1. Wuthering Heights: Passion, Violence, and Revenge on the Moors

Summary

---

The Book Club – Episode 1

Wuthering Heights: Passion, Violence, and Revenge on the Moors
Released: February 17, 2026
Hosts: Dominic Sandbrook and Tabitha Syrett

---

Episode Overview

Dominic Sandbrook and Tabitha Syrett launch their new podcast, The Book Club, by diving into Emily Brontë’s iconic and wildly misunderstood novel, Wuthering Heights. They go far beyond the surface reputation of the book as a tempestuous love story, examining its darkness, violence, structure, and the enigmatic figure of Emily Brontë herself. The conversation blends humor, sharp literary criticism, and an engaging exploration of the Brontë family’s history, ultimately challenging preconceptions about Wuthering Heights and literary romance.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Opening Reading: The Novel’s Chilling Tone

• Memorable Dramatic Scene: Dominic and Tabby begin with a theatrical reading from Lockwood’s chilling ghostly encounter at Wuthering Heights (00:39).
• Dominic jokes about his own performance skills, Tabby playfully defends her “melodrama” (02:21).

---

2. What Makes Wuthering Heights a Classic?

• Described as “one of the absolute canonical classics,” but with a reputation that is often misunderstood (04:30).
• It is “famously wild,” with “unbridled emotions,” and “a very, very famous love story at the heart” (Tabby, 04:30).

---

3. Plot Overview and Structure

• Two Families, Two Generations: The Earnshaws and the Lintons live near each other on the Yorkshire moors. The narrative is “driven by Heathcliff’s crusade of vengeance” (Tabby, 05:37).
• Doubling and Repetition: “A huge part of the story is the doubling… It shows you that you’re trapped in these dark webs of hatred and obligation” (Tabby, 12:03).
• Greek Tragedy Elements: The cycles of revenge and repeating names enhance the sense of fate (Dominic, 12:14).

---

4. Narrative Complexity

• Multiple Narrators: Begins with outsider Lockwood, who “adds a bit of comedy” due to his outsider status (Tabby, 08:19). He is soon joined by Nelly Dean, the housekeeper, whose reliability is questioned (Tabby, 26:28).
• Unreliable Narration: Critic James Haffley suggested “maybe Nelly is the villain of the story... all her puppets” (Dominic, 27:36; Tabby, 28:04).

---

5. Emily Brontë: Sphinx of the Moors

• Brontë is “an enigma, such a riddle. We know so little of her inner life” (Dominic, 13:23).
• Family Tragedy: Orphaned young, lost two sisters before age seven (Tabby, 13:59).
• Odd Childhood & Close Siblings: The Brontës were literary, isolated, and constructed complex imaginary worlds (Tabby, 17:33).
• Personality: Portrayed as “the patron saint of difficult women” (Dominic citing Catherine Hughes, 19:20). Socially awkward, fiercely independent, recalcitrant toward fashion and rules.
• Violent Streak: Famous anecdote—she repeatedly punched her dog, Keeper, for climbing on her bed (Dominic, 20:12).
• Political Views: Not a proto-feminist; described as “high Tory,” she “would have set the dog on suffragettes” (Tabby, 21:16).

---

6. Publication & Reception

• Published under a pen name (Ellis Bell) shortly after Charlotte’s Jane Eyre (Dominic, 21:49).
• Scandalized Critics: Initial reactions focused on the “violence and aggression,” calling it a “fiend of a book... action is laid in hell” (Tabby, quoting Rossetti, 22:45).
• Early Death: Emily died young, possibly from tuberculosis and “graveyard water” (Tabby, 23:30), after which Charlotte tried to recast her sister’s image, “she did not know what she had done” (Dominic, 24:16).

---

7. Character Analysis

• Narrators: Lockwood (outsider, lost in the moors) and Nelly Dean (intimately involved, possibly manipulative).
• The Lintons: Seen as “sanest” but drip-like, representing “the Jane Austen side” (Tabby, 28:33).
• The Earnshaws and Heathcliff: Cycle of abuse and revenge; abusive upbringings.
• Doubling & Incestuous Entanglement: Names repeat (Cathy/Cathy; Linton/Linton), with “slightly incestuous” pairings (Dominic, 31:00).
• Comparisons to Pop Culture: Linton likened to “Joffrey Baratheon” (Tabby, 31:25).
• Hareton and Young Cathy: Representative of redemption, return to gentility, “straining to return to their gentility always lost at Wuthering Heights” (Tabby, 33:18).
• Catherine Earnshaw (“Old Cathy”): “The fulcrum,” combining beauty, selfishness, wildness; dies unexpectedly quickly (Tabby & Dominic, 34:07–34:39). Quintessential line:

  “He’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.” (Tabby, 35:11)

---

8. Heathcliff: Monster, Outcast, or Romantic Hero? (36:02–44:00)

• Origins & Otherness: Dark-skinned, Irish undertones, “swarthy gypsy,” Liverpool foundling. “He occupies a similar sort of space to Byron... both compelling but dangerous” (Dominic, 37:23).
• Nature of His Obsession: His love for Cathy borders on pathological. “She dominates his every waking thought. To call it an obsession is to massively underplay it” (Dominic, 38:17).
• Villain or Victim?: Comparisons to Satan (“Milton’s Satan”), Byronic hero, and even vampire/necrophile as he digs up Cathy’s body. “I don’t think Heathcliff has any moment of redemption. There’s no good in him, really” (Tabby, 39:53–40:03).
• Modern Re-readings: Discussion about readings focused on race, class, and outsider status but concluded Emily was “not that interested in his past” (Tabby & Dominic, 41:24–41:36).

---

9. Violence & Abuse

• Brutality: “Immensely brutal man”—reviews called it depraved and full of “unnatural horrors” (Dominic, 41:40).
• Heathcliff’s Actions: Hangs dogs, abuses Linton, threatens Catherine, necrophilic incidents.
• Other Characters’ Violence: Hindley’s violence toward Hareton and Nelly; Cathy (Margot Robbie’s character in the film) herself is violent and entitled; even Isabella lashes back.
• Abuse as Central Theme: Both physical and psychological abuse, especially of women (“how can it be a romance?” Tabby, 49:36), with lived experience from the Brontë family’s circle influencing these themes.

---

10. The Book’s Feminism – Or Lack Thereof (44:47–47:20)

• “Wildness of female characters led critics to see it as feminist,” but Tabby argues this is both yes and no:

  “They are unusually independent... but to enshrine Catherine Earnshaw as a feminist heroine is overplayed... they can’t help but be very strong, fiery women, but they also suffer abuse and coercive control.” (Tabby, 45:24–47:20)

---

11. Romance and Misreading

• Not a Love Story After All:

  “How can it be a romance, a love story, with all this abuse and violence?” (Tabby, 49:36)

• The attraction of impossible, soul-consuming love for teenage readers vs the adult realization of its toxicity.

  “They want to be each other. They want to own each other’s souls.” (Tabby, 51:27)

• No sex, only possession and merging of identities; reflective of Emily Brontë’s own inexperience (Dominic, 52:35–53:03).

---

12. Final Reflections & Ratings (53:14–56:47)

• Dominic’s Change of Heart: Admits to previous dismissals (“bit of a book for teenage girls”) but now sees it as “raw, unpolished... bearing their soul to the world” (Dominic, 53:27–54:15).
• Tabby’s Shift: Loved it less upon this reading; no longer sees it as a love story; instead, admires its artistry and emotional boldness (Tabby, 54:19–55:36).
• Ratings:
  • Dominic: 7/10 “dead dogs”
  • Tabby: 7.5/10 “dead dogs”
• Invitation for listeners to share their own “dead dogs” ratings for the book.

---

13. Preview of Upcoming Episodes (57:17–58:33)

• Each week alternates between classics and modern/contemporary novels.
• Next up:
  • Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
  • The Great Gatsby
  • The Secret History by Donna Tartt
  • Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
  • Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell
  • 1984 by George Orwell
  • Northern Lights (The Golden Compass) by Philip Pullman

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the violence of the book:

  “What he tries to do, Mr. Lockwood, is he tries to basically slit the child’s wrist on some broken glass… That sets the tone because there’s a lot more violence and abuse to come.”
  — Dominic (09:25)

• On repetition and family cycles:

  “It’s deliberate, I think. It shows you that you’re trapped in these dark webs of hatred and obligation and it goes on and on and on.”
  — Tabby (12:05)

• On Heathcliff’s appeal:

  “To call it an obsession is to massively underplay it.”
  — Dominic (38:17)

• On romance and recognition:

  “He’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.”
  — Catherine Earnshaw (quoted by Tabby, 35:11)

• On the misreading of the book as a love story:

  “How can it be a romance? How can it be a love story with all this abuse and violence?”
  — Tabby (49:36)

• On the artistic quality:

  “The repetition, the doubling, the strangulating domestic spaces… her imagination stretches over these vast expanses and encompasses such depths of feeling and torment and emotions.”
  — Tabby (55:23)

• On the Brontë family’s strangeness:

  “Their father… used to walk around with a loaded gun… a fun guy, he’s a good time.”
  — Tabby (15:54)

• On rating the book:

  “You can have half a dead dog. If it lives with Emily Brontë, it’s definitely half a dead dog.”
  — Tabby (56:42)

---

Key Timestamps

• [00:39] – Opening reading: Lockwood’s nightmare
• [04:30] – What makes Wuthering Heights “canonical”
• [05:47] – Plot summary and structure
• [13:59] – Emily Brontë’s life and childhood
• [21:49] – Publication and shock reception
• [26:28] – Narrators & unreliable narration
• [34:07] – Catherine Earnshaw analysis
• [35:11] – Iconic quote: “He’s more myself than I am…”
• [36:02] – Heathcliff: Outcast, villain or hero?
• [41:40] – The book’s brutality and reviews
• [44:47] – Is Wuthering Heights feminist?
• [49:36] – Romance, abuse, and the problem of “the love story”
• [53:27] – Hosts’ final verdicts
• [56:07] – Book ratings: “dead dogs out of 10”
• [57:17] – Upcoming episode previews

---

Tone & Style

True to their premise, Dominic and Tabby’s banter is erudite but irreverent, marked by playful one-upmanship and a refusal to treat even revered literature as sacred. They combine historical context with sharp criticism and personal reflections, making for a conversation that is both informative and highly entertaining.

