Wuthering Heights
Emily Bronte's only novel, published in 1847 and unlike anything before or since. A love story that doubles as a ghost story, a class drama, and a portrait of obsession so intense it warps the narrative itself. Heathcliff is English literature's most violently compelling anti-hero. It burns.
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 case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
