1. Wuthering Heights: Passion, Violence, and Revenge on the Moors

[Music] I remembered I was lying in the oak cross it, and I heard distinctly the gusty wind and the driving of the snow. I heard also the fur bow repeated its teasing sound and ascribed it to the right cause, but it annoyed me so much that I resolved a silence it if possible, and I thought I rose and endeavored to unhasp the casement. The hook was soldered into the staple, a circumstance observed by me when awake, but forgotten. "I must stop it nevertheless," I muttered, knocking my knuckles through the glass, and stretching an arm out to seize the important branch, instead of which, my fingers closed on the fingers of a little ice-cold hand. The intense horror of nightmare came over me. I tried to draw back my arm, but the hand clung to it, and a most melancholy voice sobbed. "Let me in, let me in!" "Who are you?" I asked, struggling meanwhile to disengage myself. "Cathryn Linton, I'm come home. I'd lost my way on the more." And as it spoke, I discerned obscurely a child's face looking through the window. "So what an incredibly chilling scene to kick off this new show. It's from Emily Bronte's "Wuthering Heights," and how brilliantly it was performed I have to say. "By me!" "I think there were two people in that performance tabby actually. That's, I can't believe you rushed to give yourself all the credit and deny any to me." "I brought all the melodrama, all the pathos. I think I was both deeply moving, but also somewhat disturbing." "Well, I think that's going to set the tone for the show." So hello everybody, on that very cheerful note, welcome to the book club. To explain what we're doing, we're kicking off today with "Wuthering Heights," but every week we will be discussing some of the greatest, most enjoyable, most entertaining books of all time. We'll be exploring the lives of the authors, the worlds they inhabited, the worlds they created. We'll be digging into things like the great Gatsby 1984, but we'll also be looking at more contemporary books when we tabby, like "Never Let Me Go" by Casua Chiguro. A big favourite of yours, "The Secret History" by Donna Tart. Sally Roon is normal people. I'm actually reading that right now. So Tabby maybe we should say who we are. Yeah, the dreary bit. Yeah, weirdly, I actually really enjoy talking about myself, so this is the best bit. That's why it's dreary for me. So yeah, so I'm Dominic Samarook and I'm a historian and I present another go-hanger show called "The Rest Is History." And Tabby, you're one of the producers on the rest of history, aren't you? I am. And we spend a lot of time bickering about books, Germany. I have to say, you're ridiculously well read, but also you have some terrible takes. So it's very unusual to have that combination in somebody. That was almost so tender, so moving. So yeah, hello everybody, I've been working with Dominic on the rest of history for just long, painful years now. This new show is going to be a continuation of a mini series that we did back in September I think it was, which maybe some of you heard all about books. Yeah, so let's get into today's episode. It's a book that people are talking about a lot at the moment because of course the film, "Weathering Heights," just come out. It's directed by Emma and Fennel, starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Illordy and Tabby, you and I are actually going to see it. We are. So "Weathering Heights" by Emily Bronti published in 1847. It's set in 1801, but it's looking back even before that. And Tabby, it's one of the absolute canonical classics. And it's actually regarded, isn't it, as one of the great romantic novels? It absolutely is. For instance, in the very famous 1939 Lawrence Olivier Film about it. They advertised it as the greatest love story of our time or of any time. And as you say, I mean, it's an absolute classic and it's particularly famous because of its depictions of kind of wild maws, simmering tensions, unbridled emotions. And of course this very, very famous love story at the heart of it all between Kathy, Catherine Ernstscher and the kind of iconic romantic hero Heathcliff. And you, I mean, you've been going on about "Weathering Heights" for ages. I remember even before we were doing the show. Yeah. You saying it was one of your absolute favorite books. And am I not right in thinking that you used to read it? Oh no. You used to read it every single year? Yeah, but let me justify that. For 20 years. I want to explain myself. I basically read it first when I was about 12 and I thought it was just, you know, devastatingly romantic, heartbreaking. I loved the love story. I loved Catherine Ernstscher, the heroine of the book, because I thought she was kind of fiery and beautiful and elegant. And then as you say, I kind of put it on a pedestal and I would read it every year until I was about 17, like, you know, sort of sad teenage miser. I stopped after that for a long time. And then so this was my first time rereading it since I was 17. And so I was very intrigued to see what I thought about it this time. And my view on it's definitely changed. But before we get into all that and before we get into what you think of it, I think we should give a brief outline of what "Weathering Heights" is about. It tells the story of these two families, the urnshaws and the lintens, and they live very near each other across the Orchemores and it's kind of about the tangled relationships between them. And these relationships, particularly tangled in large parts, thanks to the machinations of, you know, the iconic Heathcliff. And the plot is driven by his kind of crusade of vengeance. And Heathcliff is a found link taken in by the urnshaws as a young boy and is treated very badly by his stepbrother. But falls in love with at a very young age, his step sister, Catherine. There's something of the Greek tragedy to it because it's kind of the cycles of revenge going round and round and round. So it falls into two halves, really. The first half is about, it's Kathy and Heathcliff basically. Yeah. So Kathy earns sure she ends up marrying this bloke, could Edgar lintens, or the other family who live across the Orchemores. Yeah, much more gentrified. Like I think if you think this book is like Jane Austen and it's not, they are more akin to a Jane Austen. Yeah, that's exactly right. Family, yeah. And so Catherine or Kathy, she's torn between slightly drippy husband, Edgar and then… Yeah, harsh. Much wilder, more violent, Heathcliff, who is kind of her soulmate. And then the second half of the book is about her daughter who, confusingly, would have killed Emily Bronti to give her a different name, yes, it clearly would, because she's also called Kathy. I think we can basically just for the purposes of this. Oh Kathy, young Kathy. We can just call her a young Kathy or Kathy. Yeah, exactly. Kathy is living with Edgar, her father, in this civilized house called Throschcross Grange. And then she ends up coming across weathering heights and she's dragged back into Heathcliff's world and the sort of mad stuff that is going on there. For those people who haven't read it, and I'm guessing there's quite a few people listening to this, who haven't read it, we won't give it all away right now, but basically there are going to be… They're going to be spoilers. Yeah, absolutely. But just on that, the way it starts, it gives you a clue to how the book works basically, because we began with that reading. We're being told this story by a guy called Mr. Lockwood. Mr. Lockwood has rented Throschcross Grange, so years after the events that are being described and he's a Londoner, isn't he? So he's kind of out of his depth on the