Twenty-one reactions to Wuthering Heights

There is no indifference to Wuthering Heights. As one of the early reviews (anonymous) said, “Wuthering Heights is a strange sort of book, — baffling all regular criticism; yet, it is impossible to begin and not finish it; and quite as impossible to lay it aside afterwards and say nothing about it.” The Brontë sisters excited a vivid and assured set of reactions from the start. Many assumed they were men (Thackeray didn’t, nor did Elizabeth Barrett Browning: “Plainly Jane Eyre was by a woman. It used to astound me when sensible people said otherwise.”). Some thought all their books were by the same man. In the Quarterly Review it was called “too odiously and abominably pagan to be palatable to the most vitiated class of English readers.”

Below I have compiled some quotations—some short, some long-ish—from the various critical reactions to Wuthering Heights. You will see F.R. Leavis dismissing it as “sport” and Q.D. Leavis trying to downplay the metaphysical aspect, as part of a long arc in which Wuthering Heights was first reacted to morally, then critically, and now historically. I left in F.D.’s comments on Charlotte because they are just so extraordinary. He never fails to leave me blustered. Elsewhere there is talk of toasted cheese, devils, consumption, and the true nature of the book’s religion.

It is often said that the greatness of a classic can be found in the sheer range and plurality of responses it inspires, but one thing you will take away from these extracts is that while many critics are entitled to dislike the book, they allow their feelings to mar their judgements, and to make false or downright unliterary proclamations. How chastising it ought to be to read the history of criticism!

…in spite of its truth to life in the remote nooks and corners of England Wuthering Heights is a disagreeable story. The Bells seem to affect painful and exceptional subjects: – the misdeeds and oppressions of tyranny – the eccentricities of 'woman's fantasy.' They do not turn away from dwelling on those physical acts of cruelty which we know to have their warrant in the real annals of crime and suffering, – but the contemplation of which taste rejects. The brutal master of the lonely house on 'Wuthering Heights' – a prison which might be pictured from life – has doubtless had his prototype in those uncongenial and

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