Wuthering Heights

A dark and passionate tale of tortured but enduring love... Mesmerising * Guardian *
This brilliantly atmospheric Yorkshire saga has only one drawback - Emily never wrote another novel. For me, it is both fantastic but also true to life because the protagonists have such believably fierce emotions
When I was 16 I read Wuthering Heights for the first time, and I read it as a kind of oracle; that life is worth nothing if it is not worth everything. Disaster does not matter, intensity does. You can dilute Wuthering Heights, as Mills & Boon and musicals have done. But if you are honest, you cannot escape its central stark premise; all or nothing. The all is not Heathcliff - that is the sentimental version. The all is what Heathcliff represents, which is life itself
It is as if Emily Brontë could tear up all that we know human beings by, and fill these unrecognizable transparencies with such a gust of life that they transcend reality
Only Emily Brontë exposes her imagination to the dark spirit
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
Commonly thought of as 'romantic', but try rereading it without being astonished by the comfortableness with which Brontë's characters subject one another to extremes of physical and psychological violence
Lambasted when it came out as irredeemably perverse and, I quote, as practically "French"'
The greatest love story ever told, Heathcliff the hero being a wild, stormy, gothic fellow who will not rest until his beloved Cathy is in his arms again, even though she died some years previously. My favourite moment comes when he bribes the sexton who buried Cathy to bury him next to her, with the sides of their coffins left open, so when they're dug up 50 years hence nobody will know which bones are his, and which are hers