February 2011, Hosted by: Isabel Jefferson
"Wuthering Heights, first published in 1847, the year before the author's death at the age of thirty, endures today as perhaps the most powerful and intensely original novel in the English language. The epic story of Catherine and Heathcliff plays out against the dramatic backdrop of the wild English moors, and presents an astonishing metaphysical vision of fate and obsession, passion and revenge. "Only Emily Brontë," V. S. Pritchett said, "exposes her imagination to the dark spirit." And Virginia Woolf wrote, "Hers...is the rarest of all powers. She could free life from its dependence on facts...by speaking of the moor make the wind blow and the thunder roar." "
Hostess Notes:
"Hello everyone,
For all of you who came to my home and shared your comments about the book, thank you for sharing!
Comments about the book ranged from the age of the author, the moors, unsympathetic characters, to the narrators. Wuthering Heights is an interesting and thought provocative book.
In order to better understand it, I decided to put myself in the author’s place and started to see some of what she might have been trying to tell us.
At the time that Emily Brontë wrote the novel, women did not have many rights. Women could not directly inherit their family fortune (if they had one). Man, mostly white man, controlled the world in which Emily Brontë lived.
England was in political turmoil. The middle class was sandwiched between the very poor, lowly paid or unpaid factory workers – black with soot; and the very rich. Women basically, were property of their husbands.
Wuthering Heights had two main narrators: A white female servant and a white privileged man who thought of himself as a “mannered, educated” man.
There were no sympathetic characters in Wuthering Heights. It depicted a raw, dramatic and conflicted world.
If Emily Brontë saw herself as the oppressed, she would probably be Heathcliff. Angered with her circumstances, not being able to strike back, she did it so through the only means available to her - her plume. And she used a pseudonym to publish her work – poetic justice? Maybe.
Wuthering Heights is an intense read, perhaps because it reminds us that the world is a harsh place. It also points to us that love is maybe the only thing that surpasses the realms of a harsh reality. The fact that only in death could Heathcliff and Catherine be together, is in itself a clue of the very restrictive environment the author was in at the time she wrote this novel."
"Wuthering Heights, first published in 1847, the year before the author's death at the age of thirty, endures today as perhaps the most powerful and intensely original novel in the English language. The epic story of Catherine and Heathcliff plays out against the dramatic backdrop of the wild English moors, and presents an astonishing metaphysical vision of fate and obsession, passion and revenge. "Only Emily Brontë," V. S. Pritchett said, "exposes her imagination to the dark spirit." And Virginia Woolf wrote, "Hers...is the rarest of all powers. She could free life from its dependence on facts...by speaking of the moor make the wind blow and the thunder roar." "
Hostess Notes:
"Hello everyone,
For all of you who came to my home and shared your comments about the book, thank you for sharing!
Comments about the book ranged from the age of the author, the moors, unsympathetic characters, to the narrators. Wuthering Heights is an interesting and thought provocative book.
In order to better understand it, I decided to put myself in the author’s place and started to see some of what she might have been trying to tell us.
At the time that Emily Brontë wrote the novel, women did not have many rights. Women could not directly inherit their family fortune (if they had one). Man, mostly white man, controlled the world in which Emily Brontë lived.
England was in political turmoil. The middle class was sandwiched between the very poor, lowly paid or unpaid factory workers – black with soot; and the very rich. Women basically, were property of their husbands.
Wuthering Heights had two main narrators: A white female servant and a white privileged man who thought of himself as a “mannered, educated” man.
There were no sympathetic characters in Wuthering Heights. It depicted a raw, dramatic and conflicted world.
If Emily Brontë saw herself as the oppressed, she would probably be Heathcliff. Angered with her circumstances, not being able to strike back, she did it so through the only means available to her - her plume. And she used a pseudonym to publish her work – poetic justice? Maybe.
Wuthering Heights is an intense read, perhaps because it reminds us that the world is a harsh place. It also points to us that love is maybe the only thing that surpasses the realms of a harsh reality. The fact that only in death could Heathcliff and Catherine be together, is in itself a clue of the very restrictive environment the author was in at the time she wrote this novel."
I have not finished this book. I tried to start reading it on the plane to Maui, but put it away to read something else much lighter. I could tell from the first few pages it was going to be one of those books I would have to reread sentences, paragraphs, etc to make sure I was completely understanding what the author was writing. Not a book for reading while sitting by the pool...Maybe I will come back to it this summer.
ReplyDeleteI think everyone thought of "Wuthering Heights" and thought "romantic" or "Jane Austen-esque" and consequently, had a lot of trouble getting through this novel (if they did at all).
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