Book Review: Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

The picture is blurry,
but you get the idea

Wuthering Heights is a gothic novel about two English estates and the tortured people who inhabit them. The families are related, but that doesn't stop the cousins of Wuthering Heights from falling in love with the cousins of Thrushcross Grange only to marry other, wealthier cousins, and vice versa.
In case you couldn't tell, I didn't love this one. I thought many of the characters were flat or unsympathetic, especially the housekeeper Ellen Dean, who was important to the story but seemed to care for nothing except the well-being of her employers. I was also annoyed by the abundance of exposition. The story's narrator is a Wuthering Heights tenant named Lockwood; however, he spends most of the book listening to Ellen Dean explain the estates' history. So much backstory! So many quotations marks! It irked me.
Additionally, some characteristics of the time, such as cousins falling in love and mysterious illnesses, bothered me. But that's less a problem with the novel and more a problem with me as a reader, haha.
If you're partial to old British Lit, you might like Wuthering Heights. I don't like it now, but I think I would have loved it a few years ago.

- Carly

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