moors of Yorkshire. And because of that, because of the fact that he is a Londoner and quite sort of civilized or whatever, he adds a bit of comedy to it because he kind of goes into this house. He goes to meet his landlord and his landlord is Heathcliff, who lives at Wuthering Heights across the moors from Throschcross Grange. And it's like he basically walks into an asylum and it's like shadows everywhere. He keeps tripping over dead rabbits. He's slobboured on by vast wolf hounds. And he's honestly bemused by everything and everyone he encounters there. And there's this kind of grotesque cast of characters that he meets at the Heights. Anyways, he ends up getting snowed in for the night, much to his distress. And he is put to bed in this room. And he finds a ledge in the room covered with writing and it's a name repeated in all kinds of characters, you know, large and small. And it says Catherine Ernshaw here. And then it varies to Catherine Heathcliff and then again to Catherine Linton. And so he then starts to read this Catherine's diary. And this triggers the mad nightmare from the opening reading, which I think I injected with so much dramatic flair. Nice that you're complimenting yourself, yes, again. Again. So basically it's a very, very violent scene, the child's face to the window. And actually what he tries to do, Mr. Lockwood, is he tries to basically slit the child's wrist on some broken glass, which is, I mean, you would think, "Oh, that's a bit much in a Victorian novel." But of course that sets the tone because there's a lot more of this kind of violence and abuse to come in the book. It's a very, very nightmare of seeing because it is a nightmare. It is. And it's very odd because Heathcliff comes into the room and is. He's so angry. There's like a mad desperation to him. And it's like he has caught Lockwood dreaming the dream that he ought to be dreaming about this girl, Catherine. And we at this stage don't know why. We don't understand the relationship between them. Yeah. So Lockwood has had this flipping weird experience staying in this hotel. I mean, you'd never stay at it. It's like, it makes 40 towers, not in that errant. Yeah, I'd actually rather stay at a hostel than that. Anyway, he's been staying at Heathcliff's house. It's full of all these mad people. There's a lot of stuff with broken glass and ghosts. And when he goes back to his own house, he finds out that the housekeeper there is called Nelly. Nelly Dean. Yeah, she used to work for the urnshaws at weathering heights. And she knows the whole story behind this because Lockwood is as lost as we are. And so she says basically, "Well, I will tell you the story." Yeah, it's not exactly the kind of recuperative. No. you know, pleasant tale that I think he was hoping for amidst his illness. Exactly. It's a very long story and complicated story short. There's these two characters, Heathcliff and Catherine Ernstshire, who later becomes Catherine Linton, who is now dead. And Heathcliff was the Foundling and Kathy was his kind of adopted sister. Yeah. And they had this incredibly tortured and intense relationship. She married this bloke Edgar Linton, who lived across the moors. Heathcliff was driven sort of mad with rage. He ends up a loping with Edgar's sister Isabella, who's massively fallen in love with him, but soon realizes she's made a terrible mistake. Yeah, and that's kind of interesting because Isabella falls in love with him in the way that I think a lot of audiences now fall in love with Heathcliff without having read the book. Yeah. It's the idea of him. It's the bironic heroic idea of him. Exactly. She thinks he's incredibly glamorous and. Yeah, and romantic. And little does she know. She has a child irritatingly called Linton. It makes me hate Emily Bronte. Yeah, you could have thought of a different name, but you just thought you'd use the surname again. Brilliant. Meanwhile, Kathy's had a daughter with Edgar Linton, who she calls Kathy. Kathy. Yeah. So, I mean, this is a huge part of the story. Is the doubling of names. But I deliver it, I think. Yeah, of course it's completely delivered. It's like the compulsive repetition. It shows you that you're trapped in these dark webs of hatred and obligation and. Exactly. that goes on and on and on. It's like you're saying about the Greek tragedy thing. Yeah. The bitterness and the hatred and the jealousy being passed down through the generations. Yeah. It makes you think, though, given the violence of it and the. You know, how complicated it all is. It makes you wonder, like, what is going on in the mind from which it's sprung, like the strange mystery of Emily Bronte. That's a very nice segue, Taby, into talking about Emily Bronte, right? But first of all, I mean, should we talk about another fevered imaginative writer? What's your take on mothering heights? So I read Jane Eyre a few years ago for the first time, loved it, and then I thought, "I'll read another Bronte." And I read Weathering Heights and I thought, "Oh, disappointing. It's not as good as Jane Eyre." Because I didn't really get into the kind of fever dream side of things. I frankly did get a little bit lost. And I thought to myself, "This is going to be very self-incriminating. I thought to myself, 'This is a bit of a book for teenage girls.'" Oh, he went there. That's the book that a sad and lonely teenage girl would read every year, Taby. No, but actually, I've changed my mind. Oh, wow! I will reveal all at the end of the episode, but I've completely changed my mind about it. That's exciting. Before we do that, let's get into Emily Bronte herself. Because critics used to call her the "sphinx of the moors" because she was such an enigma, such a riddle. We know so little of her inner life. And so that, of course, plays into the Bronte industry and the Bronte legend because it's meant that obsessed readers can project onto Emily Bronte, whatever they like. However, there is obviously clearly a historical person here behind the kind of layers of wild myth and legend. So Taby, you've done a bit of thinking, haven't you, into Emily Bronte's life? In large part because of that thing, the kind of the myth, I wanted to see how much reality there was to it. So Emily, she's the fifth of six Bronte children and she's born in Thornton in Bradford in July 1818. And then when she's, I think almost two, they moved to a place called Hayworth in the Penn Islands and her father Patrick is the local curate. And then she's struck by the first of these three kind of early tragedies that will darken her early life because her mother Maria dies of cancer when Emily's about three. And then she and her older sisters, including Charlotte Bronte of Jane Airfame, they're sent to this school for clergymen's daughters when she's not yet six and they're treated really, really badly. And this school is actually the inspiration for Lowwood in Jane Air, the kind of terrible school where it all starts. Yeah. And then while there, two of Emily's older sisters die. So before the age of seven, she loses two sisters and a mother. And then so there's only four children left and it's Charlotte. It's Emily, it's Bramwell, there's only brother and then Anne, who's also an author. Anne's always a bit of an afterthought, isn't she? She is always, I always think that's a bit harsh though because I really like the tenant of Welfare Hall. Right. But she, yeah, she's definitely not as famous or as impressive as the others probably. Anyway, so they're educated at home at the past and it's by their father and their aunt Elizabeth. And definitely a bit of a weird household, I would say. Yeah. People think of them isolated kind of. Yeah. And I just haunted how. Yeah. Cut off from the world. And then when they were in the countryside, they were very illiterary. They subscribed to heavyweight literary journals, the house is full of classics. And it's not surprising because their father, Reverend Bronte, was a very impressive, very, very clever man. He came from County Down in Ireland and he was actually the son of a farmhand. And then because he was so intelligent, he managed to get himself to Cambridge to read theology. Although that said, he is a bit bonkers. Didn't he get walk around with a gun all the time? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I actually think you can see the side effects of some of this madness in some of the odd characters of weathering heights. He doesn't let them eat meat, not because of. He doesn't let them eat meat, no. Not for moral reasons because he thinks it'll make them entitled and spoiled. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah, so he's a fun guy. He's a good time. And he's also very much kind of lets himself be an outsider in their community. He keeps his Irish accent so he stands out. And he's known to be quite cold, quite distant. And he's known to have these mad kind of fiery rages. Right. So he's a delightful fellow. Yeah, sounds great. But I think it's no surprise that his kids are quite odd too. So for instance, a local woman told Elizabeth Gaskell when she was looking into the Brontese. The Brontese children had no friends in the village. And I actually quite admire this because I think similarly on one occasion, they were invited to a party and they showed no knowledge of the games played by their peers. And I actually quite respect that because my heart always sinks when I took go to people's houses and they say, "Oh, should we play cards? Should we play Scrabble?" So I'm on their side with that. You don't like cards or Scrabble? No, I just don't say. So that's actually like Scrabble, but it's so forced. It's like the forced fun of it. I mean, not just. Would you never play any form of game? Yeah, when I'm press-ganged into it because you don't want to be, you know. Well, all those people who were thinking about inviting you to their house to play Cludo and now are changing their minds. But so because of this, because of their reluctance to sign up to annoying, boring, forced games, the siblings do become very, very close, unnaturally close, perhaps. They create these fantasy worlds, don't they? This is very you, actually. Is it Glass Town and Angrier? Yes, it does. A place called Angrier. A place called Angrier, yeah. And the really funny thing about it is it's not quite kind of Lord of the Rings because they have little soldiers in them, like they have the Duke of Wellington in them. And actually it's very telling about how exposed these children actually were to the wider world, how much they didn't live under a rock in Yorkshire because they're kind of set all over the world. It's in the Pacific, isn't it? The Pacific, yeah, exactly, exactly. So Emily, you know, they're obviously going to have to get a livelihood. Yeah, well, they have to earn some money, yeah. Right. So she becomes a teacher in Halifax and that's a shambles, isn't it? This is where me and Emily part ways, I think. She says to the kids at one point, "I genuinely prefer the dog to you, I hate you." Yeah, and you will discover and do course why that's such a frightening sentiment. And why these children were actually. Yeah, if there's any dog sisters, plus stop listening. Yeah. Anyway, so that doesn't work out. So when she's 24, she goes to Charlotte to a girl's boarding school in Brussels and she teaches music there. But yet again, she absolutely hates it. She's very snobbish. She's quite up herself. She says that, "Oh, I'll only teach the children at the end of the day when I'm done with my own studies." And that's the only time that they have a break or free time. So she cuts into their free time and was unsurprisingly very unpopular. That's poor. And she was also very unfashionable. She refused to wear the Belgian fashion. Wouldn't that wear the latest Belgian fashion? No. But what could a Belgian fashion possibly be? Well, you wouldn't understand such things because you're not a fashionista like me. Do you know what Belgian fashion is? I do, actually. I just don't feel like sharing it right now. Okay, fine. Anyway, so because of this, and I find this so amusing, there was a student called Latisha Wheelwright. And she said of Emily Bronte, "I simply disliked her from the first. Her tallish, ungainly, ill-dressed figure, always answering our jokes with. I wish to be as God made me." She sounds like a terrible person. Yeah. The great critic, Catherine Hughes, I was reading an article that she wrote about this book. And she described Emily Bronte as the patron saint of difficult women. You're not going to be a sat next to her at dinner party because she wouldn't go. She won't go out. But it's by some terrible mischance. You're having a Bible reading or something. Her physical portrait can tell from that she's very unfashionable. And she's also said to be tall and had big bones. Big bones. Generally when people say you're big bones, they mean that. It's not a good thing. Yeah, and an unfashioning way, right? And actually there's a movie that they did called Emily with Emma McKay from Sex Education and they very, very much play into this. I go like, "She comes across as almost autistic, I think." And people said that about her, didn't they? Yeah, well, people have diagnosed her since with autism or with anorexia and all these kinds of things, which people love to do with characters. I wasn't that slight dodgy. I tell you one thing, there's very dodgy, though, actually. So you mentioned the business about dogs. As we'll discuss, weathering heights is a violent book. There is a lot of abuse of various kinds. Shocking me violent, that's me. As well as mental. And you might say, "Well, where does this come from in this sort of quite withdrawn lonely, you know, very bookish girl?" And an answer is, "She herself is quite violent." So she had this dog called Keeper. And she loves Keeper, doesn't she? But one day, he climbs on her bed with muddy paws and she reacts by punching him in the face, but not just once, but again and again. And if you love dogs more than people, you're in big trouble if you're one of her students. I think we have to be slightly sympathetic towards Emily. You know, she's grown up with, as far as we can tell, a very angry father and she's suffered a lot of loss at a young age and she's very isolated. So I do have a little bit of pity towards her in that respect. But the other thing that's worth remembering is, is that, you know, people have almost canonized Emily Bronte as kind of like a feminist icon and we'll touch on that a bit more. You know, she has quite kind of high Tory politics, doesn't she? She would have set the dog on suffragettes or whatever. Right. Which is not in keeping with the idea of how this kind of free spirit is. Sphinx of the mores. When it goes back to the thing, Catherine Hughes' thing about her being a bit difficult or perceived as a bit difficult exactly. So she's not immediately likable. Anyway, she comes back from Belgium, she and her sisters are great writers and she's writing loads of poems in 1846. She and her sisters poems are published and they're using pen names to disguise their gender. So their Carabell, Ellis Bell and Acton Bell, Charlotte, Emily and Anne. Then there's the most extraordinary moments in literary history. In the autumn of 1847, first of all, her sister Charlotte publishes Jane Eyre and then a month later, Emily publishes "Wuthering Heights" under the name of Ellis Bell. And the first