---

In Short

This debut episode questions everything you think you know about Wuthering Heights. It is not just a doomed romance, but a saga of violence, obsession, and societal collapse, penned by a brilliantly strange author living on the moors. The hosts argue—often hilariously—about its meaning, its artistry, and its standing in the literary canon, while plotting the course for a podcast that promises both serious insight and fun.

---

Transcript

[Tabby]

This precedence day upgrade the look of your home without breaking your budget. Save up to 50% site wide on new window [e-mail] blinds.com makes it easy with free virtual consultations on your schedule and samples delivered to your door fast and free. With over 25 million windows covered and a 100% satisfaction guarantee, you can count on blinds.com to deliver results you'll love.

[Advertiser]

Shop up to 50% off site wide plus a free professional measure during the President's Day Mega Sale. Last chance happening right [e-mail] terms apply.

[Dominic Samarok]

I remembered I was lying in the oak closet and I heard distinctly the gusty wind and the driving of the snow. I heard also the fir bough repeat its teasing sound and ascribed it to the right cause, but it annoyed me so much that I resolved to silence it if possible, and I thought I rose and endeavoured to unhasp the casement. The hook was soldered into the staple, a circumstance observed by me when awake, but forgotten. I must stop it nevertheless, I muttered, knocking my knuckles through the glass and stretching an arm out to seize the importunate branch, instead of which my fingers closed on the fingers of a little ice cold hand. The intense horror of nightmare came over me. I tried to draw back my arm, but the hand clung to it and a most melancholy voice sobbed, let me in.

[Tabby]

Let me in.

[Dominic Samarok]

Who are you? I asked, struggling meanwhile to disengage myself.

[Tabby]

Catherine Linton, I'm come home. I'd lost my way on the moor,

[Dominic Samarok]

and as it spoke I discerned obscurely a child's face looking through the window. So what an incredibly chilling scene to kick off this new show. It's from Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights and how brilliantly it was performed, I have to say, by me. I think there were two people in that performance. Tabby, actually, that's I can't believe you rushed to give yourself all the credit and deny any to me. That's Paul.

[Tabby]

I brought all the melodrama, all the pathos. I think I was both, you know, deeply moving but also somewhat disturbing.

[Dominic Samarok]

Well, I actually think that's going to set the tone for the show. So hello everybody. On that very cheerful note, welcome to the book club. To explain what we're doing, we're kicking off today with Wuthering Heights. But every week we will be discussing some of the greatest, most enjoyable, most entertaining books of all time. We'll be exploring the lives of the authors, the worlds they inhabited, the worlds they created. We'll be digging into things like the Great Gatsby, 1984. But we'll also be looking at more contemporary books, won't we, Tabby? Like Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, a big favorite of yours. The Secret History by Donna Tartt, Sally Rooney's Normal People. I'm actually reading that right now. So, Tabby, maybe we should say who we are.

[Tabby]

Yeah, the dreary bit.

[Dominic Samarok]

Yeah. Weirdly, I actually really enjoy talking about myself, so this is the best bit.

[Tabby]

That's why it's dreary for me.

[Dominic Samarok]

So, yeah, so I'm Dominic Samarok and I'm a historian, and I present another goal hanger show called the Rest Is. And, Tabby, you're one of the producers on the Rest Is History, aren't you?

[Tabby]

I am.

[Dominic Samarok]

And we spend a lot of time bickering about books generally. I have to say, you're ridiculously well read, but also you have some terrible takes. So it's very unusual to have that. Have that combination in somebody that was

[Tabby]

almost so tender, so moving. So, yes. Hello, everybody. I've been working with Dominic on the Rest of History for just long, painful years now. This new show is gonna be a continuation of a miniseries that we did back in September, I think it was, which maybe some of you heard all about books.

[Dominic Samarok]

Yeah. So let's get into today's episode. It's a book that people are talking about a lot at the moment, because, of course, the film Wuthering Heights just come out. It's directed by Emerald Fennell, starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi. And, Tabby, you and I are actually going to see it. We are. So, Wuthering Heights by Emily bronte, published in 1847. It's set in 1801, but it's looking back even before that. And Tabby, it's one of the absolute canonical classics. And it's actually regarded, isn't it, as one of the great romantic novels.

[Tabby]

It absolutely is. You know, for instance, in the. In the very famous 1939 Laurence Olivier film about it, they advertised it as the greatest love story of our time, or of any time. And as you say, I mean, it's an absolute classic. And it's particularly famous because of its depictions of kind of wild moors, simmering tensions, unbridled emotions, and of course, this very, very famous love story at the heart of it all, between Cathy Catherine Earnshaw and the kind of iconic, laconic romantic hero Heathcliff.

[Dominic Samarok]

And you. I mean, you've been going on about Wuthering Heights for ages. I remember, even before we were doing the show.

[Tabby]

Yeah.

[Dominic Samarok]

You saying it was one of your absolute favourite books. And am I not right in thinking that you used to read it? You used to read it every. Every single year.

[Tabby]

Yeah. But let me justify that for 20 years. I want to explain myself. I basically read it first when I was about 12 and I thought it was just, you know, devastatingly romantic, heartbreaking. I loved the love story. I loved Catherine Earnshaw, the heroine of the book. Cause I thought she was kind of fiery and beautiful and elegant. And then, as you say, I kind of put it on a pedestal. And I would read it every year until I was about 17. Like sort of sad teenage miser.

[Dominic Samarok]

Yeah.

[Tabby]

I stopped after that for a long time. And then. So this was my first time rereading it since I was 17. And so I was very intrigued to see what I thought about it this time. And my view on it's definitely changed. But before we get into all that and before we get into what you think of it, I think we should give a brief outline of what Wuthering Heights is about. It tells the story of these two families, the Earnshaws and the Lintons. And they live very near each other across the Yorkshire moors. And it's kind of about the tangled relationships between them. And these relationships are particularly tangled, in large part thanks to the machinations of, you know, the iconic Heathcliff. And the plot is driven by his kind of crusade of vengeance. And Heathcliff is a foundling, taken in by the Earnshaws as a young boy, and is treated very badly by his stepbrother, but falls in love with, at a very young age, his stepsister, Catherine. There's something of the Greek tragedy to it because it's kind of these cycles of revenge going round and round and round.

[Dominic Samarok]

So it falls into two halves, really. The first half is about. It's Cathy and Heathcliff, basically.

[Tabby]

Yeah.

[Dominic Samarok]

So Cathy Earnshaw, she ends up marrying this bloke called Edgar Linton. The Lintons are the other family who live across the moors.

[Tabby]

Yeah. Much more gentrified. Like, I think if you think this book is like Jane Austen and it's not, they are more akin to a Jane Austen.

[Dominic Samarok]

Yeah, that's exactly right.

[Tabby]

Family. Yeah.

[Dominic Samarok]

And so Catherine, or Cathy, she's torn between slightly drippy husband, Edgar, and then harsh, much wilder, more violent Heathcliff, who is kind of her soulmate. And then the second half of the book is about her daughter, who, confusingly. Would it have killed Emily Bronte to give her a different name? Yes, it clearly would. Because she's also called Kathy.

[Tabby]

I think we could basically, just for the purposes of this Old Cathy, we can just call her Young Cathy. Old Kathy.

[Dominic Samarok]

Exactly. So young Cathy is living with Edgar, her father, in this civilized house called Thrushcross Grange. And then she ends up coming across Wuthering Heights and she's dragged back into Heathcliff's world. And the sort of mad stuff that is going on there, for those people who haven't read it, and I'm guessing there's quite a few people listening to this who haven't read it. We won't give it all away right now, but basically there are going to be. I mean, there are going to be spoilers.

[Tabby]

Spoilers, absolutely.

