Wuthering Heights

This is a novel about crappy people. Or, specifically, one really crappy guy named Heathcliff, who is adopted by an Northern English family, treated poorly, and proceeds, over the course of generations, to extract his revenge on them in all sorts of different ways. Nothing acute and immediate, mind you – this guy is in for the long haul, and his revenge takes place over decades.

I have problems with classic novels, it seems (this one dates to 1847). I read them, and generally hate them, because I think I’ve been broken by contemporary fiction. I think I just fail to evaluate them in the context on when they were written.

Very few novels written before the 20th century have really, genuinely entertained me in the present. I can remember that Dracula was very good, and I was blown away by the ending of A Tale of Two Cities when I read it in college. But then I read things like Crime and Punishment or The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde or Pride and Prejudice, and I’m just…meh.

So, at the risk of pissing off literary purists, compared to a modern novel, this one is just a long snooze.

There are only two settings – two Yorkshire estates: Wuthering Heights and Thurcross Grange, which are about four miles apart, separated by the moors (hills, basically – the setting is just south of Scotland). All of the action takes place in one of these two houses. People argue, make up, get married, are born, die, weep, fight and have all sorts of drama in these two places (or occasionally in the space between them).

The character naming doesn’t help. I had this same problem with War and Peace and Shogun. It’s hard to keep track.

• Catherine gives birth to Cathy, who is also called Catherine quite a bit
• Edgar Linton has a son named… Linton Heathcliff (not to be confused with the main guy, Heathcliff)
• There are multiple Earnshaws, including Hareton and Hindley
• Nelly is the maid and the narrator of most of the story; she’s also called Ellen occasionally

Almost the entire story is told in flashback, except the very beginning and the very end. Nelly narrates most of it, telling the entire dramatic history of the inhabitants of the two houses to Mr. Lockwood, who spends a couple nights at Wuthering Heights and is traumatized by how awful the people are. The long flashback is book-ended by a brief beginning and end in the present – the core conflict of the book is how the people came to be the way they are.

One of the problems is that the main(-ish) character sucks. Healthcliff is an abusive jerk. This is not a love story, which it’s sometimes presented as, and which the 2025 movie has been framed. The “love,” if you absolutely want to call it that, is perverse.

Also, I found the book confusing. I had to follow along with SparkNotes after every chapter, and I missed a lot. I don’t know if I stopped paying attention, or if the writing is just obtuse (or, again, if it was fine in its time, I’m just not putting it in the right context).

(I actually stopped reading it at 68%, but left the SparkNotes page open in my browser for months out of some feeling that if I closed it, I would be admitting defeat. I finally came back to the book and finished it in a 24-hour span, because I refused to let the book beat me.)

It got tedious at the end. There’s no big revelation, and I was just kind of happy it was over. I suppose there’s some satisfaction in the final disposition of some of the characters – the main theme is about a younger generation shedding the emotional baggage of the generations before them – but the entire story had been such a bore to that point, that I had stopped caring.

Book Data

Author

Emily Bronte

Year

1847

Pages

331

Acquired

November 17, 2022

Open Library

OL21177W

Wikipedia

Wuthering_Heights

• I have read this book. According to my records, I completed it on July 11, 2026.
• A hardcover copy of this book is currently in my home library.