Pod Insights The Book Club 1. Wuthering Heights: Passion, Violence, and Revenge on the Moors About this episode Why does Emily Brontë's novel, Wuthering Heights, have such an enduring romantic association? Is Heathcliff a romantic lead, or an abusive antihero? Are the characters aspirational in any way, or irredeemable?
Join Dominic Sandbrook and Tabitha Syrett as they discuss all this and more.
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Transcript 12,198 words · 12 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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2:40 Dominic Sandbrook? I remembered I was lying in the oak closet and I heard distinctly the gusty wind and the driving of the snow. I heard also the fir bough repeat its teasing sound and ascribed it to the right cause, but it annoyed me so much that I resolved to 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 importunate branch, instead of which my fingers closed
3:24 Dominic Sandbrook? on the fingers of a little ice cold hand.
3:30 Dominic Sandbrook? 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.
3:41 Speaker 04 "Let me in, let me in."
3:43 Dominic Sandbrook? "Who are you?" I asked, struggling meanwhile to disengage myself.
3:48 Speaker 04 "Catherine Linton, I'm come home. I'd lost my way on the moor."
3:52 Dominic Sandbrook? 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.
4:13 Speaker 04 By me!
4:14 Dominic Sandbrook? 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. That's poor.
4:22 Speaker 04 I brought all the melodrama, all the pathos. I think I was both. You know, deeply moving, but also somewhat disturbing.
4:29 Dominic Sandbrook? Well, I actually 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, won't we, Tabby? Like Never Let Me Go by Kazu Ishiguro. A big favourite of yours, The Secret History by Donna Tartt. Sally Rooney's Normal People, I'm actually reading that right now. So Tabby, maybe we should say who we are.
5:09 Speaker 04 Yeah, the dreary bit.
5:10 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, weirdly, I actually really enjoy talking about myself, so this is the best bit.
5:14 Speaker 04 That's why it's dreary for me.
5:16 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, so I'm Dominic Sambrook and I'm a historian and I present another Goalhanger show called The Rest Is History. And Tabby, you're one of the producers on The Rest Is History, aren't you?
5:26 Speaker 04 I am.
5:27 Dominic Sandbrook? And we spend a lot of time bickering about books, generally. I have to say, you're ridiculously well read, but also you have some terrible takes. So it's very unusual to have that, have that combination in somebody.
5:39 Speaker 04 That was almost so tender, so moving. So yes, hello, everybody. I've been working with Dominic on The Rest Is 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 of our books.
5:58 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 Wuthering Heights just come out. It's directed by Emerald Fennell, starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi. And Tabby, you and I are actually going to see it.
6:15 Speaker 04 We are.
6:17 Dominic Sandbrook? So Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte, 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?
6:31 Speaker 04 It absolutely is. You know, for instance, in the, in the very famous 1939 Laurence 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 moors, simmering tensions, unbridled emotions, and of course, this very, very famous love story at the heart of it all between Cathy, Catherine Earnshaw, and the kind of iconic, laconic, romantic hero Heathcliff.
7:07 Dominic Sandbrook? And you, I mean, you've been going on about Wuthering Heights for ages. I remember when, even before we were doing the show.
7:12 Speaker 04 Yeah.
7:12 Dominic Sandbrook? You saying it was one of your absolute favourite books. And am I not right in thinking that you used to read it?
7:18 Speaker 04 Oh, no.
7:18 Dominic Sandbrook? You used to read it every single year?
7:20 Speaker 04 Yeah, but let me justify that.
7:22 Dominic Sandbrook? For 20 years.
7:23 Speaker 04 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 Earnshaw, 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 a sort of sad teenage miser.
7:48 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
7:49 Speaker 04 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 has 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 Wuthering Heights is about.
8:06 Dominic Sandbrook? Hmm.
8:06 Speaker 04 It tells the story of these two families, the Earnshaws and the Linton's, and they live very near each other across the Yorkshire moors. And it's kind of about the tangled relationships between them. And these relationships are 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 foundling taken in by the Earnshaws as a young boy, and is treated very badly by his stepbrother, but falls in love with, at a very young age, his stepsister Catherine. There's something of the Greek tragedy to it, because it's kind of these cycles of revenge going round and round and
8:45 Dominic Sandbrook? So it falls into two halves, really. The first half is about, it's Cathy and Heathcliff, basically. So Cathy Earnshaw, she ends up marrying this bloke called Edgar Linton. The Lintons are the other family who live across the moors.
8:57 Speaker 04 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.
9:04 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, that's exactly right.
9:05 Speaker 04 Family, yeah.
9:06 Dominic Sandbrook? And so Catherine or Cathy, she's torn between slightly drippy husband Edgar and then
9:11 Speaker 04 Harsh.
9:12 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 it have killed Emily Bronte to give her a different name? Yes, it clearly would, because she's also called Cathy.
9:28 Speaker 04 I think we could basically, just for the purposes of this, we can just call her Young Cathy, Old Cathy, yeah.
9:33 Dominic Sandbrook? So Young Cathy is living with Edgar, her father, in this civilized house called Thrushcross Grange. And then she ends up coming across Wuthering 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, I mean, it's a book show, there's bound to be spoilers.
9:59 Speaker 04 Yeah, absolutely.
10:00 Dominic Sandbrook? But just on 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 Thrushcross 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.
10:20 Speaker 04 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 Thrushcross 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 slobbered on by vast wolfhounds.
10:44 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
10:44 Speaker 04 And he's utterly bemused by, by everything and everyone he encounters there. And there's this kind of grotesque cast of characters that he meets at the heights. Anyway, so 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 Earnshaw 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.
