A Wuthering Heights Handbook

by Richard Lettis (Editor), William E. Morris (Editor)

Critical essays on Wuthering Heights meant to be read as research, including a section on Topics for Research. Features essays from Virginia Woolf, Bruce McCullough, Dorothy Van Ghent, and Eric Solomon.

246 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1900

About the author

Dr. Richard Lettis earned degrees from the University of Massachusetts and Yale, and taught at Ohio University and C.W. Post College of Long Island University, where he served as professor, department chair, and dean. A Dickens scholar, he wrote and edited works on Dickens, Brontë, and Crane, and published essays on Twain and Salinger. His op-eds and letters appeared in major publications and were collected in Letters to the Editor: Opinions, Objections, and Recollections. He lived in Ramsey, New Jersey, with his wife, Lucy Bara Lettis, who completed his final manuscript following his death in 2017.

Reviews

[James F · Rating 4 out of 5]

Preparing to read Maryse Condé’s La Migration des Coeurs, a retelling of Wuthering Heights, I decided to re-familiarize myself with Emily Bronte’s classic novel, which I hadn’t read for a half-century. I remembered little about it except for the basic plot, and I am sure back then I didn’t really understand it at anything beyond a simple plot level; certainly I had not read enough other English novels from that time period to realize how different Wuthering Heights actually was. In fact, I don’t think I really liked the book, as far as I can recall. This time around, with a lot more experience, I got somewhat more out of it, especially aided by the critical articles in the back (it was a Norton Critical edition) and this book of critical articles. If it still doesn’t impress me as much as her sister’s Jane Eyre, it is certainly better than, say, anything by Charles Dickens.

With a book that most people have read, either in High School English or in college, there isn’t much point in summarizing the plot, and I’m not enough of a literary expert to give an original interpretation, so I will limit myself to commenting on it by way of the critical material. Between the two books, and taking account of three duplicated articles, there were twenty-five articles. Given that both books were published in the early sixties, there were happily no examples of post-modernist literary theory jargon; most of the articles were helpful, although there were a few that seemed to miss the point of the book entirely.

The three articles that were in both books were C.P. Sanger’s 1926 article on “The Structure of Wuthering Heights”, which worked out the chronology of the events, Carl Woodrings’s “The Narrators of Wuthering Heights”, and one of the two best articles, John K. Matthison’s “Nelly Dean and the Power of Wuthering Heights”, which dared to describe Nelly Dean as a negative character and unreliable narrator, who by her own narrative is constantly lying, spying, and betraying both the children and her employers – my own impression of the book. He makes the good point that our constant disagreement with the narrator forces the reader to actively think about the novel rather than simply reading for the story. Another article went even further: James Hafley’s “The Villain of Wuthering Heights”, which argues that Nelly Dean is actually the Iago of the novel; I think that is a bit too extreme – there are many villains in the book, but Nellie is certainly one of the worst.

The article that I agreed with most (in other words, the one which came closest to my own experience reading the novel), however, was Arnold Kettle’s “Emily Bronte: Wuthering Heights (1847)”, a chapter from a two-volume book, An Introduction to the English Novel. Kettle argues that the characters of Heathcliff and Catherine are not some sort of abstract symbols of “storm” and “calm” or “Nature” and “civilization”, or (just) passionately in love in some romantic sense, but are united in a common rebellion against the class-bound conventions of the other characters; that Catherine’s marriage with Edgar is not only a betrayal of her love for Heathcliff but more importantly a betrayal of their common values for the values they had been in unity against. This seems to me to make the most coherent sense out of the whole novel.

There were articles on all the major and minor characters, with one exception: Mr. Earnshaw; which I thought was a curious exception, since he is the “protagonist” of the novel in the literal sense – the character whose decisions initiate the entire action of the book.

[cebkowal · Rating 4 out of 5]

i really liked this book, would definitely only recommend it if you really like wuthering heights but since i do i had a great time

some of the essay topics can feel a little repetitive but i liked how in a lot of the essays other essays in the books are mentioned so it really feels like a conversation between the writers. the essays might be a tad dated, i would have loved some discussion about race in wuthering heights, but since this book was published in 1961 and a lot of the essays are from the 40s and the 50s i would say it’s understandable why there’s no mention of it.

if i was to recommend one essay i would say read “the villain in wuthering heights” by james hafley, he makes a fairly convincing argument about nelly dean and it made me think of the entire book in a completely new way.