Wuthering Heights, by Emily Bronte.

The word “wuthering”means blustery and turbulent.

It took me until the end of the book to finally look that up in the dictionary, can you believe it?  I think it’s because I had it set in my head that Wuthering Heights was just the name of the estate where Heathcliff resided.  Because it’s very common in England to have a home with a name.

It makes so much more sense to know the meaning behind the title now.  That the house, Wuthering Heights, was by definition, the epitome of turbulence.

This would make a great horror movie.  I can picture this raving lunatic, locking people up in his house, killing their joy, laughing in the face of their sorrows and despair, forever bent on avenging the loss of his loved one.

This book was before its time.  It is not as polite as a lot of the novels written in this era seem to be.  It deals with the ugliness of being self-serving.  It boasts of physical abuse:  of the weaker characters and of women.  It is dark and sinister and alludes to the haunting of one of the main characters, Heathcliff, by his long-dead beloved Catherine.  And it allows you to sympathize with him, barely, as he in turn haunts those who he feel are cause for his loss or related to those who are to blame.

I’m glad it’s done, because I believe that this being my 11th work of classic fiction this year, I tire of the predictable minuscule typeset, and ridiculous amount of verbiage used to describe something to death!

But, had this been my 1st classic novel of the year, it would have probably been amongst my favorite in that it was unpredictable, dark, and risque for the time.