Dominic Sandbrook and Tabitha Syrett on Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff, and the Misread Romance

Wuthering Heights, published in 1847, is the novel this show starts with. Dominic Sandbrook and Tabitha Syrett read it against the love story the adaptations sell. The cold open is Mr Lockwood’s dream of a child at the window, crying to be let in. One of them read the book every year from about twelve until seventeen. On this return, the hosts say, the romance has thinned. Sandbrook came to it from Jane Eyre, thought it a book for teenage girls, and has changed his mind, from five on a first reading to seven. A film directed by Emerald Fennell, with Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, has just come out, and they are going to see it on Friday.

Key ideas

1. The first episode opens on a hand at the window, and the famous romance is a rumour about a trap. They perform the dream together. Sandbrook says so, and he addresses her: there were two people in it. Lockwood, snowed in, dreams he breaks the glass to stop a branch and closes his hand on a child’s, ice-cold. The child says she is Catherine Linton, come home, lost on the moor, and sobs to be let in. Later they add the rest. Lockwood tries to slit the child’s wrist on the broken glass. That violence is the tone they want, not a gothic decoration.

The welcome is his. He is a historian, and he presents The Rest Is History. He gives the plan: one book a week, the author’s life, and the world of the book. He is reading Normal People. Syrett produced it. She says the new show continues a mini-series they did in September, about books. The reason people are talking, the hosts say, is the film. They are going to see it. When the casting of Cathy comes up, someone calls it controversial, and they will see on Friday.

One of them read it first at about twelve, thought it devastatingly romantic, loved Catherine Earnshaw as fiery and beautiful, and reread it every year until about seventeen. The book was put on a pedestal, and then the reading stopped. This is the first rereading since seventeen, and the view has changed. After Jane Eyre Sandbrook had found this one disappointing, a fever he did not enter, a book in which he got a little lost, and ‘a book for teenage girls’. One of them has changed their mind, and will give the verdict at the end.

The plot they sketch is two families on the Yorkshire moors, the Earnshaws at Wuthering Heights and the Lintons at Thrushcross Grange. The Lintons are the family that would sit in a Jane Austen novel. Heathcliff is a foundling, abused by his stepbrother, in love with Catherine. She marries Edgar Linton. The second half is her daughter, also Cathy, drawn back into the Heights. They apologise for the repeated names, and then decide the repetition is the point: compulsive, a web of hatred and obligation, Greek in its cycles. Lockwood is a Londoner who has rented the Grange years later. His landlord is Heathcliff. The house is a grotesque of shadows, dead rabbits, and wolfhounds. He finds the names written over and over, Catherine Earnshaw, Catherine Heathcliff, Catherine Linton, and a diary brings the dream. Heathcliff is furious, as if Lockwood has dreamed the dream that belonged to him. Back at the Grange, the housekeeper Nelly Dean, who once worked for the Earnshaws, tells the story. The frame is a civilised outsider, an unreliable servant, and a name that keeps returning.

2. The Sphinx of the Moors is a legend, and they will not diagnose the woman to save it. Sandbrook says critics called her the Sphinx of the Moors because so little of the inner life is known, and that the industry of the legend is readers projecting onto her whatever they like. He asks Syrett, by name, whether she has been digging. The life that follows is in his turn.

Emily is the fifth of six, born in Thornton, in Bradford, in July 1818. The family moves to Haworth, in the Pennines, when she is almost two. Her father, Patrick, is the curate. Her mother, Maria, dies of cancer when Emily is about three. The older girls, including Charlotte, are sent to a school for clergymen’s daughters before Emily is six. The school is Lowood in Jane Eyre. Two older sisters die. Before seven she has lost a mother and two sisters. Four children remain: Charlotte, Emily, Branwell, and Anne. Anne is called a bit of an afterthought. One of them thinks that harsh, and likes The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.