reviews were really shocked, weren't they, by what they saw as the violence and aggression of the book. They didn't say, "Gosh, this is a lovely romantic story." They said, "Oh my God, you know, this is shocking. This is genuine, to a Victorian reader in the late 1840s. The degree of revenge and hatred and resentment and jealousy in the book is really kind of troubling." There was some that really liked that about the book. Like Dante, Gabrielle Rosetti said, "It was the best book he'd read for ages." And he likes that element of it. He says, "It's a fiend of a book, an incredible monster. The action is laid in hell. Only it seems the places and people have English names there." So you can see from that that, you know, some people were really drawn to the kind of darkness of it all. Yeah. So at that point, people are probably thinking, "Well, she's going to go on and have this tremendous literary career." Exactly. Exactly. They've smuggled in behind Jane Eyre because the publishers of Jane Eyre realised it was going to be a big success and they said, "Okay, well, we'll publish your sister's books." Anyway, and then it captured the public imagination. But then in September 1848, her brother, Brownwell, dropped dead, probably TB, coupled with an alcohol and opium addiction. And then Emily herself caught a massive cold at his funeral. And she may actually have already had TB from her school days. And also, and this is a mad fact, this ties in enormously into the kind of timber, an image of them. They'd all been drinking water from the local graveyard runoff. So they'd been literally been drinking corpse water. It's no wonder they're also sickly. Right, a bad mistake. Bad mistake. She doesn't rate doctors. Does she say when she falls really ill, she says, "No, they're all quacks." Then she gets worse and worse and worse. And then on the 19th of December, she says, "Okay, I'm actually quite ill now. I think probably you should call her doctor." And they got, they got a doctor and two hours later, she's dead. That's the end of her. Two nights. Too much graveyard water. So she's buried in supposedly the undertakers had never made a smaller coffin because she's so thin. That's one of the things that has led people subsequently to say, "Oh, maybe she had a need to sort or maybe she was anorexic or something." And then after her death, her memory is kind of fixed by her sister Charlotte, who writes these prefaces to weathering heights. Sorry, disingenuously, perhaps. Yeah, possibly because what she's, some critics have thought, that what Charlotte was trying to do was she was anxious that weathering heights were so violent and it would kind of tarnish the bruntly brand. She says, "Well, you can't really blame my sister for what she wrote because she's a, and I quote, "a native and nirseling of the mores." She was simpler than a child. Her nature stood alone. She did not know what she had done. Yeah. So she kind of turns her into this sort of innocent freak touched by kind of divine inspiration in the matter of writing weathering heights. And she turns therefore weathering heights into this kind of natural phenomenon. It is rustic through, it is morish and wild and naughty as the root of heath. But then, funnily enough, Charlotte actually went back in amended large swathes of weathering heights. And she tones the whole thing down. And she actually changed some of the speech. So there's a mad eccentric character called Joseph, who is always quoting pastures from the Bible, always getting crossed with everyone. I did wonder if there was something of Emily Brompte's father in that. Anyway, he speaks in a very strong, northern dialect, York Shrakson exactly. And she massively tones that down. And I actually think that God, because he's utterly incomprehensible as it is. At first, when I was reading his bits, I started to sort of mutter them to myself. York should dialect to try and make sense of them. And then about half of the book, I thought, "Henry, you have said the same thing anyway." So I just. This is what I said about the songs in "Lord of the Rings." I just kind of skipped over them. And you were a poor by that. I am still a poor by that. That's probably the worst thing you've ever said. Very disappointing, because the songs, of course, the best bit of "Lord of the Rings" as everybody knows. Oh, God. So since you mentioned Joseph, shall we just have a look at some of the characters in "Wuthering Heights?" Because they're a good way into the themes of the book. Yeah, they definitely are. People who've not read the book may think, "Gosh, this is all about kind of massive landscapes, wild passions and more." And actually, it's quite a claustrophobic book. Most of the action is set indoors in these very kind of enclosed spaces. As we said, there's a lot of doubling characters with the same names and characters who mirror images of each other. And then the narration, it's often kind of a story within a story within a story because the whole thing is being told to us by this bloke Lockwood. And Lockwood, he's actually the narrator. We know very little about him, do we? Hardly anything, which is kind of an oddly sinister. He's like the outsider looking in. He's like us. He's encountering these mad families and their mad dynamics and their brutality and their violence. And his shock is therefore kind of our shock. Anyway, so then we have our secondary narrator who is telling Lockwood the story of the book and this is Nelly Dean. And she is the housekeeper at Thrush Cross Grange, as we said, and she used to work at "Wuthering Heights." And she was a servant to the urnshaws, the family who live at Wuthering Heights and was kind of devoted to them. In typically gothic manner, Nelly is not entirely reliable, is she? She's actually kind of a participant in the story herself. She doesn't tell certain characters things. She seems very close to Heathcliff and you wonder if she's on his side and then kind of turns her back on him. She's not very sympathetic to Kathy. So she plays quite a big part in the story, but you also feel slightly that there's a limit to what she can tell you because she's not as educated as the characters that she is describing. And not only that, so I personally, I love and under allowable narrator. I know you do. And there was a critic in the fifth article James Haffley who basically said maybe Nelly is the villain. The villain. Maybe Nelly is the villain of the story because she's often kind of either concealing or disclosing confidences that characters have told her and she tells you this in the story. And actually some of the things that she reveals to Heathcliff and whatnot, they end up having disastrous consequences. And so you could argue, couldn't you, that she's the actual, the book is all about Nelly. They're all her puppets. Exactly. Yeah, I think that's a bit harsh. And I also think that's like working a little bit too hard to read critical analysis into the book. I think she's like a solid, quite hard Yorkshire woman. Okay. Very devoted to the urnshaws. But I don't think she intentionally doesn't tell people things ever. Anyway, I think you're probably right. So the family that she is working for now in, for much of the book are the Lintens. And they're kind of, you know, you think of them as absolute drips. I do think of them as total shit. Yeah. They are done by actually. I think they might actually be sort of the sanest epic characters in the book. And they are, they contrast enormously with the urnshaws. They're all blonde and elegant. They're much more Jane Austen. They live in luxury. The grain is much more insipid in comparison to weathering heights. So the head of their family, the main character