Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, read by Chesterfield Readers’ Group

We enjoyed re-reading this – most of us not having read it for fifty years or more! And some of us remembered it with much affection. Several of us come from Yorkshire and some of us remember Haworth parsonage long before it became part of the Brontë industry. It was generally agreed that this is a difficult novel so it was surprising to find it in the hundred best reads. We felt that some of the choices had more to do with television adaptations than literature and some were sheer nostalgia for childhood.

We discussed the usual problems with the book – the unreliable narrator, which one member of our group likened to a Chinese Box: Lockwood quoting Nellie who quotes Catherine, Hindley, Linton and Isabella at times when she could not have been present. We found Lockwood a very unreliable narrator, a city man with no experience of this harsh, isolated world and these tough, emotional people in it. The fact that he is himself unmarried, loveless, makes it probable that he is unable to recognise passion in others.

We had some tangential fun referring to  Prof. John Sutherland’s book Is Heathcliffe a Murderer? and The Crimes of C. Brontë by James Tulley which purports to prove that the entire family was murdered by Charlotte’s husband, her father’s curate. Both of them highly recommended.

Inevitably our discussions led to adaptations both for the cinema and for television. Those of us who are old enough to remember the ghosts of Merle Oberon and Laurence Olivier skipping merrily over Penistone Crags agreed that such a complex, puzzling novel can only be rendered trivial – even risible – on the screen. Even the recent Radio 4 serialisation sometimes sounded like the kind of parody Sue Limb could have written! Perhaps, we wondered, the problem is that the Gothic has been so well-explored since the nineteenth century.

So we agreed that this was the kind of novel best left as text – though most of us gave up on your free hand-out text and resorted to our own school version for eye-comfort!

Is Wuthering Heights merely a kind of violent, haunting family saga, or is it Emily Brontë’s venture into Gothic Horror? Whichever, we all agreed it is a great novel, well deserving of its place in the literary canon – if not in the BBC’s Best reads!

Bette Paul
Co-ordinator
Chesterfield Readers’ Group.