My English literature class took on Wuthering Heights this evening. I read it for the first time over the weekend. I was surprised to discover that it was my first reading. I had been sure that I'd read the novel years ago; at school or in my first (failed) stint as an English literature undergraduate more than thirty years ago at Stirling University. But it seems I'm wrong. The further into the story I delved the less and less familiar the text seemed. By about the end of chapter three I realised I had never read the work before. How can a man like me, who professes to know and like literature, reach fifty-two years of age and not have read Emily Bronte's finest?
It is a splendid work. The anti-matter version of Pride And Prejudice. It is real and surreal, good and evil, dream and nightmare, natural and supernatural, alive and dead. It's imperfectly crafted and immature in many places but what should one expect of a novel written by an author who died aged thirty? It's one of a kind, of course. But what a one: a turning point in literary history to which every horror movie ever made owes an enormous debt.
Kate, of course: barking but irresistible.
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