11:23 Dominic Sandbrook? Nice that you're complimenting yourself yet again.
11:24 Speaker 04 Again, yeah.
11:26 Dominic Sandbrook? So basically, it's a very, very violent scene. The child's face looking through 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, God, that's, 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 nightmarish scene because it is a nightmare.
11:50 Speaker 04 It is. And it's very odd because Heathcliff comes into the room and is, he's, 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.
12:08 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah. So Lockwood has had this flipping weird experience staying in this hotel. I mean, you'd never stay. It's like, it makes faulty towers look like they're writs.
12:19 Speaker 04 Yeah, I'd actually rather stay at a hostel than that.
12:21 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 Nellie.
12:33 Speaker 04 Nellie Dean.
12:34 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, she used to work for the Earnshaws at Wuthering 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.
12:45 Speaker 04 Yeah, it's not, it's not exactly the kind of recuperative.
12:48 Dominic Sandbrook? No.
12:48 Speaker 04 You know, pleasant tale that I think he was hoping for amidst his illness.
12:51 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly. So to cut a very long story and complicate the story short, there's these two characters, Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw, who later becomes Catherine Lynton, who is now dead.
13:02 Speaker 04 Yeah.
13:02 Dominic Sandbrook? And Heathcliff was the foundling and Cathy was his kind of adopted sister.
13:07 Speaker 04 Yeah.
13:08 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 eloping with Edgar's sister, Isabella.
13:24 Speaker 04 Yeah.
13:25 Dominic Sandbrook? Who's massively fallen in love with him, but soon realises she's made a terrible mistake.
13:29 Speaker 04 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.
13:37 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
13:38 Speaker 04 It's the idea of him. It's the ironic heroic idea of him.
13:41 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly. She thinks he's incredibly glamorous.
13:42 Speaker 04 Yeah, and romantic. Little does she know.
13:45 Dominic Sandbrook? She has a child irritatingly called Linton.
13:50 Speaker 04 It makes you hate Emily Bronte.
13:51 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, you could have thought of a different name here, but you just thought you'd use the surname again. Brilliant. Meanwhile, Cathy's had a daughter with Edgar Linton, who she calls Cathy.
13:59 Speaker 04 Cathy, yeah.
14:01 Dominic Sandbrook? So, I mean, this is a huge part of the story, is the doubling of names.
14:04 Speaker 04 But it's deliberate, I think.
14:05 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, of course, it's completely deliberate.
14:06 Speaker 04 It's like the compulsive repetition. It shows you that you're trapped in these dark webs of hatred and obligation and.
14:14 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly.
14:14 Speaker 04 It goes on and on and on.
14:15 Dominic Sandbrook? It's like you were saying about the Greek tragedy thing. It's basically the idea of the bitterness and the hatred and the jealousy being passed down through the generations.
14:23 Speaker 04 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 sprung? Like, the strange mystery of Emily Bronte.
14:36 Dominic Sandbrook? That's a very nice segue, Tabby, into talking about Emily Bronte, right?
14:39 Speaker 04 But first of all, I mean, should we talk about another fevered imaginative writer? What's your take on Wuthering Heights?
14:46 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 Wuthering 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.
15:10 Speaker 04 Oh, he went there.
15:11 Dominic Sandbrook? It's the book that a sad and lonely teenage girl would read every year, Tabby. No, but actually I've changed my mind.
15:19 Speaker 04 Oh, wow.
15:20 Dominic Sandbrook? I will reveal all at the end of the episode, but I've completely changed my mind about it.
15:23 Speaker 04 That's exciting.
15:25 Dominic Sandbrook? 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, you know, whatever they like. However, there is obviously clearly a historical person here behind the kind of layers of wild myth and legend. So Tabby, you've done a bit of digging, haven't you into Emily Bronte's life?
16:00 Speaker 04 In large part because of that thing, the kind of the myth, I kind of 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 Pennines. And her father, Patrick, is the local curate. And then she is 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 Eyre fame, they're sent to this school for clergymen's daughters when she's not yet six and they're treated really, really badly.
16:42 Speaker 04 And this school is actually the inspiration for Lowood in Jane Eyre, 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 Branwell, their only brother, and then Anne, who's also an author.
17:04 Dominic Sandbrook? Anne's always been an afterthought, isn't she?
17:06 Speaker 04 She is always. I always think that's a bit harsh though, because I really like the Tenet of Wildfell Hall. 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 parsonage by their father and their aunt Elizabeth. And definitely a bit of a weird household, I would say.
17:22 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, people think of them isolated.
17:24 Speaker 04 Yeah, in like this haunted house.
17:26 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
17:27 Speaker 04 Cut off from the world, but that's actually rubbish. They were very literary. They subscribe to sort of 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.
17:53 Dominic Sandbrook? Didn't he catwalk around with a gun all the time?
17:55 Speaker 04 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like all loving fathers, he walked around with a loaded gun. And I actually think you could see the side effects of some of this madness in some of the odder characters of Wuthering Heights.
18:04 Dominic Sandbrook? He doesn't let them eat meat?
18:05 Speaker 04 He doesn't let them eat, no.
18:07 Dominic Sandbrook? For moral reasons because he thinks it'll make them entitled and spoiled.
18:10 Speaker 04 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. So he's a delightful fellow.
18:30 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, sounds great.
