It’s not used as an excuse for his actions as an adult though - Emily is interested in the reasons we are who we are, not in excusing bad behaviour. But Heathcliff himself is a victim before he is a monster: a child offered a precarious place in society, only to have it snatched from him, to spend his youth oppressed by violence and hard labour. Even the vapid Mr Lockwood has to change his opinion of Heathcliff within a page of his positive opening assessment. One woman makes the mistake of romanticising Heathcliff, and Isabella soon comes to regret her decision to elope with him. Alcoholism is not romanticised, nor is domestic violence. It’s a story in which revenge proves unsatisfying, class hierarchy disempowers even the best of intentions and what endures through it all is the cycle of seasons and the landscape. It’s about the selfishness of love and its short-sightedness. Wuthering Heights is a story about how children internalise prejudices and repeat them. On the re-read, I found that Emily is a far more fascinating judge of human character than I had realised before, I accepted that I am now old enough to sympathise properly with Nelly, who is absolutely key to the story, and I had much more patience for Volume II than I did as a younger woman. Stevie Davies‘ take on Emily gave me the confidence to return to it though, and I’m so glad I did. It has been since I first read it half a lifetime ago, and I’ve been nervous about returning to it in case I found that I had, in fact, been romanticising something that was not as nuanced as I remembered. I do intend to read some Anne Brontë soon, to whom I mean no disrespect or criticism, but if you think that preferring Tenant of Wildfell Hall to Wuthering Heights automatically makes you a better person then you probably won’t get much out of this review anyway. I don’t intend to apologise for my tastes here. I assure you that this is purely my subjective, literary preference, and makes me neither less of a feminist nor someone who romanticises ‘alcoholic dickbags’, to borrow the phrase. And of the three I will likely always choose Emily. This one makes up for it though, drawn when Kate Beaton had, you know, actually read Wuthering Heights.Īs is, I believe, traditional, allow me to pitch several completely different female authors against one another: why yes, I do prefer the works of the Brontë sisters to Austen. That ‘dude watching with the Brontë sisters’ comic has a lot to answer for tbh.
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