Wuthering Heights
By Emily Brontë
Review by Isabelle
Wuthering Heights is the story of a small world inhabited by enormous characters. Read just a couple chapters and you will see why this book has made such an impact on our imaginations. Few other fictitious lovers have come close to the model set by Catherine and Heathcliff. And yet, haunting the novel at every turn is the question of how Heathcliff can turn this passionate love into such dastardly cruelty against other characters, particularly his own relations. In Brontë’s world of the 1770s Yorkshire moors, unfiltered and extravagant behaviour fuelled by high emotions has brothers and sisters constantly crossing each other. If this sounds like a lot, one of the great turns of the novel is that much of the drama is narrated by a servant who sits just to the side of the action (though she too experiences the wrath of Heathcliff). Amongst the scenes of social drama, Brontë sprinkles vivid, beautiful descriptions of the ecology of the moors and its seasons.
Readers should be warned, this book contains domestic violence and a view of race commonly held in the Victorian period.
For fans of Jane Eyre, Frankenstein and Normal People.