18:31 Speaker 04 But I think it's no surprise then that his, his kids are quite odd too. So for instance, a local woman told Elizabeth Gaskell, when she was looking into the Brontes, that the Bronte children had no friends in the village. And, 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 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.
19:00 Dominic Sandbrook? You, you don't like cards or Scrabble?
19:02 Speaker 04 No, I, I, I just.
19:04 Dominic Sandbrook? See, I don't actually like Scrabble.
19:05 Speaker 04 It's so forced. It's like the forced fun of it. Can we not just?
19:08 Dominic Sandbrook? Would you never play any form of game?
19:09 Speaker 04 Yeah, when I'm press ganged into it because you don't want to be, you know.
19:13 Dominic Sandbrook? All those people who were thinking about inviting you to their house to play Cluedo are now changing their minds.
19:17 Speaker 04 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.
19:27 Dominic Sandbrook? They create these fantasy worlds, don't they? This is very you actually. Is it Glass Town? Angria, a place called Angria.
19:34 Speaker 04 Garstan and Angria, yeah. And the really funny thing about it is, it's not quite kind of Lord of the Rings. Cause 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.
19:54 Dominic Sandbrook? It's in the Pacific, isn't it?
19:55 Speaker 04 The Pacific, yeah, exactly, exactly.
19:57 Dominic Sandbrook? So Emily, you know, they're obviously going to have to get a livelihood or whatever.
20:01 Speaker 04 Yeah, well, they have to earn some money, yeah.
20:02 Dominic Sandbrook? Right, so she becomes a teacher in Halifax and that's a shambles, isn't it?
20:07 Speaker 04 This is where me and Emily part ways, I think.
20:09 Dominic Sandbrook? She says to the kids at one point, I genuinely like prefer the dog to you, I hate you.
20:13 Speaker 04 Yeah, and you will discover in due course why that's such a frightening sentiment and why these children were actually.
20:19 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, if there's any dogs listening to this podcast, stop listening.
20:22 Speaker 04 Anyway, so that doesn't work out. So when she's 24, she goes with Charlotte to a girls' 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.
20:45 Dominic Sandbrook? That's poor.
20:46 Speaker 04 She was also very unfashionable. She refused to wear the Belgian fashions.
20:50 Dominic Sandbrook? Would not wear the latest Belgian fashions?
20:52 Speaker 04 No.
20:52 Dominic Sandbrook? But what could a Belgian fashion possibly be?
20:55 Speaker 04 Well, you wouldn't understand such things because you're not a fashionista like me.
20:58 Dominic Sandbrook? Do you know what Belgian fashions are?
20:59 Speaker 04 I do, actually. I just don't feel like sharing it right now.
21:01 Dominic Sandbrook? Okay, fine.
21:02 Speaker 04 Anyway, so because of this, and I find this so amusing, there was a student called Letitia 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.
21:18 Dominic Sandbrook? She actually sounds like a terrible person.
21:20 Speaker 04 Yeah.
21:21 Dominic Sandbrook? The great critic Catherine Hughes, I was reading an article that she writes about this book. And she described Emily Bronte as the patron saint of difficult women. You're not going to be sat next to her at a dinner party because she wouldn't go.
21:31 Speaker 04 She won't go out, yeah.
21:32 Dominic Sandbrook? But if by some terrible mischance.
21:34 Speaker 04 You're having a Bible reading or something. Her physical portrait, you can tell from that, she's very unfashionable. And she's also said to be tall and had big bones.
21:43 Dominic Sandbrook? Big bones. Generally, when people say you're big bones, they mean that.
21:46 Speaker 04 It's not a good thing.
21:47 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, in an unflattering way, right?
21:49 Speaker 04 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. She comes across as almost autistic, I think.
21:58 Dominic Sandbrook? Right.
21:59 Speaker 04 And people said that about her, didn't they?
22:00 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, well, people have diagnosed her since with autism or with anorexia, all these kinds of things, which people love to do with characters in the past. I always think that's slightly dodgy. I tell you one thing that's very dodgy, though, actually. So you mentioned the business about dogs.
22:12 Speaker 04 Yeah.
22:13 Dominic Sandbrook? As we'll discuss, Wuthering Heights is a violent book. There is a lot of abuse of various kinds of physical, 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 like again and again.
22:43 Speaker 04 And if you love dogs more than people, oof, 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, because people, they almost canonize 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.
23:17 Dominic Sandbrook? Right.
23:18 Speaker 04 Which is not in keeping with the idea of her as this kind of free spirited Sphinx of the Moors.
23:22 Dominic Sandbrook? Well, it goes back to the thing, Catherine Hughes's thing about her being a bit difficult, or perceived as a bit difficult, exactly. So she's not immediately likeable. 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 sister's poems are published, and they're using pen names to disguise their gender. So they're Curra Bell, Ellis Bell, and Acton Bell, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne. Then there's the most extraordinary moments in literary history.
23:50 Speaker 04 Yeah.
23:51 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 the, 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 gen- for, 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.
24:24 Speaker 04 But there were some that really liked that about the book. Like Dante Gabriel Rossetti 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.
24:46 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah. So at that point, people are probably thinking, well, she's going to go on and have this tremendous literary career.
24:50 Speaker 04 Exactly, exactly. Although interestingly, the book was kind of 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 Branwell drops 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 Tim Burton image of them, they'd all been drinking water from the local graveyard runoff. So they'd been, they'd literally been drinking corpse water. It's no wonder they're all so sickly.
25:31 Dominic Sandbrook? Right, a bad mistake. And she doesn't, she doesn't rate doctors, does she? So 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 a doctor. And that they got, they call the doctor and two hours later, she's dead. That's the end of her. Too late.
