Wuthering Heights

Wuthering Heights is a great novel and a terrible dating recommendation.

The moors and the famous doomed pair got me through the door. Then I began to suspect that every person telling me what happened had something to gain from the telling. Emily Brontë does not hand you a love story and ask you to forgive its damage. She makes the damage the thing you have to look at.

It is also much funnier than its weather forecast suggests. Someone is always entering a room with entirely the wrong idea of who is in it. Someone else is being grand about a feeling that should probably have remained private. I found myself laughing, then feeling slightly ashamed of laughing, which is a fair description of my relationship with this book.

The premise (no spoilers past Catherine's choice)

Lockwood rents Thrushcross Grange on the Yorkshire moors and visits his landlord at the forbidding house called Wuthering Heights. From that uneasy introduction, he learns the history of Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff. Heathcliff was taken in by Catherine's family as a foundling; they grew up together, and their attachment became the sort that rearranges everyone else's furniture, whether anyone asked or not. Catherine faces a choice between that attachment and a more socially secure marriage.

That is the early doorway. Beyond it, the novel is as interested in the people standing near the central pair as in the pair themselves. A house can hold a grudge. Two houses can apparently make a profession of it.

What works

The telling is the marvel. Lockwood arrives with the confidence of a man who thinks he can understand a household by spending one miserable night in it. Much of what follows comes from the housekeeper Nelly Dean, who knows these families intimately and has her own habits of judgement. Brontë puts distance between event and account: a visitor records what a participant remembers. I kept having to ask whether I believed the judgement, the memory, or simply the person who spoke last. That friction is the book's pulse.

The structure also refuses to let a passionate childhood attachment stay picturesque. Brontë widens the lens to a second generation, so the emotional bill comes due in a different set of hands. I will not say who pays it or how. The point is the design: what begins as an apparently private feeling becomes a family climate. The book keeps changing what its central romance means by showing what it does to people outside it.

Then there is the landscape. The Yorkshire moors are not a soft backdrop for handsome suffering. Their isolation makes every departure and return feel more extreme. Inside, rooms become places where resentment collects; outside, open ground offers no guarantee of freedom. Brontë can make a doorway feel like a border crossing. You need not admire every flourish of the prose to feel how carefully the geography traps these people together.

I love, too, that the novel lets desire be ugly without making the sentences ugly. The voices can be sharp, formal, pleading, self-serving, sometimes all at once. Its force comes from the pressure of those switches. A more obliging novel would give us a clean explanation for each act of cruelty. Brontë lets a person be injured and injure someone else. She trusts us to survive the lack of a permission slip.

What's polarising

If you need a couple to grow kinder through loving each other, this is an exceptionally ornate way to ruin your evening. The novel asks for attention without offering much company you would choose at dinner. Cruelty is not a misunderstanding waiting for a conversation. It becomes a repeated way of dealing with other people. I cannot blame anyone who reaches a point of exhaustion and wants one adult to behave like an adult for six consecutive pages.

The family relationships also take work to keep straight. Names recur, time folds back, and the account comes through people whose knowledge has limits. Early on, I had to slow down and keep the households clear in my head. That delay is useful to the design, but it is still a delay. If your patience for a frame narrator is thin, Lockwood may have you bargaining with the weather to hurry up.

And the intensity can flatten the ordinary emotional register. Not every grievance deserves the operatic treatment it receives. At moments I wanted a stretch of calm conversation, a cup of tea, perhaps a responsible neighbour with spare keys. Brontë has other plans. She would rather make the excess itself the evidence.

The Heathcliff of it

Heathcliff is a foundling who grows up inside the Earnshaw household yet remains painfully outside its easy claims to belonging. That wound matters. It does not turn his later cruelty into a romantic credential. The book's unnerving achievement is that I can understand the appeal of his absolute feeling while refusing to call the consequences devotion. He is compelling in the way a fire is compelling when it has reached the curtains.

That distinction is why I resist the neat label of tragic hero. He can make an entrance feel electrically charged, and Brontë knows it. She also gives us enough room to see the people who have to live after the entrance. I was never rooting for his vindication. I was rooting for everyone else to get a door that locked.

Spice and heat

Heat: 0 of 5, with no explicit sex on the page. This is desire, fixation and social peril, not a source of open door scenes. The temperature is emotional; the conduct is often brutal. Do not confuse the lack of sexual detail with gentleness.

Content note: the novel includes domestic abuse, child abuse, emotional cruelty, animal cruelty, racism, illness and death. The violence within relationships is part of the book's subject, and the period language around race is unpleasant. If you need a love story that treats harm as a hurdle the couple can sweetly clear, choose another night.

Who it's for

Read this if you want a classic that will argue with your idea of romance, and if you enjoy having to decide how much a narrator knows. Read it for the framing, for the houses, for the frighteningly durable resentment. Bring a little patience for the names and a healthy suspicion of anyone described as irresistible. Both will serve you well.

Skip it if you want a comforting romance or a redeemable brooding man. The brooding is plentiful. The redemption is not the service on offer.

Books like Wuthering Heights

• The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë: another Brontë novel that looks steadily at the damage done inside a marriage, with less appetite for making the damaging man a spectacle.
• Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier: for a house saturated with the past and a narrator trying to work out what sort of story she has entered.
• The Silent Companions by Laura Purcell: a less obvious pick if the isolated house and Gothic unease are what kept you reading; its dread turns more openly supernatural.
• The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy: for another landscape that seems to have opinions about the people trying to make lives upon it.

Finished the book and not ready to leave? Heathcliff is waiting on Fictora.

Talk to Heathcliff