On the Shelf
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Three weeks before Valentine’s Day, the independent L.A. bookstore Skylight Books was devoid of a single copy of “Wuthering Heights.” The same day, the Los Angeles Public Library’s database showed 146 people waiting for the novel’s Penguin Classics edition.
While the frenzy to obtain Emily Brontë’s gothic romance owes itself to the Feb. 13 release of director Emerald Fennell’s film adaptation, there is a certain satisfaction that comes along with a literary resurgence. Rather than scrolling, people are reading of the mist that obscures Yorkshire moors and its inhabitants’ judgments.
Not that Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff’s doomed-by-their-own-hands love affair ever needed the exposure; Brontë’s themes of obsession, revenge, social class and the supernatural are still analyzed in high school English classes. However, a teenager might simply identify sentences and structure, but after several years of living, loving and obsessing over someone with tousled hair, that now-adult might find their experiences affirmed, perhaps even blatantly, through a 178-year-old novel.
While reading Catherine profess, “Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same,” one doesn’t need the aid of a film’s visuals. Those are words that penetrate, ones that recollect certain names and call forth our senses.
Love is an experience so all-consuming and strange that we need all the help we can get. The authors that explore the vastness of the heart often serve as our guides. As “Wuthering Heights” continues to fly off of bookshelves, six authors who’ve written on love’s many fluctuations speak on their own relationships with the book and the legacy of Brontë’s text.
Allie Rowbottom, “Lovers XXX”
(Christina Bryson; Soho Press)
Tell me about your first experience reading “Wuthering Heights”:
I was working toward a PhD as was my then-boyfriend, now-husband. We studied for the GRE exam together and one of the books on the reading list was “Wuthering Heights.” Neither of us had ever read it before, so we did a sort of mini book club, comparing notes on the weekends and watching various adaptations in bed on Saturday nights. It’s a really sweet memory even though the GRE is notoriously hard. They didn’t even ask about “Wuthering Heights.”
What do you find to be the most significant impact of “Wuthering Heights” on romance novels?
In culture and in publishing as a microcosm of culture, there is, in my mind, quite an unfortunate move toward uncomplicated and unnuanced takes, because we’re all overwhelmed by all the information in daily life. We are turning more and more to books that give us a dopamine hit that we are now trained by our phones to want from every little thing in life. In the case of the romance genre, “Wuthering Heights” is a contradiction to that.
Why do you think obsessive love still resonates with readers?
It’s so rare for obsessive love to become an enduring love, but it’s such a collective human experience.
Melissa Broder, “Death Valley”
(Ryan Pfluger; Scribner)
Tell me about your first experience reading “Wuthering Heights”:
My first experience was under duress in eighth grade from the deadlines. I’ve reread it twice since then, once in my 20s and once when I was plotting longing in my novel, “Milk Fed.”
What do you find to be the most significant impact of “Wuthering Heights” on romance novels?
Heathcliff as an omega man — that sort of outlier is just hot to me. And that contrasts with Catherine, more of a mainstream woman or at least positioned that way. And her love sickness rendered physical is such a beautiful and powerful literary symbol.
Why do you think obsessive love still resonates with readers?
Readers are as varied as individuals, but there’s a universality of emotion. We only have so many feelings and I think that trumps time and identity. There’s something baked into the human psyche where fantasy love is very appealing to us.
Upasna Barath, “Comedic Timing”
(831 Stories)
Tell me about your first experience reading “Wuthering Heights”:
In AP literature and composition class — I bought sticky tabs and used a pen as a bookmark so I could annotate as I was reading. My annotations helped me come up with a central idea to use for my final paper, but after a point it was no longer an assignment. I knew this book was an important part of my education as a writer, even though I hadn’t admitted to dreaming of becoming a professional one.
What do you find to be the most significant impact of “Wuthering Heights” on romance novels?
We have the book to thank for so many tropes: forbidden love, friends-to-lovers. It created a lens through which we can look through love. It also showed how love can reside in a gray area — how inherently flawed and beautiful the act of loving is.
Why do you think obsessive love still resonates with readers?
Because it’s infinite. Obsessive love is rarely a safe or stable force. When love is obsessive, it creates a never-ending cycle, a love with a never-ending appetite.
Erin La Rosa, “Not You Again”
(Cathryn Farnsworth; Canary Street Press)
Tell me about your first experience reading “Wuthering Heights”:
I read “Wuthering Heights” when I was way too young, which is how you’re supposed to read it. I remember loving these two wildly toxic humans, because while it wasn’t a book I actually understood, I felt it — a sort of, What did this book just do to me? feeling.
What do you find to be the most significant impact of “Wuthering Heights” on romance novels?
A lot of modern romance novels get mislabeled as fluff, but when you read books by Abby Jimenez, Lauren Kung Jessen and the incredible phenomena that is Rachel Reid’s “Heated Rivalry,” you see complex, emotional and intense love stories. As readers, we still crave the heightened, obsessive love that “Wuthering Heights” mastered so singularly.
Why do you think obsessive love still resonates with readers?
While Heathcliff and Catherine’s love is absolutely horrifying, I do think there’s some part of me — personally — that would be over-the-moon gratified to know that the love of my life dug up my corpse so that we could turn to dust together. … We might all have a little tickle of a fantasy to have someone completely obsessed with us — the key word here is fantasy.
Sophia Benoit, “The Very Definition of Love”
(Kelsey June Jensen; Slowburn)
Tell me about your first experience reading “Wuthering Heights”:
In high school and at the beginning, I really loathed it. I thought, ‘These two are a mess!’ … And then my AP lit teacher, Ms. Barker, unpacked what Emily Brontë was trying to do, which was to comment on gothic novels and doomed literary love affairs and class and race.
What do you find to be the most significant impact of “Wuthering Heights” on romance novels?
Its influence is in the heightened emotional state of Heathcliff and Cathy, the stakes that Brontë develops through their love for one another. Their own personal desires and flaws really hinder them, which is a key to writing great characters. I also think that a lot of people credit Heathcliff with being in the canon of bad boys. He’s a little too awful for me, but I do think we could use less sanitized heroes and heroines in modern love stories.
Why do you think obsessive love still resonates with readers?
It’s cathartic to watch it play out — especially on such a dramatic, epic scale — and to microdose the experience you’ve been through before, even if the circumstances are entirely different. I love pressing on that bruise. There’s pleasure in the pain of it.
Maurene Goo, “One & Only”
(Sela Shiloni; G.P. Putnam’s Sons)
Tell me about your first experience reading “Wuthering Heights”:
In high school — for fun, not required reading. I was deep in my Austen/Brontës phase and I couldn’t read enough. I remember being a little shocked by how radically different it felt from everything else. It was just so strange and dark and felt a little bit illicit, even though it was “ye olde literature” to me at the time. I think I didn’t even quite understand what I was reading — I’m sure at first blush I thought it was romantic and wild, just like my all-consuming teenage crushes at the time. It was only with time that I understood “Wuthering Heights” for its impact on literature — how its existence during the Victorian era was so subversive.
What do you find to be the most significant impact of “Wuthering Heights” on romance novels?
On a surface level, I think Brontë created an archetype that has lived on — the brooding, possessive self-made man type. This is like every CEO romance love interest. But I also think “Wuthering Heights” made it OK to be weird and raw in romance, to dig into those strange animal feelings that first love can conjure.
Benson is an L.A. culture writer with a romance emphasis.
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