Wuthering Heights

"So this is thirty years after the death of Jane Austen, it’s a generation on. It’s light years away. You couldn’t imagine anyone further from the world of Mr Woodhouse than Healthcliff. It’s about as far as it’s possible to get. But it’s very influential and Romantic. It fits into the Romantic movement in a way that Austen doesn’t. It means a sensibility that celebrates being set free from convention. They’re very subtle, but every single character in Austen is—in one way or another—conventional. They pay tribute to the conventions of ordinary life. Whereas Cathy—and all of Emily Brontë’s characters—are more or less feral. That’s why we love them. It’s a different world, it’s a mad world. In some ways, Emily Brontë is more of a poet. But she has inspired many subsequent writers of fiction. You couldn’t imagine Lawrence without her, for example. You couldn’t imagine some of Hardy. It’s always said, isn’t it, that you’re either a Jane Eyre-ite or you’re a Wuthering Heights-ite—it’s one or the other. I think we like that don’t we? We want to have somebody investigate the bleakness of human nature. It’s not a feel-good novel. There are two options: you can either stay on the surface or you can go deep. There’s not much in between. Yes. Also, one of the things about these books is that they all talk to each other. In a strange way, they’re connected. There’s an internal dialogue between one book and another. Sometimes it’s quite explicit: in the preface to the second edition of Jane Eyre , Charlotte Brontë acknowledges quite freely her debt to Thackeray—which is interesting, I think. Yes, it is important. It’s the same with Virginia Woolf and the stream of consciousness, as well as the rigorous use of point of view—what point of view you’re adopting—which is comparatively late. The novel is an evolving form and, at one time or other, it is different. Clearly the novel now is not what the novel was—even twenty years ago."

"I read this when I was 16 and was completely blow away by the intensity of it all. It’s so passionate. Again it’s about love turning into obsessions and being all-consuming and how even future generations are manipulated by this love. I read it around the time that the Kate Bush song came out and it was so funky that this girl who’d read the book when she was 12 and written this song was having a hit with it. The rugged moors put a chill into the setting and it’s just about the pain Cathy and Heathcliff go through and put everyone else through. I am always fascinated by intense emotions and I notice that some people succumb to them and some don’t. In these books love is seen from different angles and only The World According To Garp is really optimistic."

"Wuthering Heights is a strange novel in a lot of ways. It’s a standalone—there’s not really another book like it. This is apparent even in early editions edited after Emily Brontë’ s death by Charlotte Brontë. Charlotte Brontë makes some strong claims for Emily’s goodness, passion and strangeness as a person. She’s trying to argue against readers who see the novel as immoral. Charlotte’s preface and alterations try to regularise Wuthering Heights and minimise the moral complaint one could have against the novel. To some extent. It frustrates contemporary critics because it seems like special pleading. It’s as if Charlotte trying to turn what Emily is doing in her novel into the kind of thing Charlotte does in hers, which is a very different framework for understanding how characters act. Whenever I teach Wuthering Heights , it’s hard for students navigate the novel’s story—because of the way it’s plotted, the nested and individuated narration. And because the characters being described are so unusual. It’s also challenging because it’s unclear if you’re supposed to read the first generation or the second generation as the aim of the novel. I think Charlotte, and a lot of readers, would tend to read the second generation as a laudable aim for the novel’s world—it gets the wildness out. There’s that sort-of pedagogical plot at the end of the novel, where Catherine the Younger is teaching Hareton how to read, a contrarian smacking him. Yet that reading minimises the interest in the first generation. Most readers remember Cathy the Elder and Heathcliff—they don’t focus on Hareton and Catherine the Younger. What do you do with a novel that has, seemingly, a positive happy ending, that seems to actually have more energy and interest in the first not -happy ending? Yeah, I don’t think so. There’s a lot of frustration with that second pairing, because it feels like a diminution in intensity in the novel. Obviously, it’s domesticated; they’re going to be married, live at the heights, and enjoy a stable marital relationship. It also eliminates the threat of somebody else, like a fox in the henhouse, because obviously Cathy the Younger’s marriage to Edgar is never consummated. There’s no strange residue questioning, ‘Whose child is this?’ There are some people who want to read Catherine the Younger as Heathcliff’s child. I don’t think there’s a lot of evidence for that in the novel. But I do think there’s supposed to be a confusion: who is the true partner of Catherine the Elder? The challenge of Wuthering Heights is teasing out the intensity of the novel versus the plot-level solution that Brontë gives us at the end of the book."

"That’s a very interesting question. Two very important women novelists died virgins: Jane Austen and Emily Brontë. It is very odd, because there is a great deal of sex in both their fiction. The Brontës had this idea of a Samson figure. Rochester, like Samson, has to be mutilated before he can be domesticated. What is interesting about Heathcliff, in Wuthering Heights , is that he isn’t. He remains this superman. He is greater than a human being. He is named after two elemental things, the heath and the cliff. We never know what his first name is. He doesn’t himself. He may be, in fact, half black. He may be a gypsy, no one knows. He comes from nowhere. He is found in the gutter in Liverpool. Some people think he must be Irish because the novel was written during the time of the Irish famine, although it is set in the earlier 19th century. All the Brontës, Anne as well as Emily and Charlotte, had this image of a great and powerful man whom they feared and were fascinated by, and rather hoped to be dominated by, after he had been tamed. And mere women like Cathy in Wuthering Heights , Jane in Jane Eyre , Agnes in Agnes Grey or Helen in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall – how did they tame these men? Taming man is really what the Brontës were all about. Things were changing very fast in Victorian life. You can feel the stirrings of women moving towards getting the vote. The important thing about the Victorian novel is that it had a huge female readership. There is a critic called Elaine Showalter, the author of A Literature of Their Own , who sees it as women having a literature, well, of their own. She sees it as women talking to women across the barriers that are erected between them. So a novel like Jane Eyre is one woman’s conversation with a large number of women. I think that still works today. You could say it is a novel that women readers are privileged in understanding, and that male readers have to struggle, to some extent, to empathise with what is going on."

"Daphne du Maurier must have been deeply inspired by Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights as both stories are cut from similar turf, if different wilderness settings – Wuthering Heights is set on the Yorkshire moors. Neither stories are comforting reads, but they are books to get lost in. I recently read both close together and there are undoubted similarities, however it is the power of Bronte’s love story that stands the test of time. One of the most memorable and passionate moments in Wuthering Heights , is when Cathy compares her men to nature: Linton to the soft foliage of the trees while Heathcliff is the eternal rocks beneath. I love that paragraph. “In Wuthering Heights once again it’s the landscape that underlines the choices the characters must make” In Wuthering Heights once again it’s the landscape that underlines the choices the characters must make. Cathy must choose between the grand house in the lush valley: protected, comfortable and tame; or the wild, exhilarating bleakness of Wuthering Heights . It’s one of those books that reminds us that as humans often we must decide between following our heads or our hearts. I wanted to include two acclaimed books published by Chicken House in which the settings are central to the stories, but above all exotic . Both juggle familiar story ingredients – young heroines separated from those they love, who embark on perilous journeys to dazzling, dangerous places to find out who they are and what they are made of."