Oh, Cathy! Oh, my life!

wuthering heights (emily brontë, 1847)

Attribution: Top Withins - perhaps the inspiration for Emily Bronte's "Wuthering Heights" by Neil Theasby

I’d been meaning to re-read Wuthering Heights for a while, but the threatened Emerald Fennell adaptation finally got me to do it. If I’m going to have to live through a Wuthering Heights take cycle in two years, I’m going to be ready.

I expected to find more in it than I did when I read it as a teenager—not a risky bet, granted—and I did. When I was a teen I often had a lot of difficulty with books about people who seemed the sole source of their own problems. Then I realized some things. That, however, is another piece, perhaps for another venue, and definitely about a different book.

In fairness to Cathy and Heathcliff, in addition to being the source of their own problems, they are also the source of the problems of everybody around them. You can’t say they were slacking off in the problems department. They put in the effort.