What makes wuthering heights good

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Copyright: Jonathan Barry. Heathcliff and Cathy by Jonathan Barry Her descriptive skills are a major strength in the narrative, especially with landscapes. More from The Irish Times Books. TV, Radio, Web. Home energy upgrades are now more important than ever. Commenting on The Irish Times has changed. The account details entered are not currently associated with an Irish Times subscription. You should receive instructions for resetting your password. When you have reset your password, you can Sign In.

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Subscriber Only. Putting the Rabbit in the Hat by Brian Cox: ticking the boxes. What should any one of us be expected to do to avert climate catastrophe? Short stories. Funeral, a new short story by Robert Sheehan. Poetic justice, a new short story by Moya Roddy. The Books Podcast. It was fierce and overwhelming and destructive.

I wish I could say the book had changed me totally then. I wish I could tell you it made me a deeper, smarter person overnight. A budding writer. An artist-to-be. That all took time. Years, in fact. Cathy and Heathcliff taught me to risk, to dare, to love. To love people, books, art, ideas — with passion, with feeling, and with little regard for the consequences. In fact, they stayed with me all my life — two of the most brilliant, original, unforgettable characters ever written.

And as I grew up, they taught me to risk, to dare, to love. They challenged me to enlarge my view of the world.

I became Linton and Nelly Dean and Hareton. I became the house, the moors, the wheeling birds, the sky above them. I felt their joys and sorrows. I was transformed into something more than myself, something that transcended gender and race and age and time.

They enlarge you, remake you. They open your eyes, your mind, and your heart. And yours. More information is available here. Great TV miniseries starring Tom Hardy, too. Bronte died believing this book was a failure. And outlived all his children! Both Bronte sisters had the capacity to create archetypes—to imprint upon the culture seminal patterns that endure to the present time.

One last point: the father was Irish. Madness and genius in the blood, indeed. Enjoy it. I read it over every year or so, sometimes twice in a row.

I study it; I watch all the film versions. I just love it, the way it works, its strange cruelty and enchantment. Wuthering Heights has a sustained brilliance and originality we hardly know how to account for. Catherine, in Wuthering Heights , is nihilistic, self-indulgent, bored, restless, nostalgic for childhood, unmanageable.

She has the charm of a wayward, schizophrenic girl, but she has little to give, since she is self-absorbed, haughty, destructive. In a novel by Charlotte or Anne, Cathy would be a shallow beauty, analyzed and despaired of by a reasonable, clever and deprived heroine. She would be fit only for the subplot.

There is also an unromantic driven egotism in the characters, a lack of moral longings, odd in the work of a daughter of a clergyman.

The plot of Wuthering Heights is immensely complicated and yet there is the most felicitous union of author and subject. There is nothing quite like this novel with its rage and ragings, its discontent and angry restlessness. The peculiarity of it lies in the harshness of the characters.

Cathy is as hard, careless, and destructive as Heathcliff. She too has a sadistic nature. The love the two feel for each other is a longing for an impossible completion.

Consolations do not appear; nothing in the domestic or even in the sexual life seems to the point in this book. We do not, in her biography, even look for a lover as we do with Emily Dickinson because it is impossible to join her with a man, with a secret, aching passion for a young curate or a schoolmaster. There is a spare, inviolate center, a harder resignation amounting finally to withdrawal.

I have tried several times to read Wuthering Heights but it just strikes me as silly, so I always quit it. I somehow made it to adulthood without ever reading Wuthering Heights , but then I found out that several of my women friends considered Heathcliff their all-time favorite romantic hero.

So I read about three-quarters of it as a grown-up, and immediately developed some serious concerns about the mental health of my friends. When I read Wuthering Heights , I was It was given to me at a prize ceremony for being good in writing. I read the book in September, which is rainy season in the Caribbean.

I was lying on my bed in my bedroom, and for me it was an enchantment. I saw it at the cinema after that, by chance—the version with Laurence Olivier. It revived memories of my adolescence, so I read it again and discovered it had a meaning beyond the actual meaning, beyond the meanings the author wanted to give. It was a story you could transplant into any society. So I decided I was going to rewrite it. But it was at least another five years for me before I really started.

Because my husband, who is English, was shocked when I was telling him my vague intention. So I took another five years to decide—and when I could not help it, I started to write. It is such a masterpiece, such a beloved work in England.

What is she doing to the text? How can she dare touch that text?! It seems to me the greatest homage that I pay is to her artistry.