that we're dealing with is guy called Edgar. And old Kathy Ernshaw marries him. Because he's elegant. He's elegant and refined and he's wealthy. Yeah. And he's the somebody whose life is going to be destroyed by these awful neighbours. Largely by Heathcliff. Yeah. I actually like Edgar. I like his trajectory. I think he goes from being a kind of very slightly pathetic drip to being quite a good man and quite a strong man. Anyway, so his sister is a beller. And she really is quite whiny. But I have to say, Catherine Ernshaw, old Kathy Edgar's wife is horrible to her. But she falls in love with Heathcliff and elopes with him and regrets it almost immediately. On her wedding night, she regrets it. She ends up running away from him, pregnant and then raises their son together away from him before dying. She's the kind of absolute archetypal Victorian victim. Yeah, she is. She's basically falling in love with the bad boy on as soon as they've got married, she thinks, oh my god, I've made a terrible mistake. She's kind of Lydia, do you think, from M. Pride and Prejudice? There's something ever coming. Yeah, look at that. I can see what you mean, definitely. Yeah. A member of the household is young Kathy, right? Edgar's daughter. Edgar's daughter. Right. So Edgar has married Catherine Ernshaw, the older Kathy. They have a daughter, also called Kathy. She's a bit saucy, we're told. Yeah, Nellie calls her saucy. She's very precocious and she's blonde and she's pretty. But she's actually much more warmhearted, I think, than her mother, Catherine. And she's raised at the range of the kind of the sunny innocence of that place. But she strains against the confines of it because her father doesn't want her going out. And she meets the dark denizens of weathering heights and she eventually does. Right. Heathcliff lures her in and ends up entraping her at the heights. Well, that's the thing, is it? Weathering heights is like this labyrinth, this dark, cramish. Once you go in, yeah, there's no way out. You never, you never come out the same. Exactly. And he manages to entrap her into marrying his son, helpfully called Linton. Yeah. And this is the child that Isabella was carrying when she ran away. And then when she dies, she's taken back to the heights. Against his will. So there's always this slightly incestuous nature to it because it's basically six characters, all of the same name. And they all end up, they're all cousins and they all end up marrying each other in various combinations. God, imagine how weird they're sure. They're going to be like the Habsburgs by the third generation. They're going to have gills and fins. So Linton, so he's the son of Heathcliff and Isabella. That's right, isn't it? And he's a terrible person. He's just nothing. Oh, he's a worse. No redeeming things about him whatsoever. If anyone's watched Game of Thrones, he bears a striking resemblance to Joffrey Barathion. Yeah, yeah, I can see that. He's always moaning. He's very picky. He's very cruel. He hates the outdoors and he's very abusive towards his wife and cousin, young Kathy Linton. I'd tell you, I've seen your notes. So I can see the next sentence, which is uncanny similarities with Dee Sandbrook. And that is mad. That is mad. You know, sort of very intellectuals staying indoors, very picky about each. Picky-Bell-deeds? What? That's not that. You know, I actually wasn't going to say that, but you've chosen to destroy yourself. But you wrote it down, which is poor. Well, we're going to reveal something you wrote down later about. You and Heathcliff will come to that. Anyway, so Linton lives at Wuthering Heights with a guy called Hetton, whose father is a guy called Hindley. Yeah. Yeah. Why can't they call him, like Chad and Hubert? Nobody could Chad would have a son called Hubert or vice versa. No, that's just completely different registers of things. So anyway, Hindley was Kathy Earnshaw's brother. And he is just a monster of a man. Yeah, he's a monster of a man. He's actually very abusive to Heathcliff. To Heathcliff. He carries out a lot of the original abuse that then becomes self-mapetrating. And he's got this son called Hetton. Okay, I've just going to encourage this to the end of the book. It's dead easy. Just keep these characters in your mind. Heathcliff, Hetton and Hindley. They're all obviously very different. Basically, Heathcliff goes off for a long time and comes back and we never know what happens to him. He comes back, dead set on revinging himself on Hindley. And then part of that is by raising Hetton almost as a beast. He makes him very uncultured, very brutal. But I actually think Hetton is a good man underneath it all. And he ends up falling in love with his cousin, young Kathy Linton, who is married to Linton. Linton. Linton, Linton. Anyway, at the end of the novel, they end up kind of an item. She teaches him to read and it's and they kind of go back to the genit, they're like straining to return to their gentility that is always lost at weathering heights. Anyway, this leads us to the character that is essentially the heroine of the novel and almost as iconic as Heathcliff. And this is Catherine Ernst, or old Kathy. So Margot Robbie is playing her in the movie, quite controversial casting, I thought. But we'll see what we think of it on Friday. So she is the centre of the novel in some way. She is. She is. And at the centre of the book is the driving, obsessive passion that Heathcliff has for her. And you can sort of see why she's a fun character. She's wild, she's magnetic, she's defiant, she's very beautiful, she's very selfish. And she really isn't titled, isn't she? She should not have been eating so much meat. Yeah. And when I first read it, I thought, you know, she's the ultimate, independent, passionate rebel. And I thought, you know, the element of her that is an entitled brat came out of it a lot. And so she dies after giving birth to her daughter, young Kathy. We never entirely understand how or why and she dies in Heathcliff's arms. In what I think is quite a moving scene. But she dies so quickly. This was a real surprise to me. Like one page, she's alive and everything's fine. And then basically she dies in about three sentences. Yeah. But her life is kind of defined by these two loves. Her wild, devastating, destructive love for Heathcliff, her soulmate. And then how much safer Tamer love for Linton and he's like her security. And she says at one point that like Heathcliff is like the rock. And Linton is like the leaves on top. You know, they'll blow away, but her love for Heathcliff remains. You know, she says that very, very famous line that I know that particularly girls all over the world have always been drawn to. And that is Heathcliff is more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same. And you like that? I still find that quite moving, confirming all your worst suspicions about my. Yeah. I keep you buried or a man's nature. I do still find that moving. It kind of allows you to indulge in the idea of soulmates. But anyway, this brings us to the man who is the object of her kind of hatred and passion throughout the book. And this is the fascinating enigma, the man, the myth, the monster or vampire that is Heathcliff. But I think on that tantalising note that we should come to a break and discuss him afterwards. Exciting. Welcome back to the book club. Now we promised before the break that we would be discussing Heathcliff and Dominic, you write in the notes that you bear an uncanny similarity to Heathcliff. So maybe you want to explain yourself. I think that will have come through for the listeners already, to be honest. The kind of smoldering, brooding, dark kind of interviolence. Heathcliff is