Word: heathcliffe
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...HEATHCLIFF by Jeffrey Caine; Knopf; 246 pages...
...wolves howl, make bad novels." So wrote an American critic upon reading Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights soon after it was first published in December 1847. As so often happens, the reviewer was wrong. Emily's tumultuous tale of Catherine Earnshaw and the dark foundling Heathcliff, of the passion that raged between them across the Yorkshire moors, easily endured critical barbs and long ago became an English classic. If anything, the novel's popularity has grown steadily in the past 130 years. It has been filmed several times, most memorably in 1939 with Laurence Olivier...
Emily's leap of genius was to have the story of Heathcliff and Catherine's blighted love told by Lockwood, a prissy outsider, and by Nelly Dean, the prim housekeeper who had witnessed most of the novel's events. Such narrow-minded story tellers were ill-equipped to understand a raging natural force like Heathcliff, much less to sympathize with his condition. The greater their shock at Heathcliff s behavior, the more they condemned him, the clearer it became that Heathcliff existed on a plane beyond the grasp of normal comprehension. Emily also wisely kept...
...Return to Wuthering Heights, Anna L'Estrange (pen name of Author Rosemary Ellerbeck) sticks closely to the original Brontë formula. Lockwood's son Tom inherits his father's manuscript and becomes intrigued by the story of Heathcliff and Catherine. He returns to the vicinity of Wuthering Heights to learn what happened to the survivors after Heathcliff's death 38 years earlier. He meets Nelly Dean's great-niece Agnes, who has served virtually all the Earnshaw and Heathcliff descendants since. She has plenty to tell...
Read's Heathcliff is not a stableboy but a contemporary Yorkshire parson's son who sulks because God did not make him an aristocrat. At times, an American reader is hard put to take Hil ary Fletcher's miseries as solemnly as he does himself- even if one grants that a second-rate British public school is "worse than prison" and that hell knows no torment like an Englishman at the hunt ball whose jacket fails to fit. Alas, The Upstart stipulates that exactly this sort of class embarrassment can still drive a dated Angry Young...