The Ten Best Novels: Wuthering Heights

by W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM

1

PATRICK PRUNTY was born in County Down in 1777. His father, a farmer, had ten children to feed on the produce of the few acres of land he owned and Patrick went to work as soon as he was old enough, first as a weaver and then as a teacher in a village school, and after that as tutor in a clergyman’s family. He was ambitious and eager to get on in the world; and with the help of the clergyman, his employer, he managed to raise enough money to go to Cambridge. He was then twentyfive, old to enter a university, a tall, very strong young man, handsome and vain of his good looks. When at St. John’s College, he changed his plebeian name of Prunty into Brontë, the name of a village in Sicily of which Nelson had been made Duke three years before. Patrick Brontë took his degree, was ordained, and after occupying various curacies settled down for five years in one at Hartshead.

There he married Maria Branwell, the daughter of a Cornish trader. He had two children by her, Maria and Elizabeth. Then he moved to another curacy near Bradford where Mrs. Brontë had four more children. They were named Charlotte, Patrick Branwell, Emily, and Anne. In 1820 the Reverend Patrick Brontë was appointed to the living, a poor living worth £200 a year, of Haworth, a Yorkshire village, and here he remained, his ambition, one must suppose, satisfied, till his death. He never went back to Ireland to see the parents, the brothers and sisters he had left there. In 1821 his wife died and about a year later, after two or three unsuccessful attempts to marry again, he induced her elder sister, Elizabeth Branwell, to come to look after his children.

Haworth Parsonage was a small stone house near the church on the brow of the steep hill down which the village straggled. There were a parlor, a study for Mr. Brontë, a kitchen, and a storeroom on the first floor and four bedrooms and a lobby on the second. The floors and the stairs were of stone. There were no carpets except in the parlor and the study, and no curtains to the windows because Mr. Brontë dreaded fire. In Mr. Brontëe’s study there were mahogany tables and chairs covered with horsehair, but the other rooms were sparsely furnished. Back and front of the house was a strip of garden and on the two sides the graveyard. All about, stretching as far as eyes could reach, were the bleak moors.

Over these moors Mr. Brontë walked long and far. He was a man who shunned company and with the exception of a neighboring parson who sometimes came down the hills to pay a visit, saw no one except his churchwardens and his parishioners. Even before his wife’s death he had taken to having his meals in his study by himself and this habit he retained for the rest of his life. At eight o’clock at night he read family prayers and at nine locked and barred the front door. As he passed the room in which his children were sitting he told them not to be late and halfway up the stairs stopped to wind the clock. He was of a violent temper, selfish, “stern and peremptory.” He did not like children and was irritable when they interrupted him; his own were delicate, but he wished to make them hardy and indifferent to the pleasures of eating and dress; he would not eat meat himself and did not allow them to eat it, and they were fed, as he had been in his childhood, chiefly on potatoes, He, the son of a poverty-stricken Irish farmer, would not let them associate with the village children and they were driven to sit in the “children’s study,” the cold little lobby on the second floor, reading or whispering low in order not to disturb their father who, when annoyed or displeased, maintained a sullen silence. He taught them their lessons in the morning and Miss Branwell, after she joined them, taught them sewing and housework.

They amused themselves by wandering about the moors and by writing plays, poems, essays, and romances. In 1824 Maria and Elizabeth, and then Charlotte and Emily were sent to a school at Cowan Bridge which had recently been started to give an education to the daughters of poor clergymen. The place was unhealthy, the food bad, and the administration incompetent. The two elder girls died and Charlotte and Emily, whose health was affected, were, though not immediately, removed.

Branwell was looked upon as the clever one of the family and his father thought more of him than of his three girls. He would not send him to school, but undertook to educate him himself. The boy had a precocious talent and his manners were frank. His friend, F. H. Grundy, thus describes him: “He was insignificantly small — one of his life’s trials. He had a mass of red hair, which he wore brushed high off his forehead — to help his height , I fancy — a great, bumpy, intellectual forehead, nearly half the size of the whole facial contour; small ferrety eyes, deep sunk and still farther hidden by the never removed spectacles, prominent nose, but weak lower features. He had a downcast look, which never varied, save for a rapid momentary glance at long intervals. Small and thin of person, he was the reverse of attractive at first sight.”

He had parts and his sisters admired him and expected him to do great things. He was a brilliant, eager talker and from some Irish ancestor, for his father was a morose, silent man, he had inherited a gift for social intercourse and an agreeable loquacity. When a traveler pulling up for the night at the Black Bull seemed lonely, the landlord would ask him: “Do you want someone to help you with your bottle, Sir? If so, I’ll send up for Patrick.” Branwell was always glad to be of service.

