Wuthering Heights

Monsters love, too.

One of those books that's really cool in theory but absolutly drags on to read

‘He's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.’

‘My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I’m well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff! He’s always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being.’

‘I wish I were a girl again, half-savage and hardy, and free.’

‘Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living; you said I killed you—haunt me, then!  The murdered do haunt their murderers, I believe.  I know that ghosts have wandered on earth. Be with me always—take any form—drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you!  Oh, God! it is unutterable!  I cannot live without my life!  I cannot live without my soul!’

‘I have not broken your heart - you have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine.’

Wuthering Heights is intense, haunting and a quintessential gothic novel. Emily Brontë beautifully captured the turmoil, passion, and obsession through deeply flawed characters and poetical writing. While there are elements of love, it is more a tale of death, tragedy, and toxicity demonstrated through complex characters and metaphorical prose.

It is a classic that’s been on my reading list for a while and I switched to the audiobook after starting the book a few months ago and not picking it up again. Admittedly, I had to pull up a family tree to follow the family dynamics, but that highlights how well Brontë created a complicated and messy family. It goes without saying, the characters are deeply unlikeable and it is not your typical love story, but it’s clear this was Emily’s intention when creating this novel.

It was a trudge at times but by the end I was definitely more engaged, so glad I pulled through and finished. It is easy to see why this is a classic.

all passion and madness, where love isn’t sweet—it’s raw, destructive, and leaves scars.

TB and personality disorders are a deadly combo

we have finally reached the book that took me a whole year to finish because i refused to let it end, and made me sob and mourn its final pages like a madwoman! behold, my favorite novel ever!

wuthering heights isn't really a novel, it's a tempest. a maddening whirlwind of passion and intensity that had me hooked from the first few pages (which i now have memorized, naturally). this is emily brontë’s sole masterpiece, and it transcended any standard i'd ever set for a book, ever. heathcliff and cathy? these two are not just characters, they’re forces of nature. their love isn’t beautiful in the traditional sense. it’s savage, obsessive, and all-consuming. but, it’s also undeniably raw in a way that few literary relationships are. it was kinda impossible not to see parts of myself in their hunger, their need to possess, to be seen, to be loved in a way that’s borderline selfish.

this novel didn't just tell me a story, it showed me a mirror of sorts. it invaded my thoughts, my emotions, until i realized that it wasn't just about heathcliff and cathy anymore. it was about my own heart, my own fears of losing love, of loving too fiercely, of being consumed by something that feels like it could either save you or destroy you. and by far the best part about this is how polarizing it is; if you hate this, i don't really care, if you're lukewarm on this, i understand. if you think it's overly dramatic and ridiculous, i concede; agree, even. but if you feel what i felt, if it makes you see love for all it's beautiful, ugly glory, then you’ll know exactly why this book is worth every bit of praise as a romance novel. <3

mandatory shoutout to all the secondary characters on this who i strongly love as well but if i were to get into cathy and linton and hareton this review would be five miles long.

Always been a fan for tragic romance

Everyone’s insane

This book has like 10 killer lines in the beginning and the end and the middle is just a Modern Family style sitcom revolving around an exhausted maid who’s surrounded by sad goth idiots.

4.5

Gothic wilderness, madness, first loves, betrayals, childhood best friends parting and meeting again, castles, the highlands, wild, unbridled, intoxicating passions. Wuthering Heights is phenomenal. Emily Bronte only ever wrote one book during her lifetime, and died not long after this one was published, but as it stands, Wuthering Heights is rightly enough to put her on the list as one of the best writers in the history of English literature. This book is moody, fierce, brooding, intense, tragic and very, very beautiful. The prose alone is a pleasure to read. When I first read Wuthering Heights, I spent the first half despising Heathcliff and Cathy. They were whiny bitches for the larger part, and when I was finished with the novel I couldn't figure out just why it was that I put the book down having another perspective to look back at those same characters now. Of course, they still made you want to punch them in the stomach, but you couldn't really avoid liking them as characters. It was the first book that inspired such intense dislike and yet made wonderful reading all the same. This book is one of my all time favourites.

Readable enough I suppose but I rarely found it compelling. Perhaps that’s due to the antiquation.

3.75 i anticipated how much worse everything would turn out, given that all hell already broke loose early on! emily did not pull herself back (especially during the time she wrote it in)!!!! even with the unlikeable characters too, to the point that i don’t know who to root for… well aside from hareton, which i only did when i was about to finish the book. i have grown to like the narration style. it was difficult to grasp the multiple narratives at first, but i eventually got the hang of it. love me a good gossip!! the prose is also breathtaking! it felt to me that catherine and heathcliff’s romantic relationship was only fully emphasized after her confession and death. i wanted to see more of them together before she had anything to do with edgar, perhaps it would make me feel more strongly about them. regardless, i am convinced enough that they have an affinity for each other. “It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now; so he shall never know how I love him: and that, not because he's handsome, Nelly, but because he's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.” “Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living. You said I killed you—haunt me then. The murdered do haunt their murderers. I believe—I know that ghosts have wandered the earth. Be with me always—take any form—drive me mad. Only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! It is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!” insufferable and destructive as they are, i have to admit their fervent love is out of this world. wuthering heights is a story of passion—a harrowing one at that. the revenge plot of heathcliff was abysmal, to say the least. in my humble opinion, his character is past the point of redemption, for he has evolved to become The Devil incarnate™, even more so than hindley. truly gave satan a run for his money. (edit: i’d also like to add that while his cruelty is not justified, i understand where he’s coming from: heathcliff had suffered abuse for too long: judged and reproached by everyone, enslaved by hindley, and betrayed by catherine. and to think he was just a child when it all began.) usually not my cup of tea, but i appreciate how this book was able to provoke such intense emotions from me. mostly anger, disgust, and sometimes pity. an opposite of a snoozer read! i hope to reread this book and get a fresh perspective! who knows i might give this 5 stars by then :]