25:49 Speaker 04 Too much graveyard water.
25:51 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 an eating disorder, 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 Wuthering Heights.
26:15 Speaker 04 Slightly disingenuously perhaps.
26:17 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, possibly because what she's, some critics have thought that what Charlotte was trying to do was she was anxious that Wuthering Heights was so violent and it would kind of tarnish the Bronte 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 nursling of the Moors. She was simpler than a child, her nature stood alone, she did not know what she had done.
26:39 Speaker 04 Yeah, so she kind of turns her into this sort of innocent freak, touched by kind of divine inspiration in the matter of
26:46 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
26:47 Speaker 04 writing Wuthering Heights. And she turns therefore Wuthering Heights into this kind of natural phenomenon. It is rustic through, it is Moors and wild and knotty as the root of heath. But then, funnily enough, Charlotte actually went back and amended large swathes of Wuthering Heights. And she tones the whole thing down and she actually changed the, some of the speech. So there's a mad eccentric character called Joseph, who is always quoting passages from the Bible, always getting cross with everyone. I did wonder if there was something of Emily Bronte's father in that. Anyway, he speaks in a very strong northern dialect.
27:20 Dominic Sandbrook? Yorkshire accent.
27:21 Speaker 04 Exactly. And she massively tones that down. And I actually think, thank God, because he's utterly incomprehensible as it is.
27:27 Dominic Sandbrook? At first, when I was reading his bits, I started to sort of mutter them to myself.
27:31 Speaker 04 Yeah.
27:31 Dominic Sandbrook? Yorkshire dialect to try and make sense of them. And then about halfway through the book, I thought he only says the same thing anyway. So I'll just.
27:37 Speaker 04 This is what I said about the songs in Lord of the Rings. I just kind of skipped over them and you were appalled by that.
27:42 Dominic Sandbrook? I am still appalled by that. That's probably the worst thing you've ever said. So very disappointing because the song is of course the best bit of the Lord of the Rings, as everybody knows.
27:49 Speaker 04 Oh, God.
27:50 Dominic Sandbrook? 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.
27:57 Speaker 04 Yeah, they definitely are.
27:58 Dominic Sandbrook? People who've not read the book may think, gosh, this is all about kind of massive landscapes, wild passions and whatnot. 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 are 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?
28:29 Speaker 04 Hardly anything, which is kind of 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 Nellie Dean.
28:51 Dominic Sandbrook? Right.
28:52 Speaker 04 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 Earnshaws, the family who live at Wuthering Heights and was kind of devoted to them. In typically Gothic manner, Nellie is not entirely reliable, is she? She's actually kind of a participant in the story herself.
29:11 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
29:12 Speaker 04 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 Cathy. So she plays quite a big part in the story.
29:25 Dominic Sandbrook? But she does, yeah.
29:26 Speaker 04 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.
29:32 Dominic Sandbrook? And not only that. So I personally, I love an unreliable narrator.
29:36 Speaker 04 I know you do, yeah.
29:37 Dominic Sandbrook? And there was a critic in the 50s called James Hafley, who basically said maybe Nellie is
29:41 Speaker 04 The villain.
29:42 Dominic Sandbrook? The villain. Maybe Nellie is the villain in 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.
29:59 Speaker 04 Yeah.
30:00 Dominic Sandbrook? And so you could argue, couldn't you, that she's the actual, the book is all about Nellie.
30:05 Speaker 04 They're all her puppets, exactly.
30:06 Dominic Sandbrook? They're all her puppets.
30:07 Speaker 04 Yeah, I think, 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 stolid, quite hard Yorkshire woman, very devoted to the Earnshaws. But I don't think she intentionally doesn't tell people things, ever. Anyway.
30:25 Dominic Sandbrook? I think you're probably right.
30:26 Speaker 04 So the family that she is working for now, in much of the book, are the Linton's. And they're kind of, you know, you think of them as absolute drips.
30:35 Dominic Sandbrook? I do think of them as total drips, yeah.
30:36 Speaker 04 Yeah, I think they're quite hard done by, actually. I think they might actually be Sort of the sanest characters in the book and they are, they contrast enormously with the Earnshaws. They're all blonde and elegant, they're much more Jane Austen. They live in luxury, the Grange is much more insipid in comparison to Wuthering Heights. So the head of their family, the main character that we're dealing with is a guy called Edgar and old Cathy Earnshaw marries him.
31:00 Dominic Sandbrook? It's because he's elegant.
31:01 Speaker 04 He's elegant and refined and he's wealthy.
31:04 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, and he's basically somebody whose life is going to be destroyed by these awful neighbours.
31:08 Speaker 04 Largely by Heathcliff. I actually like, I 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 Isabella and she really is quite whiny, but I have to say Catherine Earnshaw, old Cathy Edgar's wife is horrible to her. But she falls in love with Heathcliff and elopes with him and regrets it almost immediately, like on her wedding night, she regrets it.
31:36 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
31:36 Speaker 04 She ends up running away from him, pregnant, and then raises their son together away from him before dying.
31:42 Dominic Sandbrook? She's the kind of absolute archetypal Victorian victim, isn't she?
31:48 Speaker 04 Yeah, yeah.
31:48 Dominic Sandbrook? She's basically fallen in love with the bad boy.
31:50 Speaker 04 Exactly.
31:51 Dominic Sandbrook? As soon as they've got married, she thinks, oh my God, I've made a terrible mistake.
