Caolan

Wuthering Heights is the classic I have read. As in the only one. I really enjoyed even though I found it kind of difficult to read. The only bit that annoyed me was the fact that Joseph's speech was written in accent, which is fair enough, only half the time I couldn't understand a thing he was saying.

I also hate it how people say 'You should always read the introduction.' So you do... and it gives away half the story.

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Withered Rose

I'm not sure, I liked Joseph's accent. It gave his character a little more depth than it would have if he had spoken as the others did.

But as for the intros, yeah that bothers me too. I like to read the work, not some summary in the beginning.

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fastkilr

If the introduction is by the author, then I'm all for it. Like in some of Anthony Burgess's books, it adds to the fact that they're already special. Gives him a more personal edge with the reader, I think.

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Caolan

I agree with that. If the author writes the inroduction they also somehow put into it what the readers want to hear.

In the original intro to Wuthering Heights by Charlotte Bronte Charlotte says how the book is a result of her sisters ignorance or something and that Emily could hardly have understood the weight and the issues of what she had written. Something like that, anyway, it made me lose some respect for Charlotte.

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this_reckless_pace

I read it for the first time when I was 14, about 6 months before studying it in school. Thank god I read it before my then English teacher massacred it in class, otherwise I'd never have picked it up again.

It's one of my all time favourite classics, alongside Jane Eyre.

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roadrunner

i read it about 2 years ago. it was probably the first 'classic love story' i read, and i always loved the brutleness of which Heathclif loved. I don't know if i ever really liked Catherine, though.

The only 'introduction' i ever read was for moby dick, and i didn't even finish the book after that. dumb philosophy.

RonPrice

Emile Bronte wrote the novel Wuthering Heights and a body of poetry called the Gondal just before and just after the Declaration of the Bab. A study of this remarkable woman and her writings will reveal some interesting juxtapositions between the writings of this young, single woman in her twenties in England and the birth of a new revelation.-Ron Price

What were those three inner gods
that warred so long in thee?
Are they the same that still fight on
so passionately in me?

What were those three rivers which
ran of equal depth and flow?
Gold, sapphire and blood they were,
tumbling in an inky sea below.

Not His writings, surely not!
What was that dazzling gaze?
That Ocean's sudden blaze?
The glad deep sparkled wide and bright,
white as the sun and far more fair
in the midst of your gloomy night.

That seer that you missed back then:
His glorious eye,
lighting the clouds
but once1,
He may have helped you
wish for life and not the
sleep of death.


1 so much of this poem comes from Emile Bronte's poem "A27" written on February 3, 1845. In this poem Bronte expresses the desire for death after years of suffering.

Ron Price
17 July 1998

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I am a Canadian who has been living in Australia for 36 years. I am married to a Tasmanian and have been for 33 years after 8 years in a first marriage. We have three children aged 40, 35 and 28(in 2006). I am retired and at 64 spend most of my time writing. I have been a Baha'i for 50 years.

RonPrice

RADIANCE AND THE TRAGIC

Elizabeth Barrett Browning(1806-1861) was the most successful woman poet of the Victorian period. In 1840, when her brother Edward died, she became a recluse and spent nearly all her time in her room on the third floor of her father’s house. Here she wrote her famous book of poetry entitled Poems published in 1844. She was seriously considered as a successor to Wordsworth as England’s poet laureate when Wordsworth died in 1850. Another poet, Robert Browning, became attracted to her poetry, especially the poetry in Poems and in 1945 he became attracted to her. They were married in 1846.

That same year Emily Bronte put her Gondal poems, which she had been working on for some years, into a separate collection. The following prose-poem is an expression of my appreciation both Bronte’s and Browning’s poetry and of what I see as a remarkable coincidence between the origins of their poetry and the origins of the Babi-Baha’i Faiths in that year 1844, mirabile dictu. I also include some personal autobiographical comments. -Ron Price, “Elizabeth Browning Internet Sites,” Pioneering Over Four Epochs, April 2nd 2006.

12 months after He said
I am, I am, I am and your
secret epistolary romance,
turned into a meeting--at last
and you found a husband to be,1
your poems made you famous,
the greatest female poet ever,
most inspired in history: some said.

That same year Emily put her
Gondalsaga poems into a book,
her imaginary world that came,
invaded, dominated & destroyed
her real one--became her real one
and she called it Wuthering Heights
and it told of a radiant, a mystical
oneness in the world of existence
with its misery, its insanity, its agony.

And so it was---tragic and mystical.
That same year signaled the start,
the opening of the most glorious
epoch in the greatest cycle which
the spiritual history of humankind
had yet witnessed: the most tragic,
the most spectacular, eventful in
the first century of the Baha’i Era.

1 Elizabeth met Robert Browning in May 1845.

Ron Price
April 2nd 2006

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I am a Canadian who has been living in Australia for 36 years. I am married to a Tasmanian and have been for 33 years after 8 years in a first marriage. We have three children aged 40, 35 and 28(in 2006). I am retired and at 64 spend most of my time writing. I have been a Baha'i for 50 years.

A_MacLaren

I studied Wuthering Heights just last year for my uni class. Couldn't stand it.

evadri

I never read introductions before I read the book, unless it's by the author. Some books actually advise you not to read the intro first.

I also read WH right after Jane Eyre. I liked Jane Eyre better, as I really really really identified with Jane. In WH, I had to read Joseph's speech aloud to understand it. I found I was consentrating more on understanding the words than understanding the meaning of what he was saying - that was annoying. I'm of the syntax school, not the phonetic school.

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sebastian

I totally adored WH. found it wonderful for the characterisation and world she had created on the yourkshire moores (v creepy - kinda like myra hyndly style atmosphere). WH is a very violent book, but this absolutly adds to the sentiment of the story that is unfolding as we read. i love it! especially the circular nature of the novel and how it transpires from a gothic ghost story to a domestic drama. what i really hate though is the awful film and TV adaptations that get spewed out of the BBC!

xshatteredximagex

I adored Wuthering Heights. I read it two years ago for my grade 11 english project, and I just loved it. It's so dark and romantic. The first part of it was hard, but once I got into it I couldn't put it down.

BeautifulDisaster

I read Wuthering Heights this year and I think it's a very strange novel. I didn't like it, but I didn't hate it either.

Oh, and I don't know if anyone else knows this.. but there's a rumor that a re-make movie of Wuthering Heights will be made with Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp (of course he'd play Heathcliff- he always plays such weird characters).

BillyLiar

Wuthering Heights was by far the dryest piece of work I've ever had the displeasure of reading. I could not get into it for the life of me. Although, going over it in class, I still felt like I wasn't missing much.

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