Wuthering Heights: more like this

Thanks for reading Wuthering Heights with me — the book was much more interesting than I thought it would be, and while I wouldn’t call it a great romance in the traditional sense, I really liked the gothic feel to it. If you’d like to read more books like Wuthering Heights, try one of these:

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen

Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

Rebecca by Daphne DuMaurier

A Spell of Winter by Helen Dunmore

A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick

Watch for tomorrow’s post — a new book to read with me in May!

Wuthering Heights: romantic? worth it?

Libby Brooks, in the Guardian (UK) newspaper, calls Wuthering Heights, “passion and romance written like they ought to be.”  How much or how little do you agree with the assessment of Wuthering Heights as a great romance novel?

Stephenie Meyer’s Eclipse (the third book in the Twilight series) includes several references to Wuthering Heights, spurring book sales among today’s teens, especially in France. (Here’s a clip of Stephenie Meyer talking about Eclipse and Wuthering Heights — it’s about halfway through the clip.) What does this say about the staying power of Emily Bronte’s book?

Are you glad you read it? And why would you recommend (or not recommend) Wuthering Heights to others?

Catherine and her relationships with Edgar and Heathcliff

In Wuthering Heights, how does Catherine’s marriage to Edgar compare with her relationship with Heathcliff? Catherine says that she can’t marry Heathcliff because it would be degrading, but is that worse than the unhappiness she feels married to Edgar? Do you think that if Catherine and Heathcliff had been able to marry in life, that they would have lived “happily ever after” or as least, contentedly? Why or why not?