31:54 Speaker 04 She's kind of Lydia, don't you think, from Pride and Prejudice? There's something of a comparison there.
31:58 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, look at that, I can see, I can see what you mean, definitely.
32:00 Speaker 04 The third member of the household is young Cathy.
32:03 Dominic Sandbrook? Edgar's daughter.
32:04 Speaker 04 Edgar's daughter.
32:05 Dominic Sandbrook? Right, so Edgar has married Catherine Earnshaw, the older Cathy. They have a daughter also called Cathy. She's a bit saucy, we're told.
32:13 Speaker 04 Yeah, Nellie calls her saucy. She's very precocious and she's blonde and she's pretty. But she's actually much more warm-hearted, I think, than her mother Catherine. And she's raised at the Grange with 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, lest she meet the dark denizens of Wuthering Heights. And she eventually does. Heathcliff lures her in and ends up entrapping her at the heights.
32:39 Dominic Sandbrook? Well, that's the thing, isn't it? Wuthering Heights is like this labyrinth, this dark, cramped.
32:43 Speaker 04 Once you go in.
32:44 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, there's no way out.
32:45 Speaker 04 You never come out the same.
32:46 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly.
32:46 Speaker 04 And he manages to entrap her into marrying. His son, helpfully called Linton. 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.
33:01 Dominic Sandbrook? So there's always this slightly incestuous nature to it because it's basically about six characters all have the same name. And they all end up, they're all cousins and they all end up marrying each other in various combinations.
33:09 Speaker 04 God, imagine how weird that child, they're going to be like the Hapsburgs by the third generation. Yeah, they can have gills and fins.
33:15 Dominic Sandbrook? So Linton, so he's the son of Heathcliff and Isabella, that that's right, isn't it? And he's a terrible person. He's just, there's nothing, no redeeming things about him whatsoever.
33:26 Speaker 04 If anyone's watched Game of Thrones, he bears a striking resemblance to Joffrey Baratheon.
33:32 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, yeah, I can see that.
33:34 Speaker 04 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 Cathy Linton.
33:43 Dominic Sandbrook? Tabby, 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.
33:52 Speaker 04 You know, sort of very intellectual, staying indoors, very picky about what he eats.
33:56 Dominic Sandbrook? Picky about what he eats? What? That's not, that's.
33:59 Speaker 04 You know, I actually wasn't going to say that, but you know, you've, you've chosen to destroy yourself.
34:04 Dominic Sandbrook? But you wrote it down, which is poor.
34:05 Speaker 04 Well, we're going to reveal something you wrote down later about you and Heathcliff, but we'll come to that. Anyway, so Linton lives at Wuthering Heights with a guy called Hareton.
34:15 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
34:15 Speaker 04 Whose father is a guy called Hindley.
34:18 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
34:19 Speaker 04 Why can't they have been called like Chad and, and Hubert?
34:23 Dominic Sandbrook? Nobody called Chad would have a son called Hubert or vice versa, surely. They're just completely different registers of names.
34:28 Speaker 04 Yeah.
34:29 Dominic Sandbrook? So anyway, Hindley was Cathy Earnshaw's brother.
34:33 Speaker 04 Yeah.
34:33 Dominic Sandbrook? And he is just a monster of a man. Yeah, he's a monster of a man.
34:36 Speaker 04 He's actually very abusive to Heathcliff.
34:38 Dominic Sandbrook? To Heathcliff. This, he carries out a lot of the original abuse that then becomes self perpetuating.
34:43 Speaker 04 Yeah.
34:44 Dominic Sandbrook? And he's got this son called Hareton. Okay, I'm just going to encourage listeners who haven't read the book, it's dead easy, just keep these characters in your mind, Heathcliff, Hareton and Hindley, they're all obviously very different.
34:54 Speaker 04 Basically Heathcliff goes off for a long time and comes back and we never know what happens to him and he comes back dead set on revenging himself on Hindley. And then part of that is by raising Hareton almost as a beast, he makes him very uncultured, very brutal. But I actually think Hareton is a good man underneath it all and he ends up falling in love with his cousin, young Cathy Linton, who is married to 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 genti. They're like straining to return to their gentility that is always lost at Wuthering Heights. Anyway, this leads us to the character that is essentially the heroine of the novel and almost as iconic as Heathcliff.
35:37 Speaker 04 And this is Catherine Earnshaw, old Cathy. 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.
35:47 Dominic Sandbrook? So she is the centre of the novel in some ways.
35:50 Speaker 04 Yeah, she's the fulcrum of it, really.
35:52 Dominic Sandbrook? 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.
36:01 Speaker 04 She's wild, she's magnetic, she's defiant, she's very beautiful, she's very selfish.
36:08 Dominic Sandbrook? I mean, she really is entitled, isn't she? She should not have been eating so much meat.
36:13 Speaker 04 Yeah. And I, when I first read it, I thought, you know, she's the ultimate independent, passionate rebel. And this time around, 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 Cathy. We never entirely understand how or why, and she dies in Heathcliff's arms in what I think is quite a moving scene.
36:33 Dominic Sandbrook? 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.
36:40 Speaker 04 Yeah. But her life is kind of defined by these two loves. Her wild, devastating, destructive love for Heathcliff, her soulmate, and then her 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, he's more myself than I am, whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same. And I still find that quite moving, confirming all your worst suspicions about my, yeah, deeply buried, romantic nature. I do, I do still find that moving. It kind of, it allows you to indulge in the idea of soulmates.
37:25 Speaker 04 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 tantalizing note that we should, we should come to a break and discuss him afterwards.
