Wuthering Heights (1939)
"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, and [Edgar’s] is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire."
-Wuthering Heights
Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights is not an easy book to read. Some characters, such as Joseph and Hareton, speak in a heavy dialect and can be difficult to understand. What I found most difficult, however, was my constant desire to step into the story and shake some sense into the cast of narcissistic characters that inhabit Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange. Don't get me wrong, I like the book. The first time I read Wuthering Heights was in high school, and the torturous love affairs of Catherine and Heathcliff and their children made sense to my angst-ridden, teenage brain. (I like to think that it is a sign of maturity that after a second reading I felt no desire to throw myself into a passionate but doomed love affair.) What kept me reading this time around was knowing that (1.) at the end there was redemption and (2.) Emily Bronte is a genius. She is proof that with imagination and determination you can create anything, even a book that people will be talking about some 150 years later.
