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

Comments

Junkie Metaphors and Books About Our Inner Crazy

So, recently I was doing a spot of (mandatory) community service for my gym teacher when I experienced a rare instance of karmic payoff. Me and a bunch of other temporary bond-slaves were unloading this huge file cabinet onto the gym floor, sorting everything from Dance Revolution DVDs to pamphlets on Your First Visit to the Ob-Gyn! into neat piles, when I uncovered quite by chance a crumbling copy of Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs. Elated, I carried it around for the remainder of the period until my teacher took pity on me and offered to let me borrow it. It's falling apart before my very eyes I swear... I fell in love with this book the moment I heard its title quite a while ago - Naked Lunch ? What the hell kind of weird awesome twisted name is that? I am only now realizing how twisted it really is. The book is a compilation of notes that Burroughs took while under the sick influence of heroin. ...

Lessons to be Learned From the Princess Sara Crewe

Have any of you read A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett? It was the book that made me love books. (Does every book-lover have one of those? Do you?) I first read it when I was very little and have spent the last two days rereading it, as I tend to do every few years. But the thing that struck me about the story this time around is that the story's preteen heroine, Sara Crewe, seems to have life completely figured out. Even when she loses both her father and her fortune and is working as a hated scullery maid at her London boarding school to pay off her debts, she never sacrifices her virtues of benevolence, hope, and grace. Her secret is that she considers herself a princess in spirit, even when she is no longer as wealthy and privileged as one. Sadly, I have not yet gotten my life philosophies together and lack Sara's ability to gracefull...

Goals for Book-Loving Losers

A mini-library in Park Slope, Brooklyn - GOD it's so cute For me, this time of year means nonstop action - essays, tests, cross-country practices, holidays, and rushed, chilly walks to the subway. I like being busy, but often when I'm studying and hurrying I find myself fantasizing about the all reading I'd do if I had any spare time. I think I would be much more educated and cultured if my teachers just shut me up in a room with a load of books, rather than expecting me to come to school. Oh well. Here are my fantasy reading goals for sometime when I have more time. (And if you happen to have a lot of time right now, why not attempt one?) 1. Read a ridiculously long book - War and Peace , or the Bible, or the entirety of that endless series about feral cat colonies, Warriors - and admit to yourself that you're mostly reading it so that you can tell people you read it. 2. Go camping/sit in a shed/climb up a tree/ac...

the book bum

Search This Blog