one of those characters who even if you haven't read weathering heights, you may be have heard of him and he kind of casts the shadow over all English literature. In the book we are told that he's a Foundling, he's from Liverpool and Mr Ernst Shaw senior, so Kathy's father basically found him on a business trip to Liverpool. And the implication I think because this is the late 1840s is that he's probably Irish. This is the period of the Irish famine. Obviously Liverpool, a port associated with migration from Ireland. So I think that's the assumption he's described as a dark-skinned gypsy. And this sort of uthanas I think would have been interpreted by Victorian readers as his Irishness. But there is a case that he's inspired by Lord Byron, the sort of rake and poet and celebrity of a generation or so earlier. And we know that Emily Bronte was a huge fan of Byron as well. Yes. And a magazine article about Byron that we published in 1825, he occupies a similar sort of space to Byron in that he is both compelling, but he's also dangerous as Byron was perceived to be. Yeah. There's a sort of sense I think that a lot of critics and readers get that he is this ferocious, destructive spirit who has forced his way into their household and is basically going to destroy them, the urnshaws and the lintens, the other family and the other house across the more. Yeah. But what makes him attractive to readers is the almost the obsessive, the overwhelming passion that he has for his adopted sister, Kathy. She's the only person who really understands him, ever shows him any kindness. And he develops this, I mean, to call it an obsession is massively to underplay it. She dominates his every waking thought. You get a slight sense, I think, that all the violence of his nature is this kind of, is born of frustration and anger that he can't possess her completely. Yeah, she refers to her at one point as his life. He literally cannot live without her. And I actually think, you know, given how, how so much of Heathcliff is just horrible, you know, he's a really cruel character. I think the reason that people have transformed him into this kind of romantic hero is because of his inner torment, the constant longing, the constant unquench desire for Catherine Anshul. So there are two ways, I think, in which you can look at Heathcliff. You can read the book and see him as a soul who's suffering, somebody who's in hell the whole time. And that's how he's introduced to us. Milton Satan, like from Paradise Lost. But that's, I guess, the other side that he is, that he's just evil. Yeah. That he's willfully evil. And some people, again, pushing the Byron comparison say he's kind of vampiric. He's somebody who is feeding on these women. So he destroys Isabella Linton, who marries him and then regrets it. He ends up digging up old Kathy's body. Twice. And for kind of weird necrophiliac purposes that are not fully explained. He wants to possess her entirely in a funny way. And that's the thing is I actually, I don't think that Heathcliff has any moment of redemption. I think you kind of expect really a book like this. It's going to be like Mr. Darcy or something. Where in the beginning he's not nice and he's cruel. And then by the end it turns out he's got a heart of gold underneath it all. And he's a good man. That never happens. In her sister's book, Jane Eyre, Mr. Rochester. Exactly. Also very bironic. He's dark and difficult, but actually he's not ultimately. He's a good man. Yeah, exactly. There, Heathcliff has none of the redemption to which we are accustomed these days. There's no good in him, really. He obviously has fascinated people ever since like, what is Emily Bronti trying to do with him? Yeah. The 1840s is a very, very politically economically difficult time in Britain and in Ireland. It's the hungry 40s. There's a lot of distress. The industrial revolution has played out and has turned lots of social relations on their head. So a lot of people see him as the embodiment of change who is kind of disrupting, undermining the established order. He's the outsider. Yeah. The alien thing. Exactly. Who is destroying the existing kind of class system? So there's that aspect to it. Obviously, very fashionable now is to see things in terms of race. So that thing about him being a sort of swarthy dark skin gypsy, which is the kind of language that Emily Bronti uses. There's a point at which Edgar and Isabella's father, Mr. Linton, says, "I wonder if he is quote a little lascar or an American or Spanish cast away." And actually it's become very trendy now to say, well, he comes from Liverpool. Maybe he's an escaped slave, maybe he's mixed race or whatever, which I don't actually think is would have registered with Emily Bronti. I don't think this is about the empire or anything like that. Do you think she basically hasn't thought that much into him? He exists purely in the present of her book. She's not that interested in his past. Yeah, I think so. I think he's exactly right. I think she would say, "Oh, you're overthinking things. Here's an outside force, but you don't need to explain in very literal terms exactly where he's come from." Yeah. The defining thing about him is his violence. Yeah. This is the weird thing to me about people thinking it's such a romantic book. He is an immensely brutal man. And the first reviews commented again and again on what they, I mean, here's an example, the vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors of the book. Another one, the reader is shocked, disgusted, almost sickened by details of the cruelty in humanity and the most diabolical hate and vengeance. So much of this is associated with Heathcliff himself, isn't it? Definitely. I mean, there's a series of appallingly violent things that he does. I mean, to start with, like every lovable romantic hero, he hangs his fiance's dog. She looks out her window and it's hanging. God, dogs don't fare well in the Brontos story, do they? No, but I mean, this is the product of somebody who punched her dog in the face. Yeah, well, quite exactly. He refuses a nurse to his dying son and cries, lock him up and leave him. He constantly assaults and threatens others. He says at one point of Edgillinton, I'll crush his ribs like a rotten hazelnut. He threatens to pull out his wife's fingernails. He obviously digs up his former love, Catherine Ernst Shaw. He gets mad or a mad or a mad or a mad as the book continues. It's a spiral of lunacy. The interesting thing is that he is not the only violent character in the book. Absolutely not. If you look at the other characters, we mentioned this book, Hingley, who is the older Kathy's brother. He's the father of Herton. Yeah, he's incredibly violent. So at one point, he threatens Nelly with a knife, forces a knife into her mouth. He has his baby Herton and he basically threatens to draw through him over the banisters. Drop, kick him off the banisters you're about to say. Like a rugby ball. Yeah. Old Kathy, Marco Robby's character. She pinches Nelly, she slaps, she basically hits her in the face at one point. Isabella even refined Isabella scratches Kathy's face and draws blood. Yeah, if you've read Jane Austen. Yeah, not a lot of this in Jane Austen. There's no scratching in Jane Austen. Even in Jane Eyre, so Charlotte Brunt's book, you know, there was much less overt physical violence and abuse. I mean, there was darkness in the book, definitely, but nothing comparable to this. And I think, so for me, one of the fascinating things about this book is how retro it is. People always think of weathering heights as a book looking ahead, but to me, it feels, you know, you would not be surprised to find that it had been written 20 or 30 years earlier. And it's actually set in the past, it's a historical novel. Yes. And I always think it's like the last great Gothic 18th century book. You know, those kind of books about people, damsels, locked in castles and all that sort of stuff. But the difference, I guess, is that in those books, women always portrayed as kind of victims. Yeah, a lily white waif, so I always think. