Due to hopefully becoming an English Lit student come September, I had half planned to read as many classics as possible over the course of the Summer- but I've inevitably ended up reading this and that which I fancy. I did however finally get around to reading Wuthering Heights, which I've always quite fancied reading.
As the desolate setting of the moors would suggest, as a whole, Wuthering Heights is extremely bleak- certainly in respect to setting and mood. It is the characters of the novel that I found to be most enjoyable and compelling, particularly Heathcliff- who, despite his cruelty, I found to be a character I was never totally devoid of sympathy for (which might be a result of my comparing him to the creature in Shelley's Frankenstein). I enjoyed the way Bronte chose to convey the majority of the plot through Nelly's viewpoint, allowing her to serve as a form of narrator for the most part of the novel. The plot of the novel is fairly melodramatic, as is common within Gothic literature, but the complex structure- encompassing shifts between narrative viewpoint to allow a rounded version of events- made for a fairly interesting read, although admittedly I didn't give it the attention that it perhaps deserved, and was in a bit of a hurry to finish it. If you like a tragic love story, and/or Gothic literature, you may well enjoy this novel, and perhaps I will have a chance to study it in greater detail at some point!
Next up on my reading list: Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland
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