Fascinating. ( )

An romance set in the English countryside.

Much different from the movie. His love for Catherine drove him to such insanity. It's so vividly described in this book. ( )

EMILY BRONTE: Wuthering Heights
Read several times and listened on audio July 2009.
Raw, passionate, haunting, tender, brutal and unforgettable.
It seems as if, in her isolation, Emily Bronte seeks all that life has to offer, its good and evil, its pleasure and pain, through the writing of this book. Wuthering Heights was her only novel and it is such a masterpiece that it feels as if she put everything into it, or perhaps that that it extracted everything out of her.

When the master of Wuthering Heights brings home the street urchin Heathcliff he changes the destiny of his family and that of the neighbouring household at the Grange. His daughter Cathy develops a bond with Heathcliff that begins to deepen but, ashamed of his low position, she denies this growing passion and marries Linton, the heir to the Grange. Heathcliff goes off to better himself and returns to exact a terrible revenge.

One of Wuthering Heights strengths is its narrative technique- the story is relayed in the main part by Nelly (Ellen) Dean the nursemaid and Mr Lockwood, tenant at the Grange but the unfolding of the story includes letters, ghostly sightings, anecdotes relayed second hand and related conversations between other characters spanning three generations. This gives a sense of many people affected by one story thus heightening the strength of Heathcliff and Cathy’s passion.

The prose style is surprising direct and modern, vigorous to the point of brutal in its laying bare the themes of love; romance; passion; revenge; and violence; covering ideas about: nature; religion; superstition; death; and the social values of the 19th Century. Feminist ideas about the inheritance of land and money, and about marriage for social status underpin the plot.

This book can be quite confusing at times by the use of similar names such Catherine's daughter also being named Catherine and Isabella Linton calling her son Linton. Also having to travel through two sets of narration in a non-chronological order. However, Brontë deals with all these factors masterfully to produce a masterpiece of English Literature that is far removed from other novels of the period. ( )

You can definitely see where Bronte picked up the story again in part two. I am not a huge fan of this book at all, specifically because of the tacked-on feeling of part two. ( )