through the core of the novel, inescapably present.
After having read Jane Eyre last year (one of the few that I did), I found that everyone I spoke to about it had read Jane Eyre, but never picked up Wuthering Heights. I very much enjoyed it, and while I regret having put it off for years, there is a part of me that feels the need to defend Wuthering Heights, and encourage every single person I encounter to read it. That’s where you come in, dear reader. If you’ve read Wuthering Heights, consider revisiting it with me, or passing a copy to a friend with a note that says ‘Hey, you should read this book.’ If you’ve never read Wuthering Heights, I cannot recommend it enough. The Great Gatsby gets a lot of love for being a book where everyone kind of sucks and the ending isn’t happy, and Wuthering Heights is just like that, only its about a ghost, a really terrible man, and escaping the repetitive nature of time.
Doesn’t that just sound like a hoot?
review written by Jay Fox
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