Wuthering Heights

⚖The case for it

A ghost's hand at the window, a terrified man scraping it against broken glass: the scene arrives early and announces a horror novel wearing a romance's clothes. It "leaves claw marks on the inside of your skull," one reader reports, approvingly. Bronte builds Heathcliff's cruelty from a traceable wound, a childhood spent humiliated by the family that kept him, and lets the damage reproduce in the next generation like a family trait; one assessment calls it "the greatest psychological novel ever written." Nobody in it is likable, which is the achievement, "art that doesn't care about marketability," as one fan puts it. The yearly rereaders say Heathcliff changes under them as they age. "This book slaps."

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

He hangs a dog. Mid-elopement. For a large share of readers that is the page where Heathcliff ends as antihero, and by the back half even sympathizers watch him "cross the line from vengeful antihero into cartoonish evil villain." "Heathcliff is a pouting baby, Cathy is a dope," runs one verdict. Deaths arrive and one reader admits "I felt relief rather than sadness." Cousins marry cousins across two houses, two Catherines guarantee confusion, everything arrives thirdhand through Nelly's improbably word-perfect recall, and "the second half drags like a muddy hemline." "How this book got to be a classic is beyond me," asks one reader, rejecting the romance label outright: possession and abuse in pretty prose.

— the honest librarian

6h

honest hours

9

sittings