While acknowledging the novel’s structure as famously complex, critics have begun to more closely analyze the multiple, unreliable narrators, questioning the identity of the real villains of the story. Still, Wuthering Heights, though warped into a strangely violent love story by Hollywood and some readers, is now generally accepted as a classic.
(North British Review)Ĭontemporary critics sometimes still compare Wuthering Heights to Jane Eyre ( Virginia Woolf, 1916), liken its protagonists to Shakespeare’s villains ( Joyce Carol Oates, 1983), and confess to loving its “strange cruelty and enchantment” ( Anne Rice, 2004). Here all the faults of Jane Eyre (by Charlotte Brontë) are magnified a thousand fold, and the only consolation which we have in reflecting upon it is that it will never be generally read. Comparing the novel with Jayne Eyre, critic James Lorimer was brutally dismissive: While a few critics remarked on the terrific story ( New Monthly) and powerful writing (Tait’s Edinburgh Review), most critics declared Wuthering Heights a strange book (Examiner), a disagreeable story (Athenaeum), or a strange, inartistic story (Atlas).
Can anyone survive their destructive passions?ġ847 edition title page of Wuthering Heights with author’s pseudonym Ellis Bell Critical Reception of Wuthering HeightsĬontemporaneous reviews (1847-49) of Wuthering Heights were not kind. In this violent yet engrossing revenge tale, Heathcliff and Cathy’s tempestuous relationship threatens the lives of everyone in both families, as well as those of their descendants and the story’s multiple narrators. Meanwhile, Edgar’s sister Isabella, though she has a pampered and luxurious life, wants to escape Thrushcross Grange, and she finds Heathcliff desperately exciting, arousing Cathy’s angry possessiveness. In an attempt to escape her narrow, abusive home-life, Cathy encourages Edgar Linton’s love and a proposal, arousing Heathcliff’s violent jealousy. In her turn, Cathy claims to love Heathcliff, but she longs for the money, education, and culture she sees in the Lintons, their neighbors at Thrushcross Grange.
As a young man, Heathcliff, an orphaned gypsy, is adopted by the Earnshaws, who live at Wuthering Heights, an isolated farm on the moors, where he becomes devoted to the pretty but spoiled daughter Catherine Earnshaw.
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