[Dominic Samarok]

But just on that, the way it starts, it gives you a clue to how the book works. Basically, because we began with that reading, we're being told this story by a guy called Mr. Lockwood. Mr. Lockwood has rented Thrushcross Grange, so years after the events that are being described. And he's a Londoner, isn't he? So he's kind of out of his depth on the moors of Yorkshire.

[Tabby]

And because of that, because of the fact that he is a Londoner and quite sort of civilized or whatever, he adds a bit of comedy to it because he kind of goes into this house, he goes to meet his landlord, and his landlord is Heathcliff, who lives at Wuthering Heights, across the moors from Thrushcross Grange. And it's like. He basically walks into an asylum and it's like shadows everywhere. He keeps tripping over dead rabbits. He's slobbered on by vast wolfhounds, and he's utterly bemused by everything and everyone he encounters. And there's this kind of grotesque cast of characters that he meets at the Heights. Anyway, so he ends up getting snowed in for the night, much to his distress, and he is put to bed in this room. And he finds a ledge in the room covered with writing. And it's a name repeated in all kinds of characters, you know, large and small. And it says Catherine Earnshaw here. And then it varies to Catherine Heathcliff and then again to Catherine Linton. And so he then starts to read this, Catherine's diary. And this triggers the mad nightmare from the opening reading, which I think I injected with so much dramatic flair.

[Dominic Samarok]

Nice that you're complimenting yourself yet again.

[Tabby]

Again, yeah.

[Dominic Samarok]

So basically, it's a very, very violent scene, the child's face looking through the window. And actually what he tries to do, Mr. Lockwood, is he tries to basically slit the child's wrist on some broken glass, which is. I mean, you would think, God, that's. That's a bit much in a Victorian novel. But of course, that sets the tone because there's a lot more violence and abuse to come in the book. It's a very, very nightmarish scene. Cause it is a nightmare.

[Tabby]

It is. And it's very odd because Heathcliff comes into the room and is. He's so angry. There's like a mad desperation to him. And it's like he has caught Lockwood dreaming the dream that he ought to be dreaming about this girl, Catherine. And we, at this stage, don't know why. We don't understand the relationship between them. Yeah.

[Dominic Samarok]

So Lockwood has had this flipping weird experience staying in this. This. I was about to say this hotel. I mean, you'd never stay.

[Tabby]

It.

[Dominic Samarok]

It's like. It makes Fawlty Towers look that A Ritz. Yeah.

[Tabby]

I'd actually rather stay at a hostel than that.

[Dominic Samarok]

Anyway, he's been staying at Heathcliff's house. It's full of all these mad people. There's a lot of stuff with broken glass and ghosts. And when he goes back to his own house, he finds out that the housekeeper there, who's called Nellie.

[Tabby]

Nellie Dean.

[Dominic Samarok]

Yeah. She used to work for the Earnshaws at Wuthering Heights. And she knows the whole story behind this because Lockwood is as lost as we are, basically. Well, I will tell you the story.

[Tabby]

Yeah. It's not. It's not exactly the kind of recuperative, you know, pleasant tale that I think he was hoping for amidst his illness.

[Dominic Samarok]

Exactly. So to cut a very long story and complicated story short, there's these two characters, Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw, who later becomes Catherine Linton, who is now dead. And Heathcliff was the foundling and Cathy was his kind of adopted sister.

[Tabby]

Yeah.

[Dominic Samarok]

And they had this incredibly tortured and intense relationship. She married this bloke, Edgar Linton, who lived across the moors. Heathcliff was driven sort of mad with rage. He ends up eloping with Edgar's sister, Isabella.

[Tabby]

Yeah.

[Dominic Samarok]

Who's massively fallen in love with him, but soon realizes she's made a terrible mistake.

[Tabby]

Yeah. And that's kind of interesting because Isabella falls in love with him in the way that I think a lot of audiences now fall in love with Heathcliff without having read the book.

[Dominic Samarok]

Yeah.

[Tabby]

It's the idea of him. It's the Byronic, heroic idea of him.

[Dominic Samarok]

Exactly. She thinks he's incredibly glamorous.

[Tabby]

Yeah. And romantic. Little does she know she has A

[Dominic Samarok]

child irritatingly called Linton.

[Tabby]

It makes you hate Emily Bronte.

[Dominic Samarok]

Yeah. You could have thought of a different name here, but you just thought you'd use the surname again. Brilliant. Meanwhile, Kathy's had a daughter with Edgar Linton who she calls Kathy.

[Tabby]

Kathy. Yeah.

[Dominic Samarok]

So, I mean, this is a huge part of the story is the doubling of.

[Tabby]

It's deliberate, I think.

[Dominic Samarok]

Of course, it's completely deliberate.

[Tabby]

It's like the compulsive repetition. It shows you that you're trapped in these dark webs of hatred and obligation and it goes on and on and on.

[Dominic Samarok]

It's like you're saying about the Greek tragedy thing. It's basically the. The idea of the bitterness and the hatred and the jealousy being passed down through the generations.

[Tabby]

Yeah. It makes you think, though, given the violence of it and how complicated it all is, it makes you wonder, like, what is going on in the mind from which it sprung. Like the strange mystery of Emily Bronte.

[Dominic Samarok]

That's a very nice segue, Tabby, into talking about Emily Bronte.

[Tabby]

Right. But first of all, I mean, should we talk about another fevered imaginative writer? What's your take on Wuthering Heights?

[Dominic Samarok]

So I read Jane Eyre a few years ago for the first time. Loved it. And then I thought, I'll read another Bronte. And I read Wuthering Heights and I thought, oh, disappointing. It's not as good as Jane Eyre because I didn't really get into the kind of fever dream side of things. I frankly did get a little bit lost. And I thought to myself, this is going to be very self incriminating. I thought to myself, this is a bit of a book for teenage girls.

[Tabby]

Oh, he went there.

[Dominic Samarok]

It's the book that a sad and lonely teenage girl would read every year. Tabby. No, but actually I've changed my mind.

[Tabby]

Oh, wow.

[Dominic Samarok]

I will reveal all at the end of the episode, but I've completely changed my mind about it.

[Tabby]

That's exciting.

[Dominic Samarok]

Before we do that, let's get into Emily Bronte herself, because critics used to call her the Sphinx of the Moors because she was such an enigma, such a riddle. We know so little of her inner life. And so that of course plays into the Bronte industry and the Bronte legend, because it's meant that obsessed readers can project onto Emily Bronte, you know, whatever they like. However, there is obviously clearly a historical person here behind the kind of layers of wild myth and legend. So, Tabby, you've done a bit of digging, haven't you, into Emily Bronte's life

[Tabby]

in large Part because of that thing, the kind of. The myth. I kind of wanted to see how much reality there was to it. So Emily, she's the fifth of six Bronte children and that she's born in Thornton in Bradford, in July 1818. And then when she's, I think almost, they move to a place called Haworth in the Pennines, and her father, Patrick is the local curate. And then she is struck by the first of these three kind of early tragedies that will darken her early life because her mother, Maria, dies of cancer when Emily's about three. And then she and her older sisters, including Charlotte Bronte of Jane Eyre fame, they're sent to this school for clergymen's daughters when she's not yet six, and they're treated really, really badly. And this school is actually the inspiration for Lowood in Jane Eyre, the kind of terr. Yeah. And then while there, two of Emily's older sisters die. So before the age of seven, she loses two sisters and a mother. And then so there's only four children left. And it's Charlotte, it's Emily, it's Branwell, their only brother, and then Anne, who's also an author.

[Dominic Samarok]

Anne's always a bit of an afterthought, isn't she?

[Tabby]

She is always. I always think that's a bit harsh, though, because I really like the Tenant of Wildfell Hall.

[Dominic Samarok]

But she.

[Tabby]

Yeah, she's definitely not as famous or as impressive as the others, probably. Anyway, so they're educated at home at the parsonage by their father and their Aunt Elizabet, and definitely a bit of a weird household, I would say.

[Dominic Samarok]

Yeah. People think of them isolated in, like,

[Tabby]

this haunted house, cut off from the world, but that's actually rubbish. They were very literary. They subscribed to sort of heavyweight literary journals. The house is full of classics. And it's not surprising because their father, Reverend Bronte, was a very impressive, very, very clever man. He came from county down in Ireland and he was actually the son of a farmhand. And then because he was so intelligent, he managed to get himself to Cambridge to read theology. Although that said, he is a bit bonkers.

[Dominic Samarok]

Didn't he cat walk around with a gun all the time?

[Tabby]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like all loving fathers, he walked around with a loaded gun. And I actually think you could see the side effects of some of this madness in some of the odd characters of Wuthering Heights.

[Dominic Samarok]

He doesn't let them eat meat.

[Tabby]

He doesn't let them eat.

[Dominic Samarok]

No, not for moral reasons, because he thinks it'll make them entitled and spoiled.

[Tabby]

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. See, he's a fun guy. He's a good time. And he's also very much kind of lets himself be an outsider in their community. He keeps his Irish accent so he stands out. And he's known to be quite cold, quite distant, and he's known to have these mad kind of fiery rages. He's a delightful fellow.

