I wonder why I dreaded/disliked this book. When I found out that it was the beginning piece for a class I intend to take this summer, I thought I had better reread it. I used to complain that the two Cathys and all the similar names confused me, but I certainly didn't see anything like that this time. I didn't even remember the happy ending!
Once I got started, I couldn't stop. The level of perversity of the characters is amazing. Given the Bronte's upbringing it isn't really surprising, but I hadn't ever gotten quite that sense of it. I read it once when I was in high school - not as an assignment, but because it was on my mother's annual summer reading list. I'm pretty sure I read it again, but I don't remember the time or circumstance. I have had no inclination to read it again. Possibly all those years of listening to seniors whine and generally carry on about having to read it.
I don't think I would go as far as a former English Chair at the high school where I used to teach and declare that it is the greatest novel in the English language, but it is a doggone good story. Compelling if unlikeable characters: you want desperately for some of them to see the light and change their ways, and I suppose that Hareton and Cathy II do at the very end - and the sight of them is enough to make the great satan himself, Heathcliff, abandon the torment of the two of them and go commune to his death with the ghost of Cathy I. Nelly Dean is an inspired character; as a device for narration, Bronte could hardly have done better. Nelly is everywhere and nowhere as as proper a British servant as she can be in the bizarre households of Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange.
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