My annual Gothic: /Wuthering Heights/, by Emily Brontë

[2025-10-28 Tue]--[2025-11-04 Tue]

This year, I finished my annual classic Gothic novel on October 27, making /Wuthering Heights/ probably the best-fitting to my reading speed of any of my annual Gothics; usually, I either finish early enough to start a second, or don't /quite/ finish. The year before last, I found /The Old English Baron/ to be much shorter than its inspiration, /Udolpho/, and managed to fit in the longer – and more to my taste – /The Monk/. Five years ago I found I had forgotten quite how long /Dracula/ was, and ended up finishing it a few days into November. This month, I got distracted for a few days mid-month by /Revolutionary Demonology/ by Gruppo di Nun, but reminded myself I needed to set it aside to finish /Wuthering Heights/.

It was a bit of an outlier in my Gothic reading, being neither especially early (at 1847), nor does it have supernatural elements like the other late ones I've looked at. It's also got a better literary reputation than most of the others, so it was interesting to see what's Gothic about it, and what makes it of literary merit.

What's Gothic about it is dysfunctional families that are haunted by their mutual history, a beautiful woman who died young, and a physical setting evoking the emotion of the sublime. The story is set in a very isolated bit of rural Yorkshire, where two families of the gentry occupy their ancestral homes on a desolate region of moorland. The loneliness and inhospitableness of the environment produce the feeling of awe, the abjection of the human, which is so conducive to the Gothic atmosphere. /Wuthering Heights/ is very much not a romance, though it does have a toxic one at its core.

I'm not going to do a plot recap, but I will say that the story is twisted. A foundling fostered by one of the families is mistreated by them as a child, develops a mutually unhealthy obsession with his foster sister, and eventually takes a multigenerational revenge that destroys both families from the inside. There's a significant amount of domestic violence, class antagonism, and people too trapped by the social system they live under to do anything about their problems. Plus, the astounding fragility of life for people of that era, even in the upper classes.

I ended up sitting on this entry for a few days for absolutely no reason, while forgetting other stuff that I was going to write. So to wrap it up, I do recommend it. If your entry to Gothic lit was supernatural Gothic horror, then this is actually a good transition to the non-supernatural side of Gothics.