The isolation story, they say, is rubbish. The house was literary, the journals heavy, the shelves full of classics. Patrick came from County Down, a farmhand’s son, and got himself to Cambridge to read theology. He walked about with a loaded gun. He would not let them eat meat, lest they be spoiled. He kept his Irish accent, stood apart, and had fiery rages. A local woman told Elizabeth Gaskell that the children had no friends in the village and did not know the games.

The siblings invent Glass Town and Angria. The Duke of Wellington is in those worlds, and so is the Pacific. The children were not living under a rock. She teaches in Halifax, and it fails. She told the pupils she preferred the dog. At twenty-four she goes with Charlotte to a girls’ school in Brussels and teaches music. She will teach only at the end of the day, and she cuts into the pupils’ free time. A pupil, Laetitia Wheelwright, disliked her from the first: tallish, ungainly, ill-dressed, answering jokes with ‘I wish to be as God made me.’ A critic they name Catherine Hughes calls her the patron saint of difficult women. A film, Emily, with Emma Mackey, plays her as almost autistic. People have since diagnosed autism and anorexia. They think that dodgy.

The dog is Keeper. She loves him. He gets onto the bed with muddy paws, and she punches him in the face, again and again. They set that beside the violence of the novel. One of them asks for a little pity: an angry father, early loss, and isolation. Poems in 1846, under Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell: Charlotte, Emily, and Anne. In the autumn of 1847 Charlotte publishes Jane Eyre, and a month later Emily publishes Wuthering Heights as Ellis Bell. The first reviews are shocked by the violence, not charmed by a love story. Dante Gabriel Rossetti is the reader who wants the darkness. They report him: ‘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.’

The book is smuggled out behind Jane Eyre. Branwell dies in September 1848, probably tuberculosis together with alcohol and opium. She catches cold at the funeral, may already have had tuberculosis from the school, and they have been drinking water off the graveyard. She will not see doctors. They are quacks. On 19 December she asks for one, and she is dead two hours later. The undertaker, they say, had never made a smaller coffin, she was so thin. That thinness is one of the props for the anorexia claim they have already declined to adopt. Charlotte’s prefaces fix the memory. They give her words: ‘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.’ Charlotte makes the book a natural thing, moorish and wild, and makes the sister an innocent who did not know what she had written. She also revises, and tones down Joseph, the servant who quotes the Bible in broad Yorkshire. They cannot understand him. One of them wonders whether Joseph has something of Patrick.

3. Heathcliff is not redeemed, the women hit back, and a feminist parable is more than Emily meant. The characters are the way in. The book is more claustrophobic than a poster of the moors. Most of it is indoors. The narration is a story inside a story. Lockwood is the outsider, and his shock is ours. Nelly is the second narrator, a participant, close to Heathcliff and then not, unsympathetic to Cathy, and limited by what a servant can tell. They float a critic of the 1950s, James Hafley, for the idea that Nelly is the villain: she conceals and discloses confidences, and the damage follows. The reply is that they are all her puppets, and then that this is working too hard. The reading they keep is the stolid Yorkshire woman who does not withhold on purpose.

The Lintons are blonde, elegant, richer, and closer to a Jane Austen family. Edgar is called a drip, and then defended. One of them likes the way he becomes a good and strong man. Isabella is whiny, badly treated by Cathy, in love with the idea of Heathcliff, and sorry almost at once. She is the reader who has not read the book. Someone hears Lydia, in Pride and Prejudice, in her, and the likeness is only half accepted. Young Cathy is saucy, warmer than her mother, lured to the Heights, and married to Linton, Heathcliff’s son by Isabella. Linton is pitiless in their account. Hareton, Hindley’s son, is raised brutal and untaught, loves his cousin, learns to read from her, and ends with her, straining back towards the gentry. Hindley is the original abuse, a monster, and then the pattern repeats. Heathcliff disappears and returns with the revenge already decided. They say we never learn where he has been.

