Wuthering Heights

[Smiley]

I have recently read Wuthering Height, and I'll be studying it next year at University. I'm just a little bit confused, as it is described as a great love story. I think Cathy and Heathcliff never actually got to properly love each other, or see each other much, and the story seems to be more about who Ellen was looking after, and about illness. Am I missing something??

[andy hughes]

The essence of Heathcliff's and Cathy's love is that it is doomed. Their passion for each other can never come to fruition, and the death of Cathy and Heathcliffe's incolable passion for her, even in death, forms one of the most powerful lovve stories every written. The story is complex, being told through the eyes of different characters, and it is a remarkably mature and assured work, given its time, and the circumstances of its author. Read the novel again, and then check out the plot overviews available on the web, and see if you can approach it from the angle of doomed love, which is its underlying theme, and its continuing power.

[LeMarchand]

if you ever need a bit of (just about) course-related light relief, have a look at Jasper Fforde's "The Well of Lost Plots" in which the heroine, who is hiding out in Book World (it's a long story...) attends a meeting of the "Wuthering Heights" Anger Management Group which has been set up to counsel the characters in the book who all (except Heathcliffe and Cathy) hate Heathcliffe. (It's Chapter 12, but the whole book/all 3 books in the series are well worth reading).