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Heathcliff and Cathy are elementally connected: They scream each other’s names across the moors, and it’s all very wild and passionate. That’s not to say that Wuthering Heights is not romantic, or that people who enjoy reading it as a love story are wrong to an extent, this is a book that wants to be read as a love story. When I read Wuthering Heights for the first time in college, I read it under the belief that it was a romantic love story, and as such, I hated it. The genius of Wuthering Heights lies in the way it thinks about cycles of abuse And of Wuthering Heights I can only say that it is a staggering literary accomplishment that I would be quite happy to never read again. When we talk about Emily, then, we are left with the poetry and with Wuthering Heights to talk about.
WUTHERING HEIGHTS 1992 MOVIE COMPARED TO BOOK PLUS
Her body of work is unfairly little: She had time to leave behind only Wuthering Heights and her poetry, plus the persistent, unconfirmed rumor that she was working on a second novel and that Charlotte burnt the manuscript after Emily died. Her body was little: She was so emaciated when she died that her coffin was only 16 inches wide (although it’s unclear that 16 inches was really quite so small at the time as it seems to us now). Her lifetime was little: She died young of tuberculosis, at just 30 years old.
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The few concrete facts we have about Emily tend to center on how little of her there is. The Brontë sisters are the feminist heroes we need in 2017
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We have no way of knowing how true Gaskell’s ideas are, but they created the image of Emily that we tend to rely on today: that she beat her dog with her bare fists to discipline him that when she was attacked by a rabid dog she cauterized the wound herself with a red hot poker. Our ideas about Emily that persist into the modern day mostly come from a few descriptions written by Charlotte, who depicted her sister as a wild spirit of the moors, and, more colorfully, from Charlotte’s biographer Elizabeth Gaskell. She left behind very little documentation of her life: there’s a novel, Wuthering Heights, that is considered to be one of the greatest in the English canon, some astonishingly brilliant poetry, and almost nothing else. In part, that’s because Emily’s whole thing is to be elusive, to make you not know quite what to do with her. But Emily Brontë - with her child ghosts sobbing at the window and her brutal, violent men Emily Brontë, whose 200th birthday is Monday - I have never quite known what to do with her. Of the canonical three, personally, I will go to bat for both Austen and for Charlotte Brontë - witty women and sad men having charged conversations in the drawing room, sign me up. The cliché about bookish women and the novels of the 19th century is that you have to pick from three authors, and you’re only allowed to love one of them: Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, or Emily Brontë - you have to have one favorite, and whichever one it is says something profound about you.