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Sort of, it's like a sort of a woman in a pre-raffer-like painting or something looking out of a tower and very long hair and feeling sorry for herself. They suffer kind of beautifully, but always passively. But that doesn't happen in this, right? They're women of violence in and of themselves. Yeah, that's definitely something that separates it from other Gothic books. Now, they're very, very violent and they're violent against each other and they also rail against their imprisonment in a way that Gothic heroines absolutely do not. And I think it's that, it's the wildness of these female characters that has led a lot of critics to see while throwing heights as a very feminist book. You know, women both drive the plot and it's a woman who is telling large parts of the story. Written by a woman, you know, a woman writer and it's about women, of course. And she or a woman, maybe you can pronounce on this more authoritatively than I can. Do you see it as a feminist book? You know, I thought about this a lot and I actually think it's infuriating me. It's a yes and a no. No, because I don't think Emily Bronte intended to write the women of the novel as feminist. She would have no understanding of what that term even means. And I think they more reflect the stubbornness of her own nature, perhaps. And also the women in the book are still kind of largely defined by their relationships to men as was typical of women of that time. You know, their wives, they are mothers, etc. So they're sisters. So I think to transform the women of Wuthering Heights and Bronte herself into some kind of like a feminist cultural hero as with Sylvia Plath, I think it's incongruous. It just doesn't really work. And equally to enshrine Catherine Ernst, or as this kind of feminist heroine, I think is overplayed because she's not the point of the book. She dies halfway through. You know, she's basically as with many of the other characters. She's like a tool used to enrich and elaborate a story that is largely about kind of family tragedy. But having said that, the women in the book, they are unusually independent from their girlhoods when they're kind of half savage and hardy. They run free on the malls. Neither of the Catherine's mothering heights ever lose their hardiness. Their headstrong, their physically robust and crucially, something that I love about them. There are no way paragons a virtue as with, you know, Anthony Trollep, or even, you know, to some degree, Dickens. There's much to dislike about them, even loathe about them. And you look at them individually, you know, Isabella manages to escape this abuse of marriage and raise her son alone away from him, even Nelly, Nelly is stoic. She's protective of her charges. And you know, in the face of simmering violence, she's incredibly defiant. So I think in that sense, yeah, they can't help but be very strong fiery women. They also suffer a lot of abuse and coercive control and psychological abuse, don't they? That's exactly what I was about to say that you could see this as a book about abuse and abuse, particularly of women. So Heathcliff, the way he treats Isabella, for example, Isabella Linton. So basically, Heathcliff is this, if you see him as this monstrous figure who basically is destroying these two families. I mean, he absolutely blights the lives of the Lentans. And Isabella, when she marries him, she just sinks into this massive depression. She's described as one and listless. He makes her sleep in a chair. He won't let her into that room, yeah. And he keeps the room locked and he keeps the case as she's not allowed him. He insults her in front of the servants. He calls her an "amject thing, pitiful, slavish." She doesn't bathe. Clearly suffering a kind of massive mental health crisis. And then that pattern is reproduced in the story of Linton and Kathy, the younger. So Kathy, the younger and the second half of the book, is also sucked into weathering heights. And then this bloke Linton, who's an absolute nightmare of a man, he black mails her, he imprisons her. He sort of jeers at one point. And he says, "All her things are mine. All her nice books are mine. She offered to give me them and her pretty birds and her pony, if I would get the key of our room and let her out. But I told her she had nothing to give. They were all all mine." "Atology, Linton is the true monster of the story. It's terrifying." I mean there's a true story behind this. In 1840, somebody called Mrs. Collins had come to the passenage to ask for help, to ask Emma Lissfather Patrick for help because she had an abusive husband, an alcoholic husband, who was another clergyman, one of his colleagues. And Patrick Bronte actually said, "You need to get out. You need to leave him and take your children with you." "Well, that's admirable." And then just before weathering heights was published, she came back to the passenage to thank him. And she said, "She told the whole Bronte family. She said, "I've now moved to Manchester. I've moved in with my kids. I'm running her basically a lodging house. Thank you very much for that excellent advice. I've escaped this abusive husband." So you can sort of see why the theme of abuse is playing so much on Emily Bronte's mind and she's writing the book. How can it be a romance? How can it be a love story with all this abuse and violence? But this is the man thing, right? When I used to read it, I thought it was just everything that romance and love should be. Let's get into this because I didn't read this book until a few years ago. And I was really surprised at how dark and how claustrophobic it was. Definitely. And I thought, "What about the Kate Bush song?" The Kate Bush song, absolutely, yeah. Right. It's good about when you read it, when you were in your teens. When you pin down what it was about the relationship between Catherine Ernst short and Heathcliff, I mean, it's so simplistic and try to say it being drawn to the bad boy or. I think it absolutely is. I think it's partially that it's kind of unearthly. It's so idealized and that's always been irresistible. Think about Romeo and Juliet. All these great love stories are cartoons of what love is. And as you say, it's this classic motif. It insurines these two ideals of love that I think I'm sure girls and boys, but particularly girls grow up with and it's regurgitated in Ron Combs and American teenage dramas. And it's that you have the bad boy, like the James D in character and he's bad for you and he's violent and he'll break your heart. But he kind of understands you. He's like your soul mate. But then you have the good guy who's kind of kind and gentle and extraordinarily patient. And he's the one you ought to go for. The other one there's this irresistible otherworldly passion with. So I think it's partly that. You say it's anotherworldly passion. She has these famous lines, doesn't she? Yeah. Kathy. I mean, you mentioned the thing about. He's more my soul than I am. When I read it this time, I was so struck by is that it's not so much that they aspire to be together. It's almost as though they want to be each other. They want to own each other's souls. So like Kathy says at one point, "My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff's miseries and I watched and felt each