[Dominic Samarok]

Yeah, sounds great.

[Tabby]

But I think it's no surprise then that his kids are quite odd, too. So, for instance, a local woman told Elizabeth Gaskell, when she was looking into the Brontes, that the Bronte children had no friends in the village. And I actually quite admire this because I think similarly, on one occasion, they were invited to a party and they showed no knowledge of the games played by their peers. And I actually quite respect that because my heart always sinks when I go to people's houses and they say, oh, should we play cards? Should we play Scrabble? So I'm on their side with that.

[Dominic Samarok]

You don't like cards or Scrabble?

[Tabby]

No, I don't actually like Scrabble, but it's so forced. It's like the forced fun of it. Can we not just.

[Dominic Samarok]

Would she never play any form of game?

[Tabby]

Yeah, when I'm press ganged into it. Because you don't want to be, you

[Dominic Samarok]

know, all those people who were thinking about inviting you to their house to play Cluedo and now changing their minds.

[Tabby]

But so, because of this, because of their reluctance to sign up to annoying, boring, forced games, the siblings do become very, very close. Unnaturally close, perhaps.

[Dominic Samarok]

They create these fantasy worlds, don't they? This is very you, actually. Is it Glass Town and Angria. A place called Angria.

[Tabby]

Yeah. And the really funny thing about it is it's not quite kind of Lord of the Rings because they have little soldiers in them, like they have the Duke of Wellington in them. And actually, it's very telling about how exposed these children actually were to the. To the wider world, how much they didn't live under a rock in Yorkshire, because they're kind of set all over the world.

[Dominic Samarok]

It's in the Pacific, isn't it?

[Tabby]

It's the Pacific, Yeah, exactly, exactly.

[Dominic Samarok]

So Emily, you know, they're obviously gonna have to get a livelihood.

[Tabby]

Yeah, well, they have to earn some money.

[Dominic Samarok]

Yeah, Right. So she becomes a teacher in Halifax, and that's a shambles, isn't it?

[Tabby]

This is where me and Emily part ways.

[Dominic Samarok]

I think she says to the kids at one point, I genuinely, like, prefer the dog to you. I hate that.

[Tabby]

And you will discover in due course why that's such a frightening sentiment and why these children were actually.

[Dominic Samarok]

Yeah, if there's any dogs listening to this podcast, stop listening.

[Tabby]

Anyway, so that doesn't work out. So when she's 24, she goes with Charlotte to a girl's boarding school in Brussels and she teaches music there. But yet again, she absolutely hates it. She's very snobbish, she's quite up herself. She says that, oh, I'll only teach the children at the end of the day when I'm done with my own studies. And that's the only time that they have a break or free time. So she cuts into their free time and was, unsurprisingly, very unpopular.

[Dominic Samarok]

That's poor.

[Tabby]

She was also very unfashionable. She refused to wear the Belgian fashions.

[Dominic Samarok]

Would not wear the latest Belgian fashion. No, but what could a Belgian fashion possibly be?

[Tabby]

Well, you wouldn't understand such things because you're not a fashionista like me.

[Dominic Samarok]

Do you know what Belgian fashions are?

[Tabby]

I do, actually. I just don't feel like sharing it right now.

[Dominic Samarok]

Okay, fine.

[Tabby]

Anyway, so because of this, and I find this so amusing, there was a student called Letitia Wheelwright and she said of Emily Bronte, I simply disliked her from the first. Her tallish, ungainly, ill dressed figure, always answering our jokes with I wish to be as God made me.

[Dominic Samarok]

She actually sounds like a terrible person.

[Tabby]

Yeah.

[Dominic Samarok]

The great critic Catherine Hughes. I was reading an article that she wrote about this book and she described Emily Bronte as the patron saint of difficult women. You're not going to be sat next to her at a dinner party because she wouldn't go.

[Tabby]

She won't go out.

[Dominic Samarok]

But if by some terrible mischance you're

[Tabby]

having a Bible reading or something, her physical portrait can tell from that she's very unfashionable. And she's also said to be tall and had big bones.

[Dominic Samarok]

Big bones. Generally when people say you're big boned, they mean that it's not a good thing. Yeah, in an unflattering way. Right.

[Tabby]

And actually there's a movie that they did called Emily with Emma McKay from Sex Education and they very, very much play into this. She comes across as almost autistic, I think.

[Dominic Samarok]

Right.

[Tabby]

And people said that about her, didn't they?

[Dominic Samarok]

Yeah, well, people have diagnosed her since with autism or with anorexia. These kinds of things which people love to do with characters in the past. I was in that slightly dodgy. I tell you one thing that's very dodgy, though, actually. So you mentioned the business about dogs.

[Tabby]

Yeah.

[Dominic Samarok]

As we'll discuss, Wuthering Heights is a violent book. There is a lot of abuse of various kinds of shockingly violent as well as mental. And you might say, well, where does this come from in this sort of quite withdrawn, lonely, you know, very bookish girl. And an answer is, she herself is quite violent. So she had this dog called Keeper and she loves Keeper, doesn't she? But one day he climbs on her bed with muddy paws and she reacts by punching him in the face. But not just once, but like again and again.

[Tabby]

And if you love dogs more than people. Oof. You're in big trouble if you're one of her students. I think we have to be slightly sympathetic towards Emily. You know, she's grown up with, as far as we can tell, a very angry father. And she's suffered a lot of loss at a young age and she's very isolated. So I do have a little bit of pity towards her in that respect. But the other thing that's worth remembering is that, you know, because people, they almost canonize Emily Bronte as kind of like a feminist icon. And we'll touch on that a bit more. You know, she has quite kind of high Tory politics, doesn't she? She would have set the dog on Suff, Bridgettes or whatever.

[Dominic Samarok]

Right.

[Tabby]

Which is not in keeping with the idea of how it's this kind of free spirited sphinx of the moors.

[Dominic Samarok]

Well, it goes back to the thing, Catherine Hughes's thing, about her being a bit difficult. Difficult, exactly. So she's not immediately likable. Anyway, she comes back from Belgium. She and her sisters are great writers and they are. She's writing loads of poems. In 1846, she and her sister's poems are published and they're using pen names to disguise their gender. So they're Currer Bell, Ellis Bell and Acton Bell. Charlotte, Emily and Anne. Then there's the most extraordinary moments in literary history.

[Tabby]

Yeah.

[Dominic Samarok]

In the autumn of 1847, first of all, her sister Charlotte publishes Jane Eyre. And then a month later, Emily publishes Wuthering Heights under the name of Ellis Bell. And the first reviews were really shocked, weren't they, by the. What they saw as the violence and aggression of the book. They didn't say, gosh, this is a lovely romantic story. They said, oh, my God. You know, this is shocking. This is gen for to a Victorian reader in the late 1840s, the degree of revenge and hatred and resentment and jealousy in the book is really kind of troubling.

[Tabby]

But there were some that really liked that about the book, like Dante. Gabrielle Rosetti said it was the best book he'd read for ages. And he likes that element of it. He says it's a fiend of a book, an incredible monster. The action is laid in hell. Only it seems the places and people have English names there. So you can see from that that, you know, some people were really drawn to the kind of darkness of it all.

[Dominic Samarok]

Yeah. So at that point, people are probably thinking, well, she's going to go and have this tremendous literary career.

[Tabby]

Exactly, exactly. Although, interestingly, the book was kind of smuggled in behind Jane Eyre because the publishers of Jane Eyre realized it was going to be a big success, and they said, okay, well, we'll publish your sister's books anyway. And then it captured the public imagination. But then in September 1848, her brother Bramwell drops dead. Probably TB coupled with an alcohol and opium addiction. And then Em herself caught a massive cold at his funeral. And she may actually have already had TB from her school days. And also, and this is a mad fact, this ties in enormously into the kind of Tim Burton image of them. They'd all been drinking water from the local graveyard runoff, so they'd be. They'd literally been drinking corpse water. It's no wonder they're all so sickly.

[Dominic Samarok]

Right. A bad mistake. And she doesn't. She doesn't rate doctors, does she? So when she falls really ill, she says, no, they're all quacks. Then she gets worse and worse and worse. And then on the 19th of December, she says, okay, I am actually quite ill now. I think probably you should call a doctor. And they call a doctor, and two hours later, she's dead. That's the end of her. Too late.

[Tabby]

Too much graveyard water.

[Dominic Samarok]

So she's buried in. Supposedly the undertakers had never made a smaller coffin because she's so thin. That's one of the things that has led people subsequently to say, oh, maybe she had an eating disorder. Maybe she was anorexic or something. And then after her death, her memory is kind of fixed by her sister Charlotte. Charlotte, who writes these prefaces to Wuthering

[Tabby]

Heights, slightly disingenuously, perhaps.

[Dominic Samarok]

Yeah. Possibly because what she's. Some critics have thought that what Charlotte was trying to do was she was anxious that Wuthering Heights was so violent and it would kind of tarnish the Bronte brand. She says, well, you can't really blame my sister for what she wrote because she's a. And I quote A native and nursling of the moors. She was simpler than a child. Her nature stood alone. She did not know what she had done.