Old Cathy is the fulcrum. Wild, magnetic, defiant, beautiful, selfish. On this rereading one of them finds the entitled brat where they had once found the rebel. Cathy dies after the daughter is born, in Heathcliff’s arms, and the death is sudden: alive on one page, and gone in a few sentences. Heathcliff is the rock. Edgar is the leaves that blow away. The line they read is that he is ‘more myself than I am’, and ‘Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.’ One of them still finds it moving, and says it confirms a suspicion about their own romanticism.

After the break Syrett asks him to explain a note in which he has written that he resembles Heathcliff. The lecture is hers. Heathcliff is a foundling from Liverpool, taken up by old Mr Earnshaw. The late 1840s, the famine, and Liverpool make him probably Irish in a Victorian reader’s ear. The book calls him a dark-skinned gypsy. Byron is the other model. The household had read a magazine article of 1825. Compelling, and dangerous. The passion for Cathy is obsession, not a courtship. He calls her his life. Two readings sit side by side. A soul in hell, Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost. Or a will to evil, vampiric, feeding on Isabella, digging Cathy’s body up twice. Syrett does not think there is a moment of redemption. A reader expects Mr Darcy, cruel and then golden. ‘That never happens.’ She gets as far as Rochester in Jane Eyre. One of them says Rochester is Byronic, dark and difficult, and not, ultimately, a good man. The reply supplies ‘a good man.’ Heathcliff has none of the redemption readers are used to, and there is no good in him. The hungry forties, the distress, the industrial revolution, and Heathcliff as the outsider who breaks the order of the two houses: that is the political reading. Race, the hosts say, is the fashionable one. They quote Mr Linton, who wonders whether the boy is ‘a little lascar or an American or Spanish castaway.’ Escaped-slave and mixed-race readings are, the hosts say, more than Emily registered. The hosts do not think the book is about the empire. The past is not the point, and they agree. Heathcliff is an outside force, and the book does not need a literal origin.

The violence is what makes the romantic reputation strange to the hosts. Reviews they cite speak of vulgar depravity, unnatural horrors, and a reader almost sickened by cruelty and diabolical hate. Heathcliff hangs his fiancée’s dog, refuses a nurse to his dying son (‘Lock him up and leave him’), and says he will crush Edgar’s ribs ‘like a rotten hazelnut.’ He is not the only one. Hindley puts a knife to Nelly’s mouth and threatens to throw the baby Hareton over the banisters. Cathy pinches and slaps Nelly. Isabella scratches Cathy and draws blood. There is none of this, they say, in Jane Austen, and less of it in Jane Eyre.

The hour treats the book as the last great eighteenth-century gothic novel. People think of it as looking ahead. It is set in the past, it is a historical novel, and it could have been written twenty or thirty years earlier. The old gothic locks a woman in a castle. Here the women are violent themselves, and they fight the imprisonment. The hosts ask, since one of them is a woman, whether the book is feminist, and call the answer infuriatingly a yes and a no. No, because Emily would not have understood the term. The women are still wives, mothers, and sisters. To make Emily, or Cathy, a feminist cultural hero, as with Sylvia Plath, does not work. Cathy dies halfway through. She is a figure in a family tragedy, not the point of the book. Yes, because the girls are half savage and hardy, they stay headstrong, and they are not the paragons a reader meets in Trollope or in Dickens. Isabella gets out and raises her son. Nelly is defiant in the middle of the violence. The hosts say they were about to name the abuse. Isabella is worn and listless, sleeps in a chair, is locked out of the room, is called an abject thing, and does not bathe. The pattern returns with young Cathy and Linton. His speech, which they read, is that her books, her birds, and her pony are already his, and that she has nothing to give for the key. In 1840 a Mrs Collins came to the parsonage because her husband, another clergyman, was abusive and a drunk. Patrick told her to leave and take the children. Before the novel was published she came back, living in Manchester, keeping a lodging house, and thanked him. That is why, they say, the theme is on Emily’s mind.

