Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights (Illustrated)

"If you’ve ever started reading this book and not gotten further than the first chapter, it’s worth revisiting. It’s very layered. There are a lot of narrators, and there are a lot of people who get to take charge of the story in different ways. It’s about who has the right to tell a story, to tell a love story, and to make a claim to history. The narrative starts years after the main events of the novel have taken place and then directs us backward to this doomed love affair between Heathcliff and Cathy. It’s about the wildness of the moors and the essential wildness of people. It’s not too polite. It’s dramatic and juicy and wonderful, and it’s one of my favorite novels. It’s similar to the way that Moby Dick is such a crazy book and the Modernists fell in love with it. Part of what’s fun about illustrators picking up books from earlier on and putting them in a new situation is that this work ends up in a different artistic and literary context. This edition of Wuthering Heights came out in 1942, when there had already been this blossoming of Modernism, and there was a lot more respect for the idea that there isn’t one perfect, linear story to tell. In Wuthering Heights , meaning is really nested together. There’s a moment when Heathcliff knows that his love is dying, and he dashes his head against a tree, and it makes him bleed. But we don’t learn about it from his perspective; we learn about it from the perspective of the caretaker. She’s remembering it, but she doesn’t know exactly what happened. She’s not sure if he hit his head on the tree the night before or if it just happened. All of the places where you would hinge definite meaning are questioned in a really beautiful way. The edition I’d like to talk about was illustrated by Eichenberg, who did the Jane Eyre we just discussed, although Clare Leighton (who illustrated Return of the Native ) also did a Wuthering Heights . Both Leighton and Eichenberg depict that moment by the tree, but they approach it very differently. There’s something really beautiful about thinking about the repetition of imagery. If we’re both reading Wuthering Heights , we’ll experience it so differently, but we’ll still be occupying the same essential scenes. There’s a wild encounter with barking dogs early on in the novel, and the illustrations really take on some of the energy and strangeness of the novel. Eichenberg’s Jane Eyre is all about her perspective. His Wuthering Heights is much weirder and more interested in landscape, with the dramatic moors in the background. It’s really gorgeous. She picked the right moment in the story. The book is so much about yearning. One cool thing about Eichenberg is his name literally translates as ‘oak mountain,’ and what he’s doing here is high-level wood engraving work, so he really associated himself with the material, with the wood. There’s a beautiful set of images in his archives at Yale, where he tore up bits of the prints that he made from Wuthering Heights and collaged them into the shape of his face, and into a profile of his face. I think he associated himself so strongly with these books. He made that collage years after illustrating those books, but they had stayed with him. He made another self-portrait, where he’s surrounded by the ghosts of authors that he illustrated. One of them is Emily Brontë, and she’s holding this book in front of her. He took it so seriously that he was occupying someone else’s artistic perspective. He was haunted by the experience because it’s such a haunting book."