Wuthering Heights (SPOILERS)

I read Wuthering Heights for the first time when I was probably around 12 years old. At the time, I had chosen it from my library because I liked the cover, and I thought it sounded like a good ghost story. I was really into horror novels back then. When I read it, I was more than a little disappointed. It was more romantic than I had liked (I was only 12 and romance was still yucky to me), and I found Cathy Earnshaw-Linton simply detestable. And to be perfectly honest, I still do.

I re-read Wuthering Heights very recently, and although I appreciated it way more than I had at twelve (love the dark and stormy Heathcliff, the devastating love story, and the haunting descriptions of the moors), I still found that it rubbed me the wrong way somehow.

For me, characters in a novel are 90% of the influence on whether or not I enjoy the story. If I can't connect with the characters after a few chapters, I honestly can't continue the novel and will just put it in the "couldn't finish" pile. Luckily for me, Wuthering Heights has enough likable characters to make up for the un-likable Cathy Earnshaw.

It's not hard to say what I don't like about her. She's spoiled, willful, ill-mannered, and manipulative. She's a social climber. She leads Heathcliff on on more than one occasion, and when he tires of being lead on and decides to bail altogether and forget his love for her, she throws herself a pity parade and paints him as the one who wronged her. Ugh! Talk about entitlement! The ONLY redeemable characteristic that she displays is her affection for Heathcliff, when no one else in her family cares for him at all.

Still, despite my dislike of Cathy, the love story is enough to keep me going to the end. We have all had "the one who got away", whether it was tragic death (as in the case of this particular story), or just a messy and painful breakup. It touches a nerve in all of us to read about it, I think, and Miss Bronte nailed the passionate turbulence of love when she wrote about Cathy and Heathcliff's relationship.

All in all, Wuthering Heights is definitely a book worth reading, both for its content and its status as one of the most popular classics of all time. Just be sure to have tissues handy, and be prepared to possibly enter a temporary state of melancholy while you make your way through this book.