Facets of Wuthering Heights

Book excerpt: Facets of Wuthering Heights is a collection of essays by one author concerned to throw critical light on several different facets of Emily Brontë’s masterpiece, Wuthering Heights. Although three of the essays deal partly with the historical background to the novel, the collection as a whole seeks to draw attention to Emily Brontë’s remarkable versatility as a novelist by, for example, implicitly pointing up the skill with which she has constructed the plot, the inventiveness with which she has created an astonishing variety of characters, and the brilliance with which she has made structural use of her central themes. This book is intended to encourage readers to take a fresh look at Wuthering Heights as a work of art which, far from deserving to be read merely for its extraordinary treatment of love, is, in fact, eminently notable for its author’s objective and dispassionate portrayal of a particular society and a particular set of individuals in late eighteenth-century England and beyond.