Book Review: Wuthering Heights
Posted: Thu Jul 30, 2020 10:19 pm
Title: Wuthering Heights
Author: Emily Bronte
Genre: Classic/Gothic
Disclaimer: contains violence, bullying, death
If you love Severus Snape, or wonder why some people are drawn to the character, this book is for you.
Let's see...the books describe a character who:
No, I'm actually not describing Severus Snape. The book is about Heathcliff, and is titled Wuthering Heights, and I highly suspect JK Rowling has read it.
The book is very melodramatic at times, with a main character who does vile things, but you can't help but feel sympathetic towards him. His angst is over the top, and his pain never ends.
The book is basically in two parts, with Heathcliff and the lady he loves and their relationship being the first half, and Heathcliff's relationship with the offspring being the second half. The first half is often the favorite, but the second half is important in order to complete the story. I re-read this book about once every three years, and I admit I tend to skip the second half, though. The offspring don't interest me.
Once you've read the book, make sure to listen to Kate Bush's song, Wuthering Heights. It's sung from the perspective of a ghost in the novel.
Here's a good summary from Bookrags
Author: Emily Bronte
Genre: Classic/Gothic
Disclaimer: contains violence, bullying, death
If you love Severus Snape, or wonder why some people are drawn to the character, this book is for you.
The Byronic HeroA kind of hero found in several of the works of Lord Byron. Like Byron himself, a Byronic hero is a melancholy and rebellious young man, distressed by a terrible wrong he committed in the past.
Let's see...the books describe a character who:
- is dark and brooding
melancholy
distressed by a past mistake
birth family is probably not the best
grows up beside a lovely girl
falls in love with lovely girl
thinks power and prestige will win her hand in marriage
lovely girl rejects him anyway and marries another
lovely girl has child and dies young
spends a lifetime wrapped up in memory of deceased lovely girl
bullies offspring of lovely girl and other man
No, I'm actually not describing Severus Snape. The book is about Heathcliff, and is titled Wuthering Heights, and I highly suspect JK Rowling has read it.
The book is very melodramatic at times, with a main character who does vile things, but you can't help but feel sympathetic towards him. His angst is over the top, and his pain never ends.
The book is basically in two parts, with Heathcliff and the lady he loves and their relationship being the first half, and Heathcliff's relationship with the offspring being the second half. The first half is often the favorite, but the second half is important in order to complete the story. I re-read this book about once every three years, and I admit I tend to skip the second half, though. The offspring don't interest me.
Once you've read the book, make sure to listen to Kate Bush's song, Wuthering Heights. It's sung from the perspective of a ghost in the novel.
Here's a good summary from Bookrags
First published m 1847, Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights ranks high on the list of major works of English literature A brooding tale of passion and revenge set in the Yorkshire moors, the novel has inspired no fewer than four film versions in modern times. Early critics did not like the work, citing its excess of passion and its coarseness. A second edition was published in 1850, two years after the author's death. Sympathetically prefaced by her sister Charlotte, it met with greater success, and the novel has continued to grow in stature ever since. In the novel a pair of narrators, Mr Lockwood and Nelly Dean, relate the story of the foundling Heathcliff s arrival at Wuthering Heights, and the close-knit bond he forms with his benefactor's daughter, Catherine Earnshaw. One in spirit, they are nonetheless social unequals, and the saga of frustrated yearning and destruction that follows Catherine's refusal to marry Heathcliff is unique in the English canon. The novel is admired not least for the power of its imagery, its complex structure, and its ambiguity, the very elements that confounded its first critics. Emily Brontë spent her short life mostly at home, and apart from her own fertile imagination, she drew her inspiration from the local landscape the surrounding moorlands and the regional architecture of the Yorkshire area-as well as her personal experience of religion, of folklore, and of illness and death. Dealing with themes of nature, cruelty, social position, and indestructibility of the spirit, Wuthering Heights has surpassed the more successful Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre in academic and popular circles.