4. They want to be one person, which is why it is not a bodice-ripper, and the art is the smallness. One of them, who came to the book only a few years ago, is surprised by the darkness and the closed rooms, asks what the Kate Bush song was, and says an earlier reading was everything romance should be. The hosts’ memory of the teenage reading is the bad boy who understands you, and the good man you ought to choose. Romeo and Juliet, the James Dean figure, the patient alternative. The lines the hosts come back to are Cathy’s. Not only ‘more myself than I am’, but ‘Nelly, I am Heathcliff’. His miseries have been hers from the beginning. He is in her mind as her own being, not as a pleasure. They read that as more than soulmates. The two want to own each other’s souls, and to be the children they were before class divided them. That is why, they say, the book is unsexy. There is no hint of sex. The trailer indulges in what they call bodice-ripping. What the pair dream of is a fusion of personalities and of souls, a return to a pre-fallen state. One of them asks whether this is because Emily has never spoken to a man, punching a dog and being horrible to the Belgian children. The reply names a father and a brother, and an incestuous vibration between Cathy and Heathcliff, who were raised as siblings.

One of them liked the book much more on the second reading. The reply talks about the narrative skill. It is a young woman’s book as a writer, not as a reader: raw, unpolished, and damaged by the claim that it is merely wild. The hosts speak of the passion, the soul bared to the world, and the characters who are hateful. The hosts enjoyed it less than they used to. They had come ready for a love story and did not find one. Heathcliff is horrible from the start. What stood out is what had been said. The book is misunderstood, and the artistry is real: repetition, doubling, strangulating domestic spaces, a tiny piece of ground, a tiny life, and an imagination that still reaches. Jane Austen, in the figure the hosts close on, is the decorous outside. Emily is the violence within. The moors are barely mentioned. They are used to load a character, or a stretch of a life, with feeling. The posters are wrong twice. It is not a love story, and it is not a landscape novel. The hosts say that to call it a screechy melodrama would be a disservice, and they agree.

They will mark every book out of ten, on a scale that changes with the book. For this one, one of them proposes dead dogs, and the reply is reluctant and agrees. Sandbrook predicts that Syrett will be the harsher marker, because he is the more generous. He gives seven. He would have given five on the first reading, and has come up because he admires it more. The other mark beside his seven is 7.5. Next week is Never Let Me Go.

Context

The story a stranger needs. Lockwood, a Londoner, rents Thrushcross Grange and finds his landlord, Heathcliff, at Wuthering Heights, with a household that frightens him. A dream, and then the housekeeper Nelly Dean, give him the past. Old Mr Earnshaw brought Heathcliff home from Liverpool. Hindley persecutes him. He and Catherine Earnshaw grow up wild on the moors and are each other’s whole world. She marries Edgar Linton at the Grange. Heathcliff vanishes, returns with the revenge already decided, and wrecks both houses. Catherine dies after giving birth to another Cathy. He marries Edgar’s sister Isabella, who flees him. Their son, Linton, is used to trap young Cathy into a marriage that imprisons her at the Heights. Hindley’s son Hareton is raised as a brute. Heathcliff digs Catherine up, twice, and wants to possess her entirely. Hareton and young Cathy are left, and she teaches him to read.

How the book sits. A gothic novel that announces a love story and then withholds the love. The hosts think the teenage reading is a cartoon of the bad boy and the good man, and that the adult reading is art: repetition, a locked house, and no landscape to hide in. Syrett thinks the expected turn, the cruel man who becomes good, never comes. The hour treats the book as the last great eighteenth-century gothic, historically placed. The 1939 Laurence Olivier film was advertised as the greatest love story. The Fennell film is why the novel is back in the conversation. Neither is offered as a reading of the book.

Related

• Dominic Sandbrook — co-host
• Tabitha Syrett — co-host