Why is wuthering heights considered a classic

The story proper begins with Lockwood, a stranger to the rugged moorlands, a gentleman accustomed to urban life and its polite civilisations. If the experience of reading Wuthering Heights feels like a suspension in a state of waking nightmare, what a richly-hued vision of the fantastical it is. This article first appeared on The Conversation on 31 July University home.

Current students. Staff intranet. Type to search. All content. But does her fiery heroine continue to allure and shock us, asks English Doctoral candidate Sophie Alexandra Frazer.

But surely you and everybody have a notion that there is, or should be, an existence of yours beyond you. What were the use of my creation if I were entirely contained here? I all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be. In the novel, different characters exhibit Victorian traits.

For example- Hareton shows himself to be a Victorian as the time in which he exists interest him a lot. He desires to be educated and takes it upon himself to learn and to read. He cares for Cathy and risks himself to stand for her.

The school library allowed only one book per week and even that privilege was taken away during exam months and board years; very few peers read so borrowing was out too, and Kindle and Nook and other handy e-readers were still a few years away.

I made the best of it by persuading younger sibling and non-reader friends to borrow titles I wanted from the library and reading PDFs on the family computer, but it was never enough. For the first time in my life, I had access to more books, and more kinds of books, than I could read.

Aside from the collection in the main college library and the departmental one, I was also welcome to the bookshelves of classmates and friends who, in the spirit of the best kind of readers, shared generously and freely.

So, if you happen to glance at my books, you will soon come to realise that I am an incorrigible consumer of fiction. Inside a considerable number of my books you will find lovingly scrawled inscriptions from dear friends, referencing inside jokes, vouching for a new writer they are sure I will love, and vowing eternal sisterhood. I have a vague, probably false, memory of the book being discussed in a brief aside by my English teacher in class when I was seven or eight, and already showing signs of literary besotted-ness.

I remember waddling up to my then-librarian and requesting a copy of Wuthering Heights , please. She handed me an abridged version of the classic which I laboured through, liberally skipping pages and failing to understand much of anything.

In fact, nothing made sense back then. Why were the people speaking like this? What are moors? What is a grange? Where is Yorkshire? Why are these kids not going to school? There was still something about the book, though — or was it just my childish stubbornness? When I eventually turned the last page, something had changed. I knew I would find my way back to it again when I was older, more ready.

True to my prophecy, I returned to the book again when I was in high school, about It is moorish, and wild, and knotty as a root of heath. Nor was it natural that it should be otherwise; the author being herself a native and nursling of the moors. Doubtless, had her lot been cast in a town, her writings, if she had written at all, would have possessed another character.

Even had chance or taste led her to choose a similar subject, she would have treated it otherwise. Whether it is right or advisable to create beings like Heathcliff, I do not know: I scarcely think it is. But this I know: the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master—something that, at times, strangely wills and works for itself. Wuthering Heights was hewn in a wild workshop, with simple tools, out of homely materials.

The statuary found a granite block on a solitary moor; gazing thereon, he saw how from the crag might be elicited a head, savage, swart, sinister; a form moulded with at least one element of grandeur—power. He wrought with a rude chisel, and from no model but the vision of his meditations.

Wuthering Heights is told so brilliantly. Heart of Darkness also blew me away when I first read it. That, Wuthering Heights , and Hemingway showed me what literature could be; I could do whatever I wanted! Heathcliff embodies the idea of acting on pure id. I read Wuthering Heights when I was sixteen and had just left home. I did not read it as a love story. I thought it was a loss story.

Heathcliff loses Cathy. Cathy loses Heathcliff. Edgar Linton loses Cathy, their daughter, his life, and Thrushcross Grange. Hindley loses Wuthering Heights. Heathcliff is a foundling. As an adopted child I understood his humiliations, his ardour, and his capacity to injure. I also learned the lesson of the novel that property is power. It seemed to me that if you want to fall in love you had better have a house.

Whatever Emily Bronte was doing, it was not the sentimental interpretation of this novel of all for love and the world well lost. His gradual gain of every house, horse and heirloom belonging to the Earnshaws and the Lintons is his revenge and his ruin.

It was once suggested to me that, as an antidote to crying, I put my head in a paper bag. Created by Grove Atlantic and Electric Literature. By Emily Temple. Virginia Woolf: Wuthering Heights is a more difficult book to understand than Jane Eyre , because Emily was a greater poet than Charlotte. You can buy it here.