❝catherine earnshaw, may you not rest, as long as i am living! you said i killed you—haunt me, then!❞ the world can never make me hate this book. from the beginning, heathcliff is shown as a villain, a bad character which in turn makes me want to love him even more. and despite everything, despite every immoral thing that he had committed, his love for his cathy was raw true. a match made in hell. neither of them were angels and they deserved each other. although, i feel bad for edgar and isabella because they were two innocent people who got caught in this wild affair. and yet, i would always, always, always love heathcliff and catherine. when i say that i want to be a writer, i mean this. i want to be a writer to the likes of the brontë sisters. ✧ my favourite quotes : ❝because he’s more myself than i am. whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.❞ ❝my love for heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath—a source of little visible delight, but necessary. nelly, i am heathcliff—he’s always, always in my mind—not as a pleasure, any more than i am always a pleasure to myself—but, as my own being—so, don’t talk of our separation again.❞ ❝if he loved with all the powers of his puny being, he couldn’t love as much in eighty years, as i could in a day.❞ ❝be with me always—take any form—drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where i cannot find you! oh, god! it is unutterable! i cannot live without my life! i cannot live without my soul!❞

changed the trajectory of my life forever

Wuthering Heights is difficult for me to talk about because I just don't get it. Like I understand it's capital a About obsession and it's consequences but I just don't buy it. Like why is Cathy obsessed with Heathcliff? She initially disliked him (because of kind of racist reasons which is always cool) and then got over it because why? And then they were BFF's and in love to the point where his anger over her betrayal of him literally killed her? And also this I Cathy who marries Linton because "he is handsome and pleasant to be with...young and cheerful... because he loves me...he will be rich, and I shall like to be the greatest woman in the neighborhood" but she loves Heathcliff because "whatever souls are made of his and mine are the same"? Like forgive me but that second assertion comes out of nowhere for me. And I guess I do have a read on why Heathcliff would be obsessed with Cathy... Spurned by his childhood best friend and love (who had initially hated him because she's kind of racist) and her brother basically Cinderella-d him and all that... But that's just not interesting? At all? Like I get this was written a long time ago but I just don't think that's good motivation? And the second part of the story totally loses me. Is Cathy 2's relationship with Linton 2 meant to be the reconciliation of Cathy and Heathcliff's relationship (and all that entailed) or is Cathy 2's and Hareton's eventual marriage the reconciliation?? Like I just don't get it. And I I'm not particularly interested in digging through the text *to* get it, you know? I agree with Past Monica's rating of three stars, give me Jane Eyre over this any day

I was not too keen on the second part since I absolutely adored Cathy (the OG) as a heroine but I actually think that the focus on the second generation was executed incredibly well as a means of exploring trauma (funny that I read this at the same time as Cassandra Clare's "Chain of Thorns").

The enclosed, horribly narrow, world of Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange becomes the perfect system within which trauma and abuse, perpetuating the cycle and breaking the cycle, can be explored. The characters are fascinatingly monstrous and cruel but nothing but the product of their environment; this makes all the more important that this vicious cycle cannot end until a whole generation is dead and the newer one chooses kindness and companionship instead.

I hated and loved Cathy and Heatcliff at the same time. I wanted the destruction of everyone and at the same time the salvation. I've never seen the line between love and destruction more blurried.

Loved how much each character was molded by their childhood. I did not enjoy this much, because I felt that it dismantled love, which deeply offended me. Maybe i’m not a Bronte fan? I found this difficult to finish. Whenever I feel that way about a classic, I feel sooooo stupid. I don’t really like ghost stories.

I went into this book knowing that it is not a love story, that people either love it or hate it, and that the characters would all be despicable. I hated it. It was not in the slightest a pleasurable reading experience and it felt like such a drudgery to keep turning pages. The story did not draw me in and I did not like the writing style at all (not for a lack of appreciation for classics, because I am very much enjoying reading classics now as an adult; but I truly cannot understand why the people who love this book praise its writing style so much). Every character is unlikeable, which I expected, but I also felt that the characters lacked depth and that their mental illnesses, evils, and overall character “arcs” were ill portrayed. As for the descriptions of the moors, which seem to be an aspect of the book that some readers find especially awe-inspiring, “I could never see anything extraordinary in them.” I shan’t be recommending it to anyone else.

dnf cuz i'm bored but i've read a bit more than half of it so im gonna log it sorry

there were glimpses of good moments

had to listen to kate bush's wuthering heights because my chest physically fucking hurts