Review of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights
Thursday, July 19th, 2007
As someone who is long out of high school, I thoroughly enjoyed reading Wuthering Heights (and properly this time!)
One literary critic I read somewhere said that the sheer number of characters is deliberately confusing. Certainly, it doesn’t make it any easier that there are two Catherines. Nor the frequent use of surnames, rather than first names and vice versa, quite interchangably.
I found many of the characters thoroughly odious and of moral outrage. Why Nelly Dean doesn’t just leave them all is a mystery to me.
One thing I found of great help to my understanding of the book was to paste a clearer copy of the family tree to the inside-front cover of the book. I found this on page 308 of The Scribner Companion to the Brontës by Barbara and Gareth Lloyd Evans. The marriages and births are clearer and far more readable than the chart that came with the edition of the book that I own.
I also felt the need to take notes from a number of other literary critical works on the book to get my head around the whole plot, the characters, themes, imagery and Haworth landscape.
Perhaps for the most serious among us there is a concordance to Wuthering Heights! This is great for those doing a paper on some certain theme found in the book, who want to find all the references to that topic all in one place. If you are wanting to find it: A Concordance to Brontë’s Wuthering Heights by C. Ruth Sabol and Todd K. Bender, Garland Publishing, Inc. New York/London, 1984, Garland Reference Library of the Humanities Vol. 428.
Thoroughly recommended.
