Book Review: Wuthering Heights is not what most readers expect, if what readers are expecting is a love story. It's a story of love destined but denied, which soon breaks the thin line between love and hate, involving preternatural forces of nature and a battle of tooth and claw survival. Hallmark has published an edition of Wuthering Heights composed solely of the love story of Cathy and Heathcliff: it's 61 pages long (with large print and margins). This book is not that love story. Here there is no choice, no free will -- Cathy and Heathcliff are cosmically in love (see Chapter IX), but both are too flawed (Heathcliff's violent temper and moods; Cathy's flightiness and heedless selfishness), so their love fails cataclysmically. Perhaps their love is unholy, as they love each other more than they love God (a sin raised by Anne Bronte in Agnes Grey). Their thwarted love is tainted, becomes twisted and torn, and the three families involved are punished by revenge to the next generation, in which all three children must suffer exile, pay penance, and endure. Or not. I've read Wuthering Heights twice and the two reading experiences couldn't have been more different: the first being dark, dreary, and slow, aghast at the implied violence. The second was quick and clear and I found genius on every page. Charlotte Bronte has suggested that Emily was some untutored soul who wrote from instinct and emotion, but I think the words on the page deny that, as this is a careful and brilliant work. Anyone who's read Emily's poems knows the care and wonder that goes into her words (why Emily Bronte isn't as much celebrated as a poet as her American namesake and twin, Emily Dickinson, born 12 years later, is beyond me). This is a brilliant book, a work of genius, but it is not a romance, not a love story. Buyer beware. [5★]
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