This week I completed my latest kit, on Wuthering Heights, and three things surprised me — one, that I loved the raw power and dysfunction this time around (probably my third reading?) just as much as I did the first time. Second, last year a Guardian.uk poll ranked Wuthering Heights higher than Pride and Prejudice for best-loved romance. Third, Charlotte Bronte (sister of Emily, author of Jane Eyre) was a pretty tough critic of her sister!!
The edition I read was a beautiful 1945 Random House edition illustrated with wood engravings by Fritz Eichenberg and included both a Biographical Notice and an Editor’s Preface by Charlotte Bronte. In the Biographical Notice, she described Emily’s poetry as “condensed and terse, vigorous and genuine…they had also a peculiar music — wild, melancholy, and elevating.” So far, so good… But near the end of the notice, she describes both of her sisters in the following manner: “Neither Emily nor Anne was learned; they had no thought of filling their pitchers at the well-spring of other minds; they always wrote from the impulse of nature, the dictates of intuition, and from such stores of observation as their limited experience had enabled them to amass. I may sum up all by saying, that for strangers they were nothing, for superficial observers less than nothing; but for those who had known them all their lives in the intimacy of close relationship, they were genuinely good and truly great.”
Then, in the Editor’s Preface, she states that it was wrong and inadvisable for her sister to create a being like Heathcliff, but “the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master — something that, at times, strangely wills and works for itself.” Now, all great artists owe something to the mysteries of the subconscious, but there seems to be something… catty? or undermining? about Charlotte’s take on her sister. As if she doesn’t own or shouldn’t be held responsible or has little control over her genius… She may have been trying to defend her sister against critics… Heathcliff truly is reprehensible — and thus so compelling! I noticed this time around that my memory had turned Heathcliff into a sympathetic hero, tragic in love and thus to be pitied. I realized, however, after being reacquainted with him, that he really isn’t — or shouldn’t be, at least — a sympathetic character. He is relentlessly unkind and selfish — to the end. But the power and beauty of Wuthering Heights is that Emily Bronte refused to placate or soothe the reader with a happy ending of redemption. She had the courage to end her novel in the spirit of the beginning — raw, hostile, untamed. Rather than question whether this was her conscious intention or not, we should just be grateful she had the courage and heart to persevere and not shrink in the face of critics — especially if one of her greatest was her own sister!