[Tabby]

Yeah. So she kind of turns her into this sort of innocent freak, touched by kind of divine inspiration in the matter of writing Wuthering Heights. And she turns, therefore, Wuthering Heights into this kind of natural phenomenon. It is rustic through it is Moorish and wild and knotty as the root of heath. But then, funnily enough, Charlotte actually went back and amended large swathes of Wuthering Heights and she tones the whole thing down and she actually changed some of the speech. So there's a mad eccentric character called Joseph who is always quoting passages from the Bible, always getting crossed with everyone. I did wonder if there was something of Emily Bronte's father in that. Anyway, and he speaks in a very strong northern dialect Yorkshire accent. Exactly. And she massively tones that down. And I actually think, thank God, because he's utterly incomprehensible as it is at first.

[Dominic Samarok]

When I was reading his bits, I started to sort of mutter them to myself in Yorkshire dialect to try and make sense of them. And then about halfway through the book, I thought, yenni says the same thing. Anyway, so I just.

[Tabby]

This is what I said about the songs in Lord of the Rings. I just kind of skipped over them. And you were appalled by them.

[Dominic Samarok]

That I am still appalled by that. That's probably the worst thing you've ever said. So very disappointing, because the song is, of course, the best bit of the Lord of the Rings, as everybody knows.

[Tabby]

Oh, God.

[Dominic Samarok]

So since you mentioned Joseph, shall we just have a look at some of the characters in Wuthering Heights? Because they're a good way into the themes of the book.

[Tabby]

Yeah, they definitely are.

[Dominic Samarok]

People who've not read the book may think, gosh, this is all about kind of massive landscapes, wild passions and whatnot. Actually, it's quite a claustrophobic book. Most of the action is set indoors in these very kind of enclosed spaces, as we said, there's a lot of doubling characters with the same name and characters who are mirror images of each other. And then the narration. It's often kind of a story within a story within a story, because the whole thing is being told to us by this bloke Lockwood. And Lockwood, he's actually the narrator. We know very little about him, do we?

[Tabby]

Hardly anything, which is kind of oddly sinister. He's like the outsider looking in. He's like us. He's encountering these mad families and their mad dynamics and their Brutality and their violence. And his shock is therefore kind of of our shock. Anyway, so then we have our secondary narrator who is telling Lockwood the story of the book. And this is Nelly Dean. And she is the housekeeper at Thrushcross Grange, as we said. And she used to work at Wuthering Heights. And she was a servant to the Earnshaws, the family who live at Wuthering Heights, and was kind of devoted to them in typically gothic manner. Nelly is not entirely reliable, is she? She's actually kind of a participant in the story herself. She doesn't tell certain characters things. Seems very close to Heathcliff, and you wonder if she's on his side and then kind of turns her back on him. She's not very sympathetic to Cathy, so she plays quite a big part in the story. But you also feel slightly that there's a limit to what she can tell you. Cause she's not as educated as the characters that she is describing.

[Dominic Samarok]

And not only that. So personally, I love an unreliable narrator.

[Tabby]

I know you do, yeah.

[Dominic Samarok]

And there was a critic in the 50s called James Haffley, who basically said, maybe Nelly is the villain, the villain. Maybe Nellie is the villain of the story. Because she's often kind of either concealing or disclosing confidences that characters have told her. And she tells you this in the story. And actually some of the things that she reveals to Heathcliff and whatnot, they end up having disastrous consequences. And so you could argue, couldn't you, that she's the actual. The book is all about Nelly.

[Tabby]

They're all her puppets. They're all her puppets, Yeah. I think. I think that's a bit harsh. And I also think that's, like, working a little bit too hard to read critical analysis into the book. I think she's like a stolid, quite hard Yorkshire woman, very devoted to the Earnshaws. But I don't think she intentionally doesn't tell people things ever.

[Dominic Samarok]

Anyway, I think you're probably right.

[Tabby]

So the family that she is working for now for much of the book are the Lintons. And they're kind of, you know, you think of them as absolute drips.

[Dominic Samarok]

I do think of them as total drips, yeah.

[Tabby]

I think they're quite hard done by, actually. I think they might actually be sort of the sanest characters in the book. And they are. They contrast enormously with the Earnshaws. They're all blonde and elegant. They're much more Jane Austen. They live in luxury. The Grange is much more insipid in comparison to Wuthering. Heights. So the head of their family, the main character that we're dealing with, is a guy called Edgar. And old Cathy Earnshaw marries him because he's elegant. He's elegant and refined and he's wealthy.

[Dominic Samarok]

Yeah. And he's basically somebody whose life is going to be destroyed by these awful

[Tabby]

neighbours, largely by Heathcliff. I actually like Edgar. I like his trajectory. I think he goes from being a kind of very slightly pathetic drip to being quite a good man and quite a strong man. Anyway, so his sister is Isabella and she really is quite whiny. But I have to say, Catherine Earnshaw, old Cathy, Edgar's wife, is horrible to her. But she falls in love with Heathcliff and elopes with him and regrets it almost immediately. Like on her wedding night, she regrets it. She ends up running away from him, pregnant, and then raises their son together, away from him before dying.

[Dominic Samarok]

She's the kind of. Of absolute archetypal Victorian victim, isn't she? She's basically fallen in love with the bad boy.

[Tabby]

Exactly.

[Dominic Samarok]

On as soon as they've got married, she thinks, oh, my God, I've made a terrible mistake.

[Tabby]

She's kind of Lydia, don't you think, from Pride and Prejudice. There's something of a comparison, a little bit.

[Dominic Samarok]

I can see. I can see what you mean, definitely.

[Tabby]

Yeah. The third member of the household is young Kathy, Edgar's daughter. Edgar's daughter.

[Dominic Samarok]

Right. So Edgar has married Catherine Earnshaw of the older Kathy. They have a daughter also called Kathy. She's a bit saucy, we're told.

[Tabby]

Yeah. Nelly calls her sauc. She's very precocious and she's blonde and she's pretty, but she's actually much more warm hearted, I think, than her mother, Catherine. And she's raised at the Grange, kind of the sunny innocence of that place. But she strains against the confines of it because her father doesn't want her going out, lest she meet the dark denizens of Wuthering Heights. And she eventually does. Heathcliff lures her in and ends up entrapping her at the Heights.

[Dominic Samarok]

Well, that's the thing, isn't it? Wuthering Heights is like this labyrinth, this dark, cramped.

[Tabby]

Once you go in, yeah, there's no way out. You never come out the same. And he. He manages to entrap her into marrying his son, helpfully called Linton. And this is the child that Isabella was carrying when she ran away. And then when she dies, she's taken back to the Heights against his will.

[Dominic Samarok]

So there's always this slightly incestuous nature to it. Cause there's basically about six characters, all have the same name. And they all end up. They're all cousins and they all end up marrying each other in various combinations.

[Tabby]

God, imagine how weird their children they're gonna be like the Habsburgs by the third generation. Yeah. They're gonna have gills and fins.

[Dominic Samarok]

So Linton, so he's the son of. Of Heathcliff and Isabella. That's right, isn't it? And he's a terrible per. He's just. There's nothing, no redeeming things about him whatsoever.

[Tabby]

If anyone's watched Game of Thrones, he bears a striking resemblance to Joffrey Baratheon.

[Dominic Samarok]

Yeah, yeah, I can see that.

[Tabby]

He's always moaning. He's very picky, he's very cruel. He hates the outdoors. And he's very abusive towards his wife and cousin, young Kathy Linda Tabby.

[Dominic Samarok]

I've seen your notes, so I can see the next sentence, which is uncanny. Similarities with D. Sandbrook. And that is mad. That is mad.

[Tabby]

You know, sort of very intellectual, staying indoors. Very picky about what he eats.

[Dominic Samarok]

Picky about what he eats. What? That's not. That's. That's.

[Tabby]

You know, I actually wasn't going to say that. But you know, you've chosen to destroy yourself.

[Dominic Samarok]

But you wrote it down, which is poor.

[Tabby]

Well, we're going to reveal something you wrote down later about you and Heathcliff, but we'll come to that. But anyway, so Linton lives at Wuthering Heights with a guy called Hareton.

[Dominic Samarok]

Yeah.

[Tabby]

Whose father is a guy called Hindley.

[Dominic Samarok]

Yeah.

[Tabby]

Why can't. They could have been called like Chad and. And Hubert.

[Dominic Samarok]

Nobody called Chad would have a son called Hubert or vice versa. Surely that's a completely different register.

[Tabby]

Yeah.

[Dominic Samarok]

So anyway, Hindley was Kathy Earnshaw's brother.

[Tabby]

Yeah.

[Dominic Samarok]

And he is just a monster of a man.

[Tabby]

He's actually very abusive to Heathcliff.

[Dominic Samarok]

To Heathcliff. He carries out a lot of the original abuse that then becomes self perpetuating. And he's got this son called Hareton. Okay. I'm just gonna encourage listeners who haven't read the book. It's dead easy. Just keep these characters in your mind. Heathcliff, Hareton and Hindley. They're all obviously very different.

