قصة الكتاب :
Wuthering Heights is the only completed novel written and published by Emily Brontë. It was published under the pseudonym “Ellis Bell” in 1847. She died a year later at the age of 30, believing her novel to have been a failure. Although the dark and rough nature of the story and its brutal characters polarized public opinion at the time it was published, the book has achieved near cult status and is considered a literary masterpiece. The story is told through the notes made by a man named Lockwood who is the drawn to the characters who inhabit(ed) Wuthering Heights after a night at the Grange and an encounter with the ghost of Catherine. He asks Nelly Dean, the housekeeper to tell him the story, which she proceeds to narrate.

rn At its heart, Wuthering Heights is the passionate love story of Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, but a love story of a different nature. One cannot read this expecting to find the stereotypical hero and heroine, created by other authors at the time. The explicit manner in which violence and cruelty are portrayed in this book, made it a misfit to Victorian senses. The people in this story set in the moorlands and separated from the civilized world, are just as separated and different. They are broken, brutal, unkind and fiendish to the point of being repulsive. Heathcliff is a dark-skinned orphan boy adopted by Catherine’s father and showered with affection, that is denied to the same extent to his own children. He ends up being bullied, abused and humiliated by Catherine’s brother, Hindley. Catherine remains his one true friend and companion, who he grows to love deeply. When Catherine decides to marry the richer Edgar Linton, Heathcliff leaves Wuthering Heights in a fury believing he is betrayed and rejected. He returns later a wealthy man with a hard mind bent on exacting revenge upon the Earnshaws. What he deviously proceeds to do, how he loses his peace permanently and how renewal comes about through the next generation is what the story is about. Catherine’s decision to marry Edgar, for social advancement, had nothing to do with her eternal love for Heathcliff, whom she believes she could never marry; something she tries to explain to Nelly in some of the most beautiful but haunting quotes that this book holds, “My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I’m well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff!” Yet, this book is more than merely about soulful, tormented love that finds peace only beyond the grave. It is also the story of inter-generational abuse and its psychological impact on victims. It shows us how only time can heal and mend the deepest wounds and bring about the renewal of all that’s broken.

rn Like other celebrated literary works, Wuthering Heights too has been recreated into several other forms. Emily Brontë’s singular novel has managed to win the hearts and minds of both romantics and realists worldwide. rn rn