One of the more affordable forms in which it is possible to acquire the manuscript signatures of Victorian writers today is the used cheque. Quantities of these minor, sometimes biographically revealing, documents left the archives of banks and went onto the open market in the 1990s; they now circulate through the catalogues of manuscript dealers and in the online pages of eBay, some of them leaving traceable e-narratives of their patterns of ownership.
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Catherine’s removal from the plot (other than as a haunting presence in the background, much less potent hereafter than the waif-like child ghost whose wrist Lockwood rubs back and forth across the broken window glass till the blood runs freely (p. 21)) has seemed to some readers to weaken the second half of the novel. One modern critic has suggested, indeed, that the whole of the second-generation narrative was an afterthought.
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Last week we announced the launch of the Oxford World’s Classics Reading Group, and the first book, Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. Helen Small, editor of the Oxford World’s Classics edition of the book, has put together some helpful discussion questions that will help you gain a deeper understanding of the text as you read it and when you finish it.
1. Even the early critics who were revolted or dismayed by the violence of Wuthering Heights admitted the ‘power’ of the novel. What seems to you to be the best explanation of that power?
2. How ‘moral’ a story is Wuthering Heights? More specifically, is moral justice a concern in the shaping of the story and its characters?
3. Catherine Earnshaw comes across as many things: passionate, rebellious, full of laughter and of scorn for others, driven by social ambition but careless of social expectations, self-seeking but ultimately self-destructive (willing herself to die). Is it a problem for our reading of her that we never hear her voice unmediated? How far did you feel inclined to trust what you are told of her by others?
4. One critic has speculated that the ‘second generation’ story was an afterthought, written to fill the gap created in a three volume set (Wuthering Heights, Charlotte’s The Professor, Anne’s Agnes Grey) after Charlotte withdrew. How cogently does the Catherine/Linton/Hareton narrative seem to you to fit with the first half of the novel?
5. Does Heathcliff’s story hold the novel together? Does it make sense to read it as, in its own fashion, a Bildungsroman (telling the story of the building of a character over time, through education and experience)?
6. Wuthering Heights is in many respects lawless, but it is also a novel in which the law (and what people do with it) is crucial to the plot. What do you make of its interest in, especially, property law? How does it compare with other Victorian novels you may have read (Dickens? Trollope?) which have an interest in how the law seeks to regulate ownership of land, houses, even people (wives and children)?
7. This is a famously difficult book to place within any wider story about the development of the English novel. Does it seem to you a ‘bookish’ work or primarily an oral tale?
8. How important is supernaturalism to the novel’s effects? And how closely tied to religion is the supernaturalism explored here?
Heading image: Top Withens by John Robinson. CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
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We’re excited to announce the launch of the Oxford World’s Classics Reading Group, an online group for everyone who is interested in reading and discussing the classics. The Oxford World’s Classics social media channels will provide a forum for conversation around the chosen book, and every three months we will choose a new work of classic literature for the group to read. The editor of the Oxford World’s Classics edition of the book will provide literary context, discussion questions, and lead an online question-and-answer session around the book.
We’re starting our first season of the Oxford World’s Classics Reading Group with Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë’s classic love story that incorporates themes such as social class, death and the afterlife, and the supernatural. The setting, a remote farmhouse on the moors of Northern England, is bleak, harsh, wild, and unpredictable, reflecting many of the novel’s characters. Helen Small, Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford and editor of the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Wuthering Heights, will be leading the Reading Group this season.
If you have a classic that you’ve always wanted to read, let us know and we’ll consider it for next season. In this video, Oxford University Press staff from offices all over the world talk about classic books they’ve always wanted to read but haven’t yet:
You can follow along, and join in the conversation by following us on Twitter and Facebook, and by using the hashtag #OWCreads.
Heading image: Old books. CC0 via Pixabay.
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By Helen Small
Pathological lying, the philosopher Sissela Bok tells us, ‘is to all the rest of lying what kleptomania is to stealing’. In its most extreme form, the liar (or ‘pseudologue’) ‘tells involved stories about life circumstances, both present and past’.