[Tabby]

Basically, Heathcliff goes off for a long time and comes back and we never know what happens to him. And he comes back dead set on revenging himself on Hindley. And then part of that is by raising Hareton almost as a beast. He makes him very uncultured, very brutal. But I actually Think Hareton is a good man underneath it all. And he ends up falling in love with his cousin, young Kathy Linton, who is married to Linton.

[Dominic Samarok]

Linton.

[Tabby]

Anyway, at the end of the novel, they end up kind of an item. She teaches him to read, and it's. And they kind of go back to the gentility. They're, like, straining to return to their gentility that is always lost at Wuthering Heights. Anyway, this leads us to the character that is essentially the heroine of the novel and almost as iconic as Heathcliff. And this is Catherine Earnshaw, old Cathy. So Margot Robbie is playing her in the movie. Quite a controversial cast, I thought, but we'll see what we think of it on Friday.

[Dominic Samarok]

So she is the center of the novel in some ways.

[Tabby]

Yeah, she's the fulcrum of it, really.

[Dominic Samarok]

She is. And at the center of the book is the driving, obsessive passion that Heathcliff has for her. And you can sort of see why. She's a fun character.

[Tabby]

She's wild, she's magnetic, she's defiant. She's very beautiful. She's very selfish.

[Dominic Samarok]

I mean, she really is entitled, isn't she? She should not have been eating so much meat.

[Tabby]

Yeah. And when I first read it, I thought, you know, she's the ultimate independent, passionate rebel. And this time around, I thought, you know, the element of her that is an entitled brat came out of it a lot. And so she dies after giving birth to her daughter, young Cathy. We never entirely understand how or why. And she dies in Heathcliff's arms in what I think is quite a moving scene.

[Dominic Samarok]

But she dies so quickly. This was a real surprise to me. Like, one page, she's alive and everything's fine. And then basically, she dies in about three sentences.

[Tabby]

Yeah. But her life is kind of defined by these two loves. Her wild, devastating, destructive love for Heathcliff, her soulmate. And then her much safer, tamer love for Linton. And he's like her security. And she says at one point that, like, Heathcliff is like the rock and Linton is like the leaves on top. You know, they'll blow away. But her love for Heathcliff remains. She says that very, very famous line that I know that particularly girls all over the world have always been drawn to, and that is Heathcliff. He's more myself than I am. Whatever our soul are made of, his and mine are the same and.

[Dominic Samarok]

And you like that.

[Tabby]

I still find that quite moving. Confirming all your worst suspicions about my deeply buried romantic nature. I do. I do still find that moving. It kind of it allows you to indulge in the idea of soulmates. But anyway, this brings us to the man who is the object of her kind of hatred and passion throughout the book. And this is the fascinating enigma, the man, the myth, the monster or vampire that is he. But I think on that tantalizing note that we should, we should come to a break and discuss him afterwards.

[Dominic Samarok]

Exciting.

[Tabby]

We heard you.

[Dominic Samarok]

Nine years of bring back the snack wrap and you've won. But maybe you should have asked for more. Say hello to the hot honey snack wrap. Now you've really won. Go to McDonald's and get it while you can.

[Tabby]

Welcome back to the book club. Now we promised before the break that we would be discussing Heathcliff and Dominic. You write in the notes that you bear an uncanny similarity to Heathcliff. So maybe you want to explain yourself.

[Dominic Samarok]

I think that will have come through for the listeners already, to be honest. The kind of smouldering, brooding, dark kind of hint of violence. Heathcliff is one of those characters who, even if you haven't read Wuthering Heights, you maybe have heard of him. And he kind of casts the shadow over all English literature, literature. In the book we are told that he's a foundling. He's from Liverpool and Mr. Earnshaw Senior, so Kathy's father basically found him on a business trip to Liverpool. And the implication, I think, because this is the late 1840s, is that he's probably Irish. This is the period of the Irish famine, obviously Liverpool, a port associated with migration from Ireland. So there's, I think that's the assumption. He's described as a dark skinned gypsy. And this sort of otherness, I think, would have been interpreted by Victorian readers as his Irishness. There is a case that he's inspired by Lord Byron, the sort of rake and poet and celebrity of a generation or so earlier.

[Tabby]

And we know that Emily Bronte was a huge fan of Byron as well.

[Dominic Samarok]

We know that they had read a magazine article about Byron that had been published in 1825. He occupies a similar sort of space to Byron in that he is both compelling, but he's also dangerous, as Byron was perceived to be. Yeah, there's a sort of sense, I think, that a lot of critics and readers get that he is this ferocious, destructive spirit who has forced his way into their household and is basically going to destroy them. The Earnshaws and the Lintons, the other family in the other house across the moor. More. Yeah, but what makes him attractive to readers is the almost the obsessive, the overwhelming passion that he has for his adopted sister, Kathy. She's the only person who really understands him, ever shows him any kindness. And he develops this. I mean, to call it an obsession is massively. To underplay it.

[Tabby]

Yeah.

[Dominic Samarok]

She dominates his every waking thought. You get a slight sense, I think, that all the violence of his nature is this kind of. Is born of frustration and anger that he can't possess her completely.

[Tabby]

He actually refers to her at one point as his life. He literally cannot live without her. And I actually think, you know, given how. How so much of Heathcliff is just horrible, you know, he's a really cruel character. I think the reason that people have transformed him into this kind of romantic hero is because of his inner torment. The constant longing, the constant unquenched desire for. For Catherine Earnshaw.

[Dominic Samarok]

So there are two ways, I think, in which you can look at Heathcliff. You can read the book and see him as a. As a soul who's suffering. Somebody who's in hell the whole time. And that's how he's introduced to us.

[Tabby]

Milton, Satan, like from Paradise Lost.

[Dominic Samarok]

But that's, I guess, the other side that he is. That he's. He's just evil. That he's willfully evil. And indeed, some people, again pushing the Byron comparison, say he's kind of vampiric. He's somebody who is feeding on these women. So he destroys Isabella Linton, who marries him, and then regrets it. He ends up digging up old Kathy's body twice. And for kind of weird necrophiliac purposes that are not fully explained, he wants

[Tabby]

to possess her entirely. In a funny way. And that's the thing is, I actually. I don't think that Heathcliff has any moment of redemption. I think you kind of expect reading a book like this, it's gonna be like Mr. Darcy or something, where in the beginning of. He's not nice and he's cruel. And then by the end, it turns out he's got a heart of gold underneath it all. And he's a good man.

[Dominic Samarok]

That never happens in her sister's book, Jane Eyre. Mr. Rochester.

[Tabby]

Exactly. Also very Byronic.

[Dominic Samarok]

He's dark and difficult, but actually, he's not. Ultimately.

[Tabby]

He's a good man.

[Dominic Samarok]

Yeah, exactly.

[Tabby]

Heathcliff has none of the redemption to which we are, you know, accustomed these days. There's no good in him, really.

[Dominic Samarok]

He obviously has fascinated people ever since. Like, what is Emily Bronte trying to do with him? Yeah, the 1840s is a very. Very politically, economically diffic. Difficult time in Britain and in Ireland. It's the Hungry forties. There's a lot of distress. The Industrial revolution has played out and has turned lots of social relations on their head. So a lot of people see him as the embodiment of change who is kind of disrupting, undermining the established order. He's the outsider, the alien thing. The alien thing, exactly. Who is destroying the existing kind of class system. So there's that aspect relate to it obviously very fashionable now is to see things in terms of race. So that thing about him being a sort of swarthy dark skinned gypsy, which is the kind of language that Emily Bronte uses. There's a point at which Edgar and Isabella's father, Mr. Linton says, I wonder if he is, quote, a little lascar or an American or Spanish castaway. And actually it's become very trendy now to say, well he comes from Liverpool, maybe he's an escaped slave, maybe he's mixed race or whatever. Which I don't actually think is. Would have registered with Emily Bronte. You know, I don't think this is about the empire or anything like that.

[Tabby]

Do you think she basically hasn't thought that much into him. He exists purely in the present of her book. She's not that interested in his past.

[Dominic Samarok]

Yeah, I think so. I think exactly right. I think she would say, oh, you're overthinking things. He is an outside force, but you don't need to explain in very literal terms exactly where he's come from.

[Tabby]

Yeah.

[Dominic Samarok]

I mean, obviously the defining thing about, about him is his violence.

[Tabby]

Yeah.

[Dominic Samarok]

So this is the weird thing to me about people thinking it's such a romantic book. He is an immensely brutal man and the first reviews commented again and again on what they. I mean, here's an example. The vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors of the book. Another one. The reader is shocked, disgusted, almost sickened by details of the cruelty, inhumanity and the. The most diabolical hate and vengeance. And so much of this is associated with Heathcliff himself, isn't it?

[Tabby]

Definitely. I mean there's a series of appallingly violent things that he does. I mean, to start with, like every lovable romantic hero, he hangs his fiance's dog. She looks out her window and it's hanging. God. Dogs don't fare well in the Bronte story, do they?