37:42 Dominic Sandbrook? Exciting.
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39:12 Speaker 04 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.
39:25 Dominic Sandbrook? I think that will have come through for the listeners already, to be honest. The kind of smoldering, brooding, dark kind of hint of violence. Heathcliff is one of those characters who, even if you haven't read Wuthering Heights, you maybe have heard of him, and he kind of casts this shadow over all English literature. In the book, we are told that he's a foundling. He's from Liverpool and Mr. Earnshaw Senior, so Cathy'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 there's, I think that's the assumption.
40:11 Dominic Sandbrook? He is described as a dark-skinned gypsy. And this sort of otherness, I think, would have been interpreted by Victorian readers as his Irishness. 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.
40:30 Speaker 04 And we know that Emily Bronte was a huge fan of Byron as well.
40:33 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes, we know that they had read a magazine article about Byron that had been 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.
40:48 Speaker 04 Yeah.
40:48 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 Earnshaws and the Linton's, the other family in the other house across the moor.
41:07 Speaker 04 Yeah.
41:07 Dominic Sandbrook? But what makes him attractive to readers is the, almost the obsessive, the overwhelming passion that he has for his adopted sister Cathy. 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.
41:27 Speaker 04 Yeah.
41:28 Dominic Sandbrook? 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.
41:38 Speaker 04 Yeah.
41:38 Dominic Sandbrook? And anger that he can't possess her completely.
41:41 Speaker 04 He actually refers to her at one point as his life. He literally cannot live without her. And I actually think, you know, given 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 unquenched desire for Catherine Earnshaw.
42:04 Dominic Sandbrook? So there are two ways, I think, in which you can look at Heathcliff. You can read the book and see him as a, as a soul who's suffering. Somebody who's in hell the whole time. And that's how he's introduced to us.
42:14 Speaker 04 Milton Satan, like from Paradise Lost.
42:17 Dominic Sandbrook? But that's, I guess, the other side that he is, that he's, he's just evil, that he's willfully evil. And indeed, 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 Cathy's body.
42:38 Speaker 04 Twice.
42:39 Dominic Sandbrook? And for kind of weird necrophiliac purposes that are not fully explained.
42:44 Speaker 04 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 reading 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.
43:05 Dominic Sandbrook? In her sister's book, Jane Eyre, Mr. Rochester.
43:07 Speaker 04 Exactly. Also very Byronic.
43:09 Dominic Sandbrook? He's dark and difficult, but actually he's not ultimately.
43:12 Speaker 04 He's a good man.
43:13 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, exactly.
43:14 Speaker 04 Heathcliff has none of the redemption to which we are, you know, accustomed these days. There's no good in him, really.
43:21 Dominic Sandbrook? He obviously has fascinated people ever since, like, what is Emily Bronte trying to do with him?
43:25 Speaker 04 Yeah.
43:25 Dominic Sandbrook? The 1840s is a very, very politically, economically difficult time in Britain and in Ireland. It's the hungry forties, 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.
43:49 Speaker 04 The alien thing.
43:50 Dominic Sandbrook? 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-skinned gypsy, which is the kind of language that Emily Bronte 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 castaway." 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 Bronte. You know, I don't think this is about the empire or anything like that.
44:28 Speaker 04 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.
44:35 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, I think so. I think exactly right. I think she would say, oh, you're overthinking things. He is an outside force, but you don't need to explain in very literal terms exactly where he's come from.
44:46 Speaker 04 Yeah.
44:46 Dominic Sandbrook? I mean, obviously, the defining thing about him is his violence.
44:50 Speaker 04 Yeah.
44:51 Dominic Sandbrook? So 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 and inhumanity and the most diabolical hate and vengeance." And so much of this is associated with Heathcliff himself, isn't it?
45:21 Speaker 04 Definitely. I mean, there's a, 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 farewell in the Bronte story, do they?
45:36 Dominic Sandbrook? No, but I mean, this is the product of somebody who punched her dog in the face.
45:39 Speaker 04 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. You know, he says at one point of Edgar Linton, "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 Earnshaw. He gets madder and madder and madder as the book continues. It's this spiral of lunacy.
46:06 Dominic Sandbrook? The interesting thing is that he is not the only violent character in the book.
46:09 Speaker 04 Absolutely not, no.
46:10 Dominic Sandbrook? So if you look at the other characters, we mentioned this bloke Hindley, who is the older Cathy's brother.
46:16 Speaker 04 He's the father of Hareton.
46:17 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, he's incredibly violent. So at one point, he threatens Nellie with a knife, forces a knife into her mouth. He has his baby Hareton and he basically threatens to throw him over the banisters.
46:28 Speaker 04 Drop kick him off the banisters, you were about to say.
46:30 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly, drop kick, like a rugby ball.
46:34 Speaker 04 Yeah.
46:34 Dominic Sandbrook? Older Cathy, Margot Robbie's character, she pinches Nellie, she slaps, she basically hits her in the face at one point.
46:42 Speaker 04 Isabella even, the refined Isabella scratches Cathy's face and draws blood.
46:47 Dominic Sandbrook? You know, if you've read Jane Austen.
46:48 Speaker 04 Yeah, not a lot of this in Jane Austen.
46:50 Dominic Sandbrook? There's no scratching in Jane Austen, even in Jane Eyre, so Charlotte Brunt's book, you know, there is much less overt physical violence and abuse. I mean, there is 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 Wuthering 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.
47:21 Speaker 04 It is.
