Wuthering Heights

Sorry, I have no idea.

Did it?


I find WH to be a tempest in a teacup as well....just can't see why it is considered so great.

I just want to bump their heads together, and tell them they need more fibre.

Ha! Precisely.

I don't remember that many details but I remember being very impatient with both of them and finding Heathcliff rather boorish. As in, not the attractive, dark bad boy he's supposed to be, just a petulant, mean bore.

I'm not sure. I figured Heathcliff married Isabella because it brought him closer to Edgar's land and fortune. It doesn't seem right she'd inherit the estate considering a) she's a girl in early 1800'sEngland and b) the first born is a boy.

My friend seems to think there's a line in the book that says Isabella takes it all...he's looking into it.

While reading it I kept on saying to myself, "not this again."

I kept on forgetting Heathcliff was supposed to be a dark, brooding badboy which translates into romantic. I found him to be too abusive, too angry, too greedy, too miserable.

Now tell me why everyone swoons over Darcy.

Wuthering Heights sucks. It's the kind of dreck Jane Austen was lampooning in her novels--and Austen does a better job of telling a coherent story. I sometimes suspect that English teachers inflict it on their students because they were tortured with it themselves.

I don't think it sucked, especially considering the language/style of had quite a lyrical quality, some beautiful writing.

Are you sure you're not being overemotional about this? Is it that time of the month for you?

That is an ENTIRELY different matter!!!!

I have to go back a few years in my memory, but I seem to recall the reason Heathcliff pushed for the marriage of his son Linton to young Catherine was so he could get control of Thrushcross Grange, and that it wasn't really Isabella's. Young Catherine, being Edward's only heir, was the heir of Thrushcross Grange. Heathcliff knew his son Linton was weak and would probably die. He could then control all the lands via young Catherine. Does that make sense? Did Bronte ever state that Isabella was the heir?

I think Hollywood is responsible for softening Heathcliff. He really is a brute in the book.

As to Darcy, he's a totally different cup of tea. Darcy is revealed to have a heart of gold under his cool social facade. Austin does a brilliant job of creating sexual tension between him and Elizabeth, and in the end he becomes the savior of her family and does a very successful Grovel to win Elizabeth over. Heathcliff just goes from bad to worse.

Just found this in Wiki:


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heathcliff_(Wuthering_Heights)

Bite me, asshole. Men don't have menstrual periods. I don't get emotionally involved in novels, but i appreciate a good story teller.

A badly written novel with a good story line can be engaging, and hold the reader's attention. The best written novel in the world if it lacks coherence and plausible characters is a waste of time.

Austen's characters are believable, and three dimensional--real people. Some particularly good examples of this are to be found in Mansfield Park, Northhanger Abbey and Persuasion. She constructs a good story line, too, and engages the reader in the lives of the characters. Austen was a genius, and her early death was a tragedy for literature. The publishing of Wuthering Heights, on the other hand, was a tragedy for literature.

I don't think she ever said Isabella was the heir, but according to my friend who read it, he seems to think so. He's Joe Ph.D, which means he'll begin researching property laws around that time. I wanted to save him the trouble and ask here.

Your memory description is a good one. I saw the Wikipedia page as well and figured his marriage to Isabella brought him closer to the obtaining the family fortune because Edgar would be the next step on the ladder.

I've been told Pride and Prejudice is one of Jane Austen's best novels. I'll eventually get to it. I read Emma last year and couldn't get past the obsession with the #@$! pianoforte and all the good manners. Nonetheless, I finally finished it, sort of in a swallowing cod liver oil sort of a way.

I agree Pride and Prejudice is Austin's best. I also really like the A&E version of it with Colin Firth, most of the PBS versions are dishwater in comparison. I know I read Emma, but I think the movie versions have gotten in my way of remembering the actual book. I found Northanger Abbey to be a drag and probably only finished it because it was the one book I had on a 7 hour flight.

I really don't think Isabella was the heir. I remember something about Heathcliff making a statement about getting control of the property, but it would be via the death of other characters.

I don't think that Pride and Prejudice is Austen's best, and it is important to remember that for most of her career, she was a satirist. Neither Pride and Prejudice nor Sense and Sensibility were to be taken seriously--they satirized the then popular gothic romance novels. Northanger Abbey is one of my favorites, but it is also heavy-handed satire, and is not to be taken seriously. The largest work of Austen's juvenilia was Catherine, or the Bower, which she wrote in order to read it to her family to entertain them, when she was still in her teens, about 1796 or -97 (EDIT: Sorry, i just checked my facts, and Austen was in her early 20s when she wrote Catherine--although it was based on a fragment she wrote while in her teens). She sold it for about ten pounds very early on, now entitled Susan, and the publisher put it on a shelf and left it there. Many, many years later, her brother bought the manuscript back from the publisher for just what he had paid for it, and he (the brother) returned it to Jane, who then revised it. She died before it was published, and the newly prepared manuscript became Northanger Abbey.

Personally, i consider Mansfield Park to be her best satire (although i know most people don't like to read long books that make them think), and Persuasion was her best novel altogether, being an exploration of women and marriage--her lifelong theme--and which was intended to be taken seriously. Both Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility were being written and revised by Austen when she sold her first manuscript, the Catherine manuscript, completed, revised and retitled Susan. It is not possible to fully appreciate Austen's work without the understanding that she was satirizing popular novels of the day, with their lugubrious gothic romances (such as Wuthering Heights, which, although it was published thirty years after Austen's death, represents the worst in the kind of novels she was poking fun at). Ironically, Austen was popular with literary elites until half a century after her death, when she became more widely popular. But her influence on writers in the 19th century was profound precisely because she was widely read in literary circles, and she has justifiably been seen as a major influence on the development of realism in novels--she profoundly influence writers such as George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans). Although i enjoy Eliot's novels, they can be tedious, because she was being so serious, and lacked Austen's sense of fun.

Brontë's Wuthering Heights becomes even more ridiculous when one considers that it was written a generation after the popularity of the gothic romance had already begun to fade. It isn't the height of gothic novels, it's the swan song of gothic novels, and it is tedious, over-written and highly implausible. That it appealed to unmarried young women in the Victorian era in England is no reason to continue to consider it great literature. Austen deserves to be considered a producer of great literature, not only because of the enduring popularity of her work, but because she is arguably the greatest satirist in the English language, and even while lampooning gothic romances, had something serious to say about the marriage market in her society, while writing better gothic novels than the people she was making fun of. What is even more inexplicable about Wuthering Heights is that it could have been written after Austen. One can only assume that Brontë had never read Austen, or at least not before she produced that horror of a novel.

What made reading Emma almost bearable was watching the movie Clueless. The movie interpreted the book in a very funny way.

I think my Ph.D friend interpreted Isabella as the heir. He's not here today, but when I see him, I'll let him know.

What I meant was-- his interpretation of Isabella as the heir is incorrect.

I think Charlotte Brontë read some Austen novel, and didn't like it.

I think emotions are given too much value in Wuthering Heights. Do you agree?