[Dominic Samarok]

No, but I mean this is the product of somebody who punched her dog in the face.

[Tabby]

Yeah, well, quite exactly. He refuses a note to his dying son and cries, lock him up and leave him. He constantly assaults and threatens others. You know, he says at one point of Edgar Linton, I'll crush his ribs like a rotten hazelnut. He threatens to pull out his wife's fingernails. He obviously digs up his former love, Katherine Earnshaw. He gets madder and madder and madder as the book continues. It's this spiral of lunacy.

[Dominic Samarok]

The interesting thing is that he is not the only violent character in the book.

[Tabby]

Absolutely not, no.

[Dominic Samarok]

So if you look at the other characters we mentioned, this bloke Hindley, who is the older Cathy's brother, he's the father of Hareton. Yeah. He's incredibly violent. So at one point he threatens Nelly with a knife, forces a knife into her mouth. He has his baby Hareton, and he basically threatens to draw, throw him over

[Tabby]

the banisters, drop, kick him off the banisters. You were about to say, like.

[Dominic Samarok]

Like a rugby ball.

[Tabby]

Yeah.

[Dominic Samarok]

Old Kathy, Margot Robbie's character, she pinches Nelly, she slaps. She basically hits her in the face.

[Tabby]

At one point, Isabella, even the ref find Isabella scratches Kathy's face and draws blood.

[Dominic Samarok]

You know, if you've read Jane Austen.

[Tabby]

Yeah, not a lot of this in Jane Austen.

[Dominic Samarok]

There's no scratching in Jane Austen, even in Jane Eyre. So Charlotte Bronte's book, you know, there was much less overt physical violence and abuse. I mean, there is darkness in the book, definitely, but nothing comparable to this. And I think so. For me, one of the fascinating things about this book is how retro it is. People always think of Wuthering Heights as a book looking ahead, but to me it feels, you know, you would not be surprised to find that it had been written 20 or 30 years earlier and it's actually set in the past. It's a historical novel. And I always think it's like the last great Gothic 18th century book. You know, those kind of books about people, damsels locked in castles.

[Tabby]

Yeah, massively.

[Dominic Samarok]

And all that sort of stuff. But the difference, I guess, is that in those books, books, women are always portrayed as kind of victims. They're always.

[Tabby]

Yeah, Lily white waifs, I always think.

[Dominic Samarok]

Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. Sort of. It's like a sort of a woman in a pre Raphaelite painting or something, looking out of a tower and very long hair and feeling sorry for herself.

[Tabby]

They suffer kind of beautifully, but always passively.

[Dominic Samarok]

But that doesn't happen in this. Right. The women are violent in and of themselves.

[Tabby]

Yeah, that's definitely something that. That separates it from other Gothic books. No, they're very, very violent and they're very violent against each other. And they also rail against their Imprisonment in a way. Way that gothic heroines absolutely do not. And I think it's that it's the wildness of these female characters that has led a lot of critics to see Wuthering Heights as a very feminist book. You know, women both drive the plot, and it's a woman who is telling large parts of the story written by

[Dominic Samarok]

a woman, you know, a woman narrator. And it's about women, of course, since you are a woman, maybe you can pronounce on this more authoritatively than I can. Do you see it as a feminine.

[Tabby]

You know, I thought about this a lot, and I actually think it's infuriatingly. It's a yes and a no no. Because I don't think Emily Bronte intended to write the women of the novel as feminist. Like, she would have no understanding what that term even means. And I think they more reflect the stubbornness of her own nature, perhaps. And also the women in the book are still kind of largely defined by their relationships to men, as was typical of women of that time. You know, their wife, wives, they are mothers, etc. Etc. They're sisters. So I think to transform the women of Wuthering Heights and Bronte herself into some kind of like a feminist cultural hero, as with Sylvia Plath, I think it's incongruous. It just doesn't really work. And equally, to enshrine Katherine Earnshaw as this kind of feminist heroine, I think is overplayed because she's not the point of the book. She dies halfway through. You know, she's basically, as with many of the other characters, she's like a tool used to enrich and allow elaborate a story that is largely about kind of family tragedy. But having said that, the women in the book, they are unusually independent from their girlhoods. When they're kind of half savage and Hardy, they run free on the moors. Neither of the Catherine's Mothering Heights ever lose their hardiness. They're headstrong, they're physically robust, and crucially, something that I love about them, they're in no way paragons of virtue as with, you know, Anthony Trollope or even, you know, to some degree, Dickens. There's much to dislike about them, even loathe about them. And you look at them individually, you know, Isabella manages to escape this abusive marriage and raise her son alone, away from him. Even Nelly, Nelly is stoic, she's protective of her charges. And, you know, in the face of simmering violence, she's incredibly defiant. So I think in that sense, yeah, they can't help but be very strong, fiery women, but they also suffer a lot of abuse and coercive control and psychological abuse, don't they?

[Dominic Samarok]

That's exactly what I was about to say, that you could see this as a book about abuse and abuse, particularly of women. So Heathcliff, the way he treats Isabella, for example, Isabella Linton. So basically, Heathcliff is this. If you see him as this monstrous figure who basically is destroying these two families, I mean, he absolutely blights the lives of the Lintons.

[Tabby]

Yeah.

[Dominic Samarok]

And Isabella, when she marries him, she just sinks into this massive depression. She's described as worn and listless. He makes her sleep in a chair.

[Tabby]

He won't let her into their room. Yeah.

[Dominic Samarok]

And he keeps the room locked and he keeps the key so she's not allowed in. He insults her in front of the servants. He calls her an abject thing, pitiful, slavish.

[Tabby]

She doesn't bathe.

[Dominic Samarok]

Clearly suffering a kind of massive mental health crisis. And then that pattern, Linton is reproduced in the story of Linton and Kathy the Younger. So Kathy the Younger, in the second half of the book, is also sucked into Wuthering Heights. And then this bloke Linton, who's an absolute nightmare of a man, he blackmails her, he imprisons her, he sort of jeers at one point and he says, all her things are mine or her nice books are mine. I. She offered to give me them and her pretty birds and her pony if I would get the key of our room and let her out, but I told her she had nothing to give. They were all. All mine.

[Tabby]

I told you. Linton is the true monster of this story. It's terrifying.

[Dominic Samarok]

I mean, there's a true story behind this. In 1840, somebody called Mrs. Collins had come to the parsonage to ask for help, to ask Emily's father, Patrick, for help because she had an abusive husband, an alcoholic husband who was another clergyman, one of his colleagues. And Patrick Bronte actually said, you need to get out, you need to leave him and take your children. Children.

[Tabby]

Oh, that's admirable.

[Dominic Samarok]

And then, just before Wuthering Heights was published, she came back to the parsonage to thank him and she said, she told the whole Bronte family, she said, I've now moved to Manchester, I've moved in with my kids. I'm running a. Basically a lodging house. Thank you very much for that, excellent advice. I've escaped this abusive husband, so you can sort of see why the theme of abuse is playing so much on Emily Bronte's mind when she's writing the. In the book.

[Tabby]

How can it be a romance? How can it be a love story with all this abuse and violence?

[Dominic Samarok]

But this is the mad thing, right?

[Tabby]

When I used to read it, I thought it was just everything that romance and love should be.

[Dominic Samarok]

Let's get into this. Because I didn't read this book till a few years ago.

[Tabby]

Yeah.

[Dominic Samarok]

And I was really surprised at how dark and how claustrophobic it was.

[Tabby]

Definitely.

[Dominic Samarok]

And I thought, what. What about the Kate Bush song?

[Tabby]

The Kate Bush song, Absolutely. Yeah.

[Dominic Samarok]

To go back to when you read it when you were in your teens, can you pin down what it was about the relationship between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff? I mean, it's so simplistic and try to say it. Being drawn to the bad boy.

[Tabby]

I think it. It absolutely is. I think it's. It's partially that. It's kind of unearthly. It's so idealized. And that's always been irresistible. Like, think about Romeo and Juliet. All these great love stories are kind of cartoons of what love is. And as you say, it's this classic motif. Like, it enshrines these two ideals of love that I think. I'm sure girls and boys, but particularly girls grow up with. And it's regurgitated in rom coms and, like, American teenage dramas. And it's that you have the bad boy, like the James Dean character, and he's bad for you and he's violent and he'll break your heart, but he kind of understands you. He's like your soulmate. But then you have the good guy who's kind of kind and gentle and, you know, extraordinarily patient.

[Dominic Samarok]

Yeah.

[Tabby]

And he's the one you ought to go for, but the other one that there's this, like, irresistible, otherworldly passion with. So I think it's partly that you

[Dominic Samarok]

say it's an otherworldly passion. I mean, she has these famous lines, doesn't she?

[Tabby]

Yeah.

[Dominic Samarok]

Kathy, I mean, you mentioned the thing

[Tabby]

about he's more my soul than I am.

[Dominic Samarok]

Yeah.

[Tabby]

When I read it this time, I was so struck by. It is that it's not so much that they aspire to be together. It's almost as though they want to be each other. They want to own each other's souls. So like Kathy says at one point, my great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff's miseries. And I watched and felt each from the. The.