from the beginning. Nelly, I am Heathcliff. He's always, always in my mind, not as a pleasure any more than I am, always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being." You could read that as like the romantic idea of soulmates, which we all laugh and kind of like to indulge in that idea. But then it's almost like this weird platonic unity. It's almost as if they want to be one person. And I think they're desperately longing to go back to their childhoods because that's the time when you're most alike. Class doesn't divide you. And that's I think part the reason why it is such an unsexy book. Everyone thinks about it as kind of like boldest ripping passion and if you watch the trailer for the movie, it massively indulges in that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But there's never any indication of any kind of like physical fulfilment between these two characters. Agreed. We've said a few times in this episode. They seek to kind of possess each other. Yes. But there's no sense of that being a physical process. No. They don't have sex. Absolutely not. They dream of this kind of strange, unearthly fusion of their personalities and of their souls. It's like they want to go to their pre fall in state. Yeah. The time before innocence is lost. And. But do you not think that that so much of this is driven by the fact that basically Emily Bronte has never spoken to a man? Definitely. She's basically been locked in her house, being either being punching a dog, being horrible to Belgian children. Telling people she lives for God. Yeah, or sort of dreaming up mad, middle-earth style scenarios. And so she clearly, there's a lot going on under the surface. There's a lot of passion in her. But she has never, she's obviously presumably never had any form of relationship with her. No. Apart from with her father and her brother. And there is like an incestuous sort of vibration going on between Kathy and Heathcliff. All right. Let's put everyone out to their misery and tell everybody what we made of it. Who's going to go first? I think you should, given you came to it from a place of not having liked it so much. What do you think now? I liked it a lot more on the second season. Oh, God, that's so gratifying. I'm always right. I really enjoyed the narrative skill. I think it's very much a young woman's book, by which I don't mean as a reader, I mean as a writer. It's clearly written by somebody who, you know, doesn't, it's not a terribly experienced writer. It's very raw. It's unpolished. I mean, there's definitely artistry to it. And I think it does it a disservice to claim that there's that it's just wild. Absolutely. But there is a sort of passion to it. This is the work, not of a seasoned writer, a sort of professional, but of somebody who is bearing their soul to the world. And I like that about it. I do find a lot of the characters quite hateful. But. Absolutely. Yeah, but I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it much more than I thought I would. What about you? I actually, I enjoyed it less. Oh, my words. I, then I used to. I think because I came to it ready to indulge in like a real love story. And there was nothing of a love story to me in this time. And I, and I thought Heathcliff was just horrible from start to finish. But the thing that really starts me, I think is what you said. I think it's so misunderstood. It's actually a book of incredible artistry, the repetition, the doubling, the triangulating domestic spaces. As you say, there is like this weird power that she captures. It's extraordinary because the book takes place over such a small patch of land. And the cast of characters are so small. And Emily Bronte's life was so limited and restricted and so small. And yet her imagination stretches over these vast expanses and it encompasses and plunders such like depths of feeling and torment and emotions. And you can't help but be moved by that. And so if Jane Austen's world is like the deckerous world of the outside, Emily Bronte's world is like the mad violence of the world within. And I think even though the mawls are barely mentioned and actually nature, etc. It is barely mentioned. I think she uses it very cleverly to inject characters and periods of their lives with intense feeling and intense colour. Yeah. I think to call it just a screechy melodrama, I think would be to do a massive disservice. Agreed. Right. So what we're going to be doing because of our commitment to high scholarship and literary analysis, we will be marking all the books out of ten. Yeah. And regular listeners can keep score and discover which of us is a harsh remarker. I'm going to predict that actually Tambi will be a harder marker than I am because basically I'm a fundamentally more generous person. Anyway. But each book will mark in a different scale. Have a different scale. A different scale to reflect the book. So I think we should do weathering heights in. What are we thinking of this time? I think dead dogs is really the. Dead dogs. Yeah. Obviously I'm reluctant to go along with that. Okay. That's who the dogs are. So dead dogs out of ten who's going to go first? I'll go first. You go first. I'm going to give it seven. Oh. So I would have given it a five on my first reading because I didn't really enjoy it. But on the second reading I admired it more. So I've come up to a seven. What about you Tambi? I'm going to be inferiority, contrary and say a seven point five. Ten point five. Yeah. What is, when did we have halves? We do have. You can have half a dead dog. If it lives in the Emily Bronte, it's definitely half a dead dog. You're deaf, having a dead dog. Yeah. Okay. We'd love it if people would do their own ratings online on X or Instagram or whatever it may be and give us their own ratings. Exactly. So their own number of dead dogs out of ten this week. So let's explain how the show is going to work. There's going to be an episode every week isn't the Tambi on. There is. A different book each time. And what we'll do is we will alternate absolute tip top literary classics like the great book, Civil literature, with books that are a little bit more contemporary and maybe more fun, maybe more offbeat, more unexpected. Yeah. So there's a nice kind of balanced diet. But with any proper book club, you have to give people a sense of what is coming, don't you? So next week Tambi, another of your favourite books actually, if you're a sense of the power that Tambi exerts in this show. So what's next week's book? So next week we have Never Let Me Go by Kuzuroshiguru. And then we have The Great Gatsby. And then we have Donner Tarts, The Secret History, one of my favourite books. That's a great book. And then after that, Frankenstein, Barry Mary Shelley. Yeah, and excitingly because the movie came out last year, so that's something I'm really looking forward to reading again. Then another book actually, we made into a film recently, which is Hamlet by Maggot O'Farrell. And then George Rawls 1984. And then Philip Pullman's the first book of his kind of great Lyra Balacca. Balacqua. It's Northern Lights or the Golden Compass depending if you're American or British, confusingly. So what we'll do is we will give people as much advance warning as possible. Yeah, I have to read along, but it's nice if you do. And we would absolutely love to hear your suggestions about what books we should do next. So you can suggest books to us on X, on Instagram, or you can email us. And the links to all those things are in the episode description. And we can't wait to see what you suggest. This is going to be fun, I hope. Yeah. It works. Lots of fun things to talk about. And we will see you this time next week. Bye bye. Bye.