Two hundred years ago today, Emily Brontë was born. She died only 30 years later, of tuberculosis. Her coffin was only 16 inches wide (though this may not mean what we think it means). She wrote one complete novel, which has become an enduring classic of English literature. Ernest Hemingway, Joan Didion, and Henry Miller recommended it. Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes borrowed its title for poems. Others, some of them right here in the Literary Hub office, don’t care for it quite so much. For Brontë’s birthday, I offer to you a selection of literary opinions on her one hit wonder, which was polarizing at the time of its publication and remains so 171 years later.
Virginia Woolf:
Wuthering Heights is a more difficult book to understand than Jane Eyre,
because Emily was a greater poet than Charlotte. When Charlotte wrote
she said with eloquence and splendour and passion “I love”, “I hate”, “I
suffer”. Her experience, though more intense, is on a level with our
own. But there is no “I” in Wuthering Heights. There are no
governesses. There are no employers. There is love, but it is not the
love of men and women. Emily was inspired by some more general
conception. The impulse which urged her to create was not her own
suffering or her own injuries. She looked out upon a world cleft into
gigantic disorder and felt within her the power to unite it in a book.
That gigantic ambition is to be felt throughout the novel — a struggle,
half thwarted but of superb conviction, to say something through the
mouths of her characters which is not merely “I love” or “I hate”, but
“we, the whole human race” and “you, the eternal powers . . . ” the
sentence remains unfinished. It is not strange that it should be so;
rather it is astonishing that she can make us feel what she had it in
her to say at all.
–from her 1916 essay “Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights,” as published in The Common Reader
[My favorite novelist of all time
is] Emily Brontë, author of the greatest psychological novel ever
written, with the most complex character ever conceived. Read “Wuthering
Heights” when you’re 18 and you think Heathcliff is a romantic hero;
when you’re 30, he’s a monster; at 50 you see he’s just human.
–in her 2014 “By the Book” interview with The New York Times
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