[Dominic Samarok]

Of beginning.

[Tabby]

Beginning, Nelly. I am Heathcliff. He's always, always in my mind, not as A pleasure any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being. You could read that as like the romantic ideal of soulmates, which we all love and kind of, we like to indulge in that idea. But then it's almost like this weird platonic unity. It's almost as if they want to be one person. And I think they're desperately longing to go back to their childhoods because that's the time when you're most alike. Class doesn't divide. And that's, I think, part the reason why it is such an unsexy book. Everyone thinks about it as kind of like boldest ripping passion. And if you watch the trailer for the movie, it massively indulges in that. But there's never any indication of any kind of like physical fulfillment between these two characters.

[Dominic Samarok]

Agreed. We've said a few times in this episode they seek to kind of possess each other.

[Tabby]

Yes.

[Dominic Samarok]

But there's no sense of that being a physical process.

[Tabby]

No. There's no hint of sex. Absolutely not.

[Dominic Samarok]

They dream of this kind of strange, unearthly fusion of their personalities and of their souls.

[Tabby]

It's like they want to go to like their pre fallen state.

[Dominic Samarok]

Yeah.

[Tabby]

The time before innocence is lost and.

[Dominic Samarok]

But do you not think that so much of this is driven by the fact that basically Emily Bronte has never spoken to a man?

[Tabby]

Definitely.

[Dominic Samarok]

She's basically been locked in her house being either. Being. Punching a dog.

[Tabby]

Yeah.

[Dominic Samarok]

Being horrible to Belgian children.

[Tabby]

Telling people she lives for.

[Dominic Samarok]

Yeah. Or sort of dreaming up mad Middle Earth style scenarios. And. And so she clearly. There's a lot going on under the surface. There's a lot of passion in her. But she has never. She's obviously presumably never had any form of relationship.

[Tabby]

No. Apart from with her, her father and her brother. And there is like an incestuous sort of vibration going on between Kathy and Heathcliff.

[Dominic Samarok]

All right. Right. Let's put everyone out of their misery and tell everybody what we made of it. So who's gonna go first?

[Tabby]

I think. I think you should, given you came to it from a place of not having liked it so much. What do you think now?

[Dominic Samarok]

I liked it lots more on the second reading.

[Tabby]

Oh, God, that's so gratifying. I'm always right.

[Dominic Samarok]

I really enjoyed the narrative skill. I think it's very much a young woman's book, by which I don't mean as a reader, I mean as a writer. It's. It's clearly written by somebody who, you know, doesn't. Is not a terribly experienced Writer. It's very raw. It's unpolished. I mean, there's definitely artistry to it. And I think it does it a disservice to claim that there's. That it's just wild.

[Tabby]

Absolutely. Yeah.

[Dominic Samarok]

But there is a sort of passion to it. This is the work not of a seasoned writer, a sort of professional, but of somebody who is bearing their soul to the world. And I like that about. I do find a lot of the characters quite hateful, but.

[Tabby]

Absolutely. Yeah.

[Dominic Samarok]

But I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it much more than I thought I would. What about. What about you?

[Tabby]

I actually. I enjoyed it less.

[Dominic Samarok]

Oh, my words.

[Tabby]

Than I used to, I think, because I came to it ready to indulge in, like, a real love story. And there was nothing of a love story to me in this time. And I. And I thought Heathcliff was just horrible from start to finish. But the thing that really stood out to me, I think, is what you said. I think it's so misunderstood. It's actually a book of incredible artistry. The repetition, the doubling, the strangulating domestic spaces. As you say, there is, like, this weird power that she captures. It's extraordinary because the book takes place over such a small patch of land and the cast of characters is so small, and Emily Bronte's life was so limited and restricted and so small, and yet her imagination stretches over these vast expanses and it encompasses and plunders such like depths of feeling and torment and emotions, and you can't help but be moved by that. And so if Jane Austen's world is like the decorous world of the outside, Emily Bronte's world is like the mad violence of the world within. And I think even though the moors are barely mentioned and actually nature, et cetera, is barely mentioned, I think she uses it very cleverly to inject characters and periods of their lives with intense feeling and intense kind of color.

[Dominic Samarok]

Yeah.

[Tabby]

I think to call it just a screechy melodrama, I think, would be to do a massive disservice.

[Dominic Samarok]

Agreed. All right, so what we're going to be doing, because of our commitment to high scholarship and literary analysis, we will be marking all the books out of ten.

[Tabby]

Yeah.

[Dominic Samarok]

And regular listeners can keep score and discover which of us is a harsher marker. I'm going to predict, actually, tabby will be a harder marker than I am because basically I'm a fundamentally more.

[Tabby]

Yeah.

[Dominic Samarok]

More generous people. Person anyway. But each book will mark in a different.

[Tabby]

We'll have a different scale.

[Dominic Samarok]

A different scale to reflect the book. So I think we should do Wuthering

[Tabby]

Heights in what are we thinking of this time?

[Dominic Samarok]

I think dead dogs is surely dead dogs. Yeah.

[Tabby]

Obviously I'm reluctant to go along with that, but okay, let's do dead dogs.

[Dominic Samarok]

So dead dogs out of 10, who's gonna go first? I'll go first.

[Tabby]

You go first.

[Dominic Samarok]

I'm going to give it seven. So I would have given it a five on my first reading because I didn't really enjoy it. But on the second reading I admired it it more. So I've come up to a seven. What about you, Tabby?

[Tabby]

I'm gonna be infuriatingly contrary and say 7.5.

[Dominic Samarok]

10.5.

[Tabby]

Yeah.

[Dominic Samarok]

Since when did we have halves?

[Tabby]

We do have. You can have half a DEG dog if it lives with Emily Bronte. It's definitely half a take dog.

[Dominic Samarok]

Yeah. Okay.

[Tabby]

We'd love it if people would do their own ratings online on, on X or Instagram or whatever it may be and give us their own rating. So their own number of dead dogs out of 10 this week.

[Dominic Samarok]

So let's explain how the show is going to work. There's going to be an episode every week, isn't there? Tabby ON There is a different book each time. And what we'll do is we will alternate absolute tip top literary classics like the Great Books of Literature with books that are a little bit more contemporary and maybe more fun, maybe more offbeat, more unexpected.

[Tabby]

Yeah.

[Dominic Samarok]

So there's a nice kind of balanced diet and with any proper book club, you have to give people a sense of what is coming, don't you? So, so next week, Tabby, another of your favorite books actually gives you a sense of the power that Tabby exerts in this show. So what's next week's book?

[Tabby]

So next week we have Never Let Me Go by Kazuya Shigeru. And then we have the Great Gatsby. And then we have Donna Tartt's the Secret History, one of my favourite books. That's a great book.

[Dominic Samarok]

And then after that, Frankenstein by Mary Shelley.

[Tabby]

Yeah. And excitingly because the movie came out last year, so that's something I'm really looking forward to reading again.

[Dominic Samarok]

Then another book actually that's remade into a film recently which is hamnet by Maggie O'. Farrell. And then George Orwell's 1984 and then Philip Pullman's, the first book of his kind of great Lyra Balaka Balacqua. So it's Northern Lights or the Golden Compass, depending if you're American or British. Confusingly so what we'll do is we will give people as much advance warning as possible. You don't have to read along, but it's nice if you do. And we would absolutely love to hear your suggestion about what books we should do next. So you can suggest books to us on X, on Instagram or you can email us and the links to all those things are in the episode description. And we can't wait to see what you suggest. This is going to be fun, I hope.

[Tabby]

Yeah.

[Dominic Samarok]

Lots of great books, lots of fun things to talk about and we will see you this time next week. Bye Bye.

[Tabby]

Bye. Close your eyes. Exhale. Feel your body relax and let go of whatever you're carrying today. Well, I'm letting go of the worry that I wouldn't get my new contacts in time for this class. I got them delivered free from 1-800-contacts. Oh my gosh, they're so fast. And breathe. Oh, sorry. I almost couldn't breathe when I saw the discount they gave me on my first order. Oh, sorry. Namaste. Visit 1-800-contacts.com today to save on your first order.

[Advertiser]

1-800-contacts New Year, new me. Cute. But how about New Year, New Money? With Experian, you can actually take control of your finances. Check your FICO score, find ways to save and get matched with credit card offers, giving you time to power through those New Year's goals you know you're gonna crush start the year off right. Download the Experian app based on FICO scoring model offers an approval not guaranteed. Eligibility requirements and terms apply subject to credit check, which may impact your credit scores. Offers not available in all states. See experian.com for details. Experian it's tax season, and at LifeLock, we know you're tired of numbers, but here's a big one you need to hear. Billions. That's the amount of money and refunds the IRS has flagged for possible identity fraud. Now here's another big number. 100 million. That's how many data points LifeLock monitors every second. If your identity is stolen, we'll fix it. Guaranteed. One last big number. Save up to 40% your first year. Visit lifelock. Com podcast for the threats you can't control. Terms apply.