47:22 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 mad monks and all that sort of stuff. But the difference, I guess, is that in those books, women are always portrayed as kind of victims. They're always kind of.
47:40 Speaker 04 Lily white waifs, I always think.
47:42 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, exactly, exactly. Sort of, it's like a sort of a woman in a pre-Raphaelite painting or something, looking out of a tower and very long hair and feeling sorry for herself.
47:51 Speaker 04 They suffer kind of beautifully, but always passively.
47:54 Dominic Sandbrook? But that doesn't happen in this, right? The women are violent in and of themselves.
47:57 Speaker 04 Yeah, that's definitely something that that separates it from other Gothic books. No, 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 Wuthering 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.
48:23 Dominic Sandbrook? Written by a woman, you know, a woman narrator, and it's about women, of course. Since you are a woman, maybe you can pronounce on this more authoritatively than I can. Do you see it as a feminist book?
48:34 Speaker 04 You know, I thought about this a lot and I actually think it's infuriatingly it's a yes and a no. No, because I don't think Emily Bronte intended to write the women of the novel as feminists. 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, they're wives, they are mothers, et cetera, 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.
49:13 Speaker 04 And equally to enshrine Catherine Earnshaw 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 moors. Neither of the Catharines of Wuthering Heights ever lose their hardiness. They're headstrong, they're physically robust. And crucially, something that I love about them, they're in no way paragons of virtue, as with, you know, Anthony Trollope, or even, you know, to some degree Dickens.
49:57 Speaker 04 There's much to dislike about them, even loathe about them. And you look at them individually, you know, Isabella manages to escape this abusive marriage and raise her son alone, away from him. Even Nellie, Nellie 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. But they also suffer a lot of abuse and coercive control and psychological abuse, don't they?
50:30 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 Lintons.
50:50 Speaker 04 Yeah.
50:51 Dominic Sandbrook? And Isabella, when she marries him, she just sinks into this massive depression. She's described as worn and listless. He makes her sleep in a chair.
51:00 Speaker 04 He won't let her into their room, yeah.
51:02 Dominic Sandbrook? And he keeps the room locked and he keeps the key, so she's not allowed in. Um, he insults her in front of the servants. He calls her an abject thing, pitiful, slavish.
51:11 Speaker 04 She doesn't bathe.
51:13 Dominic Sandbrook? Clearly suffering a kind of massive mental health crisis. And then that pattern is reproduced in the story of Linton and Cathy the Younger. So Cathy the Younger, in the second half of the book, is also sucked into Wuthering Heights. And then this bloke Linton, who's an absolute nightmare of a man, he blackmails 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. I, 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.
51:52 Speaker 04 I told you, Linton is the true monster of this story. It's terrifying.
51:55 Dominic Sandbrook? I mean, there's a true story behind this. In 1840, somebody called Mrs. Collins had come to the parsonage to ask for help, to ask Emily's father, 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.
52:19 Speaker 04 That's admirable.
52:20 Dominic Sandbrook? And then just before Wuthering Heights was published, she came back to the parsonage 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 a, 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 when she's writing the book.
52:46 Speaker 04 How can it be a romance? How can it be a love story with all this abuse and violence?
52:53 Dominic Sandbrook? But this is the mad thing, right?
52:54 Speaker 04 When I used to read it, I thought it was just everything that romance and love should be.
52:58 Dominic Sandbrook? Let's get into this because I didn't read this book until a few years ago.
53:01 Speaker 04 Yeah.
53:01 Dominic Sandbrook? And I was really surprised at how dark and how claustrophobic it was.
53:05 Speaker 04 Definitely.
53:05 Dominic Sandbrook? And I thought, what, what about the Kate Bush song?
53:08 Speaker 04 The Kate Bush song? Absolutely, yeah.
53:10 Dominic Sandbrook? To go back to when you read it, when you were in your teens, can you pin down what it was about the relationship between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff? I mean, it's so simplistic and tried to say it being drawn to the bad boy.
53:21 Speaker 04 I think it absolutely is. I think it's, it's partially that it's kind of unearthly. It's so idealized and that's always been irresistible. Like, think about Romeo and Juliet. All these great love stories are kind of cartoons of what love is. And as you say, it's this classic motif, like it enshrines 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 rom-coms and like, American teenage dramas and it's that you have the bad boy, like the James Dean 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 soulmate. But then you have the good guy who's kind of kind and gentle and, you know, extraordinarily patient.
54:04 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
54:04 Speaker 04 And he's the one you ought to go for, but the other one, there's this irresistible, otherworldly passion with. So I think it's, it's partly that.
54:12 Dominic Sandbrook? You say it's an otherworldly passion. I mean, she has these famous lines, doesn't she?
54:16 Speaker 04 Yeah.
54:16 Dominic Sandbrook? Cathy. I mean, you mentioned the thing about.
54:19 Speaker 04 He's more my soul than I am.
54:21 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
54:21 Speaker 04 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 Cathy says at one point, my great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff's miseries and I watched and felt each from the beginning. Nellie, 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 ideal of soulmates, which we all love and kind of, we like to indulge in that, 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.
55:06 Speaker 04 That's, I think, part of the reason why it is such an unsexy book. Everyone thinks about it as kind of like Baldist ripping passion. And if you watch the trailer for the movie, it massively indulges in that.
55:16 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
55:17 Speaker 04 But there's never any indication of any kind of like physical fulfillment between these two characters.
55:22 Dominic Sandbrook? Agreed. We've said a few times in this episode, they they seek to kind of possess each other.
55:26 Speaker 04 Yes.
