Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

This novel had an unfortunate disadvantage for me on this reading: I read it once before, twenty-odd years ago, and formed the firm impression that it was the greatest novel ever, even as my memories of id gradually and inexorably faded. This gave it something of the "Citizen Kane problem". How could it possibly live up to such an impossible reputation, superb though it might be? Against the odds, though, this rereading has altered my opinion not a whit. It is truly the greatest novel I, at any rate, have ever read.

Not, of course, that it is, as some say, "the greatest love story ever told". It is not a love story, not remotely, and it is absurd to say that it is. It is a tale, set in a landscape of bleak, harsh, unforgiving beauty that seems the master of vulnerable humanity, very much not the other way around. Against this, the lives and the values of the landed gentry make desperate and futile attempts to cling to existence. Life is short. To live to forty is accounted lucky... although, admittedly, perhaps the Lintons and the Earnshaws would breed children with much more robust constitutions if they weren't so bleeding incestuous. Marrying your cousins is bad, mmkay? 

These families are not happy ones. Indeed, the main theme of the book is the damage done by childhood abuse. Not, of course, that Emily Bronte would have used the term "personality disorder", but Cathy certainly has Borderline Personality Disorder, to my mind, and Heathcliff has something, too. Both of them are hopelessly damaged by their childhoods, and live and die defined by that abuse. Worse, Heathcliff seems to exist only to perpetuate that cycle of abuse.

There is, fortunately, a note of hope at the end, as young Cathy and Hareton seem to be falling in love and to show hope of breaking out of that awful cycle. It'a bleak but very human novel, yet somehow not without hope. It seems to question notions of class and (more tentatively) gender. In structure and in feeling it is by no means of its time, early Victorian, but simultaneously both harking back to Gothic tropes and looking forwards, with its non-linear narrative and not entirely reliable narrators. It is perfection.