Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

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If you wish to read a book about good, likable people with happy endings and good feels, this is absolutely not the book and I suggest you do not read it. A lot of people pick up this book expecting something similar to Jane Eyre, with likable main characters and redemption arcs and they are often sorely disappointed when they're given two extremely unlikable main characters and more or less 300+ pages of pain, abuse, trauma, and a very bittersweet ending. This book is less about romance and more focused on the depiction of a cycle of pain and abuse that is born from the bad decisions made by one generation and projected onto their heirs.

Mr. Lockwood is the new tenant of Thrushcross Grange, owned by Heathcliff of Wuthering Heights just a few miles away. Both estates live isolated from society in a wooded area, putting a symbolic focus on those who are often not normally visible to the scrutiny of the public eye. When Mr. Lockwood catches cold after an eventful meeting with his landlord and his nephew and daughter in law, he employs his housekeeper Mrs. Dean to tell him more about his landlord and the long story woven between Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange.

Mrs. Dean becomes the narrator and tells the story of Heathcliff and the families whose names are associated with the two estates. Heathcliff was an orphaned foundling picked off the streets of Liverpool by the elder Mr. Earnshaw, and transplanted into his family as the adopted brother of Hindley and Catherine Earnshaw, living out their childhood at Wuthering Heights, with Heathcliff and Catherine becoming the closest of friends. At Thrushcross Grange, Edgar and Isabella Linton are obliged to hospitalize an injured Catherine, who thereafter finds herself tied between the affections of Heathcliff and Edgar Linton. Thus begins the multi-generational grudge held between the two men, and how their progeny becomes the target of Heathcliff's bitterness which he holds onto for the rest of his life.

Although I do feel that it was excessive for this story's narrative to hand off between 4-5 different narrators, I do see an important role in the narrative being told by a multitude of individuals as their roles in the main story are largely uninvolved and (mostly) unbiased. Not only do I see that this gives an air of mystery for this story to be told to a stranger by a witness of the main story, I also believe this provides a literal third person view into the cycle of abuse that is born from the resentment between 5 people, and perpetuated by Heathcliff as he inflicts pain onto the next generation out of his own pain and misery.

With this book being published in the mid-19th century well before the knowledge of Psychology and trauma were well established, I find this book to be exceedingly fascinating. That is, Emily attempts to capture the way abuse and trauma affect those around the main characters, and how it can have lasting damage on their families. It explores the ways that rejection by society can affect a person, and how abuse and betrayal can turn a person into someone filled with hate and destruction.