Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


This 19th-century classic has not aged well. I confess I gave up half-way through, defeated by the self-absorption and mysoginy of its characters, the histrionics of their declarations, and the irksome artifice of its frame-tale device. I am aware that each of these criticisms could be countered with claims of needing to take into account Brontë’s social and literary context, but I don’t find Austen or Hardy nearly so problematic. Among other things, they were more artful wordsmiths and creators of more rounded characters.

The 1940s copy I read included a still from the Hollywood classic with Laurence Olivier as romantic hero Heathcliffe. This led me to wonder how much of the novel’s enduring popularity owes to screen adptations that have made more of its Yorkshire setting (the moors are barely mentioned after the opening chapters) and less of Heathcliffe’s cruelty, and indeed made the man more palatable still by casting Olivier (1939), or Ralph Fiennes (1992), or Tom Hardy (2009) to play him.




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