Leather-bound. Collins Clear-Type Press, 1953? (No date was given but the book contains stills from the 1939 film starring Laurence Olivier,) 373 p. Originally published in 1847.
Approaching a classic like this is an odd experience, as it trails a cloud of expectations. I was led to believe it to be a great love story. It isn’t. There is very little evidence in the text of a grand passion between Catherine (Earnshaw as was) and Heathcliff, only a close mutual regard through childhood companionship. She marries someone else, Edgar Linton, apparently quite happily. So does Heathcliff, of course, but that is purely to spite Edgar (who never made any secret of his disregard for Heathcliff) by ensnaring his sister.
The book’s reputation also carries something of the uncanny and indeed it starts with a Gothic touch as Mr Lockwood stops for the night at Wuthering Heights with its strange occupants and we look to be set for a ghost story with Lockwood sleeping in a room where he hears the voice and feels the presence of the long-dead Catherine outside the window. Yet apart from Edgar Linton’s propensity for sitting by Catherine’s grave for hours on end this aspect of the weird is dropped for the entirety of the novel until the last few pages where Heathcliff says he believes spirits live on after death. (And then we have the last line about “unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.”)
I was troubled early on by the unexamined – and class-ridden – assumption that because Heathcliff was a foundling and as a child brutish in appearance, he must therefore be brutish in fact. (Another writer once reminded us, “there is no art to find the mind’s construction in the face,” after all.) True, Heathcliff’s later behaviour is abhorrent beyond belief but, apart from Edgar Linton’s dislike, Brontë makes little or none of the case that others’ attitudes to him might have conspired to make his character so. After all, Catherine sees something in him. Then again, without his dark character there would have been no story.
In common with many nineteenth century novels the book is to modern eyes wordy and over-written. Also, its structure is overly convoluted. Supposedly narrated by Mr Lockwood, much of the story is relayed to us second-hand through servant Nelly Dean’s recounting (and sometimes even third hand as she tells Lockwood what Catherine Linton has said to her.)
The resolution is rather sudden and, it might be said, convenient. In addition, Catherine Linton’s accommodation with Hareton Earnshaw appears too quick. Even the title is something of a misnomer. Many of the scenes of the story take place in Thrushcross Grange. But that name does not have the Gothic attraction of the gloomy, allusive, adjective “wuthering”.
Pedant’s corner:- “pushed passed” (past,) an occasional missing comma before a piece of direct speech, “‘if I wished any blessing in the world, is was to find him’” (in the world, it was to find him,) “she learned also than her secret visits were to end” (also that her secret visits,) skurrying (scurrying,) “what inmates their were” (there were.)
