Wuthering Heights Makes Two Appearances

 I read Wuthering Heights while a teenager. I cannot recall if it was lying around the house, or if I got it from the library. I recall reading Jane Eyre first, thanks to Mom and Orson Welles (his appearing out of the fog scared my mother), which I think was in the house. Of the characters, I preferred Heathcliffe.

In the past few days, I ran across two references to Wuthering Heights that came through my email.

Critical Madness: Did Branwell Write “Wuthering Heights”? came first from Thornfield Hall. There is a definite answer to the title's question.

What would Emily Bronte have thought?  I picture her walking on the moors, growling, “I’m done with publishing.”  Winterich favors the theory that Branwell may not have written the novel but probably contributed to it. There is no evidence that Branwell wrote any of it, aside from the gossip of three of Branwell’s friends, who claimed he did.  The boys’ club tried to appropriate the best for its own -perhaps while drinking. 

The second was more indirect, its impact heightened from reading the Thornfield Hall blog post. This second incident came in Ursula K. Le Guin on How to Become a Writer

...A closed soul can have the most immense adventures, go through a civil war or a trip to the moon, and have nothing to show for all that “experience”; whereas the open soul can do wonders with nothing. I invite you to meditate on a pair of sisters. Emily and Charlotte. Their life experience was an isolated vicarage in a small, dreary English village, a couple of bad years at a girls’ school, another year or two in Brussels, which is surely the dullest city in all Europe, and a lot of housework. Out of that seething mass of raw, vital, brutal, gutsy Experience they made two of the greatest novels ever written: Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights.

Neither novel is supposed to be a boy's book, but I am not sure that a man could write Wuthering Heights. It is rather rather brutal about obsessions. Okay, maybe Melville could have written something like it, only it would be too metaphysical to stay in print.  

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