55:27 Dominic Sandbrook? But there's no sense of that being a physical process.
55:30 Speaker 04 No, there's no hint of sex, absolutely not.
55:33 Dominic Sandbrook? They dream of this kind of strange, unearthly fusion.
55:36 Speaker 04 Yeah.
55:37 Dominic Sandbrook? Of their personalities and of their souls.
55:39 Speaker 04 It's like they want to go to like their pre-fallen state.
55:42 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
55:43 Speaker 04 The time before innocence is lost and.
55:45 Dominic Sandbrook? But do you not think that so much of this is driven by the fact that basically Emily Bronte has never spoken to a man?
55:50 Speaker 04 Definitely, definitely.
55:51 Dominic Sandbrook? She's basically been locked in her house, being either being punching a dog.
55:56 Speaker 04 Yeah.
55:56 Dominic Sandbrook? Being horrible to Belgian children.
55:58 Speaker 04 Telling people she lives for God.
56:00 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, or sort of dreaming up mad, Middle Earth style scenarios. And 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 a man.
56:14 Speaker 04 Apart from with her father and her brother. And there is like an incestuous sort of vibration going on between Cathy and Heathcliff.
56:25 Dominic Sandbrook? All right, let's put everyone out of their misery and tell everybody what we made of it. So who's going to go first?
56:31 Speaker 04 I think I think you should, given you came to it from a place of not having liked it so much. What do you think now?
56:38 Dominic Sandbrook? I liked it lots more on the second reading.
56:41 Speaker 04 God, that's so gratifying. I'm always right.
56:45 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 it's clearly written by somebody who, you know, doesn't is 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.
57:08 Speaker 04 Absolutely, yeah.
57:09 Dominic Sandbrook? 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.
57:24 Speaker 04 Absolutely.
57:25 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, but I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it much more than I thought I would. What about what about you?
57:30 Speaker 04 I actually, I enjoyed it less than 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 stood out to 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 strangulating 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 is so small. And Emily Bronte's life was so limited and restricted and so small. And yet her imagination stretches over these vast expanses.
58:15 Speaker 04 And it encompasses and plunders such like depths of, 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 decorous world of, of the outside, Emily Bronte's world is like the, the mad violence of the world within. And I think even though the Moors are barely mentioned and actually nature, et cetera, is barely mentioned, I think she uses it very cleverly to inject characters and, and periods of their lives with intense feeling and intense colour.
58:46 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
58:47 Speaker 04 I think to call it just a screechy melodrama, I think, would be to do a massive disservice.
58:51 Dominic Sandbrook? Agreed. All 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 10.
59:00 Speaker 04 Yeah.
59:01 Dominic Sandbrook? And regular listeners can keep score and discover which of us is a harsher marker. I'm going to predict that actually Tabby will be a harder marker than I am because basically I'm a fundamentally more, more generous person. Anyway, but each book we'll mark in a different.
59:16 Speaker 04 We'll have a different scale, won't we?
59:17 Dominic Sandbrook? A different scale to reflect the book. So I think we should do Wuthering Heights in.
59:22 Speaker 04 What are we thinking of this time?
59:23 Dominic Sandbrook? I think Dead Dogs is surely the.
59:25 Speaker 04 Dead Dogs.
59:25 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
59:26 Speaker 04 Obviously I'm reluctant to, to go along with that, but okay.
59:29 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, so. So Dead Dogs out of 10, who's going to go first? I'll go first.
59:32 Speaker 04 You go first.
59:33 Dominic Sandbrook? I'm going to give it seven. 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, Tabby?
59:45 Speaker 04 I'm going to be infuriatingly contrary and say seven point five.
59:49 Dominic Sandbrook? Seven point five. What? Since when did we have halves?
59:53 Speaker 04 We do have, you can have half a dead dog. If it lives with Emily Bronte, it's definitely half a dead dog.
59:57 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, okay.
59:58 Speaker 04 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 rating. So their own number of dead dogs out of 10 this week.
1:00:09 Dominic Sandbrook? So let's explain how the show is going to work. There's going to be an episode every week, isn't there, Tabby?
1:00:12 Speaker 04 There is.
1:00:13 Dominic Sandbrook? Different book each time. And what we'll do is we will alternate absolute tip top literary classics, like the great books of literature, with books that are a little bit more contemporary and maybe more fun, maybe more offbeat, more unexpected. So there's a nice kind of balanced diet. And with any proper book club, you have to give people a sense of what is coming, don't you? So next week, Tabby, another of your favourite books, actually, gives you a sense of the power that Tabby exerts in this show. So what's next week's book?
1:00:42 Speaker 04 So next week, we have Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Shigeru. And then we have The Great Gatsby. And then we have Donna Tartt's The Secret History, one of my favourite books.
1:00:52 Dominic Sandbrook? That's a great book. And then after that, Frankenstein by Mary Shelley.
1:00:56 Speaker 04 Yeah. And excitingly, because the movie came out last year, so that's something I'm really looking forward to reading again.
1:01:01 Dominic Sandbrook? Then another book, actually, that's been made into a film recently, which is Hamlet by Maggie O'Farrell. And then George Orwell's 1984. And then Philip Pullman's, the first book of his kind of great Lyra Belacqua.
1:01:14 Speaker 04 Belacqua.
1:01:14 Dominic Sandbrook? So 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. You don't 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.
1:01:43 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:01:44 Dominic Sandbrook? Lots of great books, lots of fun things to talk about. And we will see you this time next week. Bye bye.
1:01:49 Speaker 04 Bye.
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