I noticed that there is a new movie version of Wuthering Heights being released shortly.

I’ve never read the novel, nor have I seen any of the previous movie adaptations, not even the classic 1939 film with Merle Oberon and Laurence Olivier. The year 1939 was such a stellar year for films, wasn’t  it?

My favorite English novelist is Jane Austen, as her sensibilities seem to mirror many of my own and her books tend to be relatively short, the kind that can be read fairly easily in a day or over a weekend, even now when my reading speed is a bit slower than it used to be. Unlike Dickens whose novels were originally serialized a chapter at a time and I guess he must have tried to maximize what the magazines would pay him.

As far as the Brontës are concerned, I’ve never sorted out those sisters. In fact the only thing I really remember about them is that they hated Jane Austen for some reason. She was too genteel or something.

Anyway I decided perhaps it was time to try to read Wuthering Heights, which my spell checker keeps trying to “correct” to “Withering Heights”. 

It was written by Emily, by the way, and she died shortly after it was published. Charlotte then got involved and edited a new edition, trying to fix all the things that she thought needed fixing, but apparently modern editors are pretty unanimous in rejecting all of sister Charlotte’s “corrections”, so they use the first edition as their starting point, merely trying to correct obvious typos and such.

Well, I read the first two chapters and wasn’t terribly impressed.

In fact, I was rather confused.

It was filled with dialogue like this, for example:

‘They’s nobbut t’ missis; and shoo’ll nut oppen’t an ye mak yer flaysome dins till neeght.’

Actually I’d like to see Charlotte’s corrections.

Anyway the narrator is a Mr. Lockwood who pays a call on Mr. Heathcliff, a most sullen and unlikeable gentleman. 

Lockwood meets several other unpleasant folks, none of whom he is introduced to until he mistakes them for servants or wives or otherwise makes an ass of himself. Then they all sit down to tea and “discuss”. A footnote (there are tons of footnotes; I almost thought I was reading Shakespeare and not an English novel written in 1847) tells me that “discuss” means “eat”. Good to know.

Finally, the housekeeper, at least I think it’s the housekeeper, at any rate she’s the only pleasant character Lockwood has met so far, shows him to a bedroom without a bed, but he’s not supposed to let Heathcliff know he’s staying in the room or else. Or else why? That isn’t explained. Lockwood is only staying the night because of a snowstorm that, oh, never mind. As I said, everyone has been incredibly rude to him.

Somewhere along the way he came across Mrs. Heathcliff’s dead rabbits that he mistook for cats, and he to took a lantern that someone was using for light in order to milk a cow, and actually that was rude of Lockwood, wasn’t it?

Really, maybe I have this mixed up, as I said, so much of the dialogue is in a language that I don’t recognize, and even with footnotes it’s hard to decipher.

But all I want to do is scream at Lockwood to get the hell out of that house, snowstorm be damned.

I don’t think I want to spend several hundred pages with such disagreeable characters. Especially as I can’t understand half the stuff they’re saying.

Perhaps I shouldn’t judge a book by its first couple of chapters. After all, it’s supposed to be one of the greatest novels in the English language. I simply wish I could find more English in it.