When Charlotte was fifteen she went to school once more, this time at Roe Head, and was happy there, but after a year she came home again to teach her two younger sisters. The family was very poor and the girls had nothing to look forward to, for

Miss Branwell was leaving the little money she had to her amusing nephew, and so they had decided that the only way they could earn a living was by training themselves to be governesses or schoolteachers. Branwell reached the age of eighteen and some decision had to be made on what trade or profession he was to adopt. He had some facility for drawing, as his sisters had too, and he was eager to become a painter. It was settled that he should go to London and study at the Royal Academy. It appears to be uncertain whether he went or not.

2

MEANWHILE Charlotte had returned to the school at Roe Head as a teacher and had taken Emily with her as a pupil. But Emily became so desperately homesick that she fell ill and had to be sent home. Anne, who was of a calmer, more submissive temper, took her place. But Charlotte’s health failed after three years — notwithstanding Mr. Brontë’s efforts to make his children hardy they all remained delicate— and she went back to Haworth. She was then twenty-two.

Branwell was not only a source of worry, but a source of expense; and Charlotte, as soon as she was well enough, felt herself obliged to take a situation as a nursery governess. It was not work she liked. The fact is that neither she nor her sisters liked children any more than their father did.

She had long boon toying with the idea of keeping a school of her own, with her two sisters, and now she took it up again; her employers, who seem to have been very kind, decent people, encouraged her, but suggested that before she could hope to be successful she must acquire certain qualifications. Though she could read French, she could not speak it and knew no German, so she decided that she must go abroad to learn languages. Her aunt advanced money, and accompanied by her sister Emily she went to Brussels where she became a pupil of the Pensionnat Héger.

The two girls were recalled to England after ten months bv the illness of Miss Branwell. She died, and having disinherited Branwell owing to his bad behavior, left the little she had to her three nieces. It was enough for them to carry out the plan they had so long discussed of having a school of their own, but since their father was old and his sight failing they made up their minds to set it up at the parsonage. Charlotte did not think she was sufficiently equipped and so accepted Monsieur Héger’s offer to go back to Brussels to teach English. On her return to Haworth the three sisters issued prospectuses and Charlotte wrote to her friends asking them to recommend the school they intended to start. No pupils came.

They had been writing off and on since they were children and in 1846 the three of them issued a volume of verse at their own expense under the name of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. It cost them £50 and two copies were sold. Each of them then wrote a novel: Charlotte’s (Currer Bell) was called The Professor, Emily’s (Ellis Bell) Wuthering Heights. and Anne’s (Acton Bell) Agnes Grey. They were refused by publisher after publisher, but when Smith, Elder & Co., to whom Charlotte’s The Professor had finally been sent, returned it they wrote to say that they would be glad to consider a longer novel by her. She was finishing one and within a month was able to send it to the publishers. They accepted it. It was called Jane Eyre.

Emily’s novel and Anne’s had also at last been accepted by a publisher, Newby bv name, “on terms somewhat impoverishing to the two authors,” and they had corrected the proofs before Charlotte sent Jane Eyre to Smith, Elder & Co. Though the reviews of Jane Eyre were not particularly good, readers liked it and it turned out to be a best-seller. Mr. Newby upon this tried to persuade the public that Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey, which he then published together in three volumes, were by the author of Jane Eyre. They made, however, no impression and indeed were regarded by a number of critics as early and immature work by Currer Bell.

This was in 1848. Now to go back a little: in 1842 Branwell was engaged as a tutor by a Mr. Edmund Robinson, a wealthy clergyman, in whose family Anne was al ihe time employed as a governess. Mr. Robinson was an elderly invalid with a youngish wife, and Branwell, though she was seventeen years older than he, fell in love with her and she with him. Their relations are so delicately alluded to that it is impossible to tell whether or not he became her lover. Anyhow, whatever they were, thev were discovered. Branwell was dismissed and Mr. Robinson ordered him “never to see again the mother of his children, never set foot in her home, never write or speak to her.”

Branwell had always drunk too much: now in his distress he took to the continual eating of opium.

It appears, however, that he was able to communicate with her and some months after his dismissal they met at Harrogate. “It is said that she proposed a flight together, ready to forfeit all her grandeur. It was Branwell who advised patience and a little longer waiting.” Suddenly he received a letter to announce the death of Mr. Robinson; “he fair danced down the churchyard as if he were out of his mind: he was so fond of that woman,” someone told Emily’s biographer.

But the next day he got a message from the widow begging him not to come near her again, for if she saw him once she would lose the care of her children and her fortune. Branwell then proceeded to drink himself to death.

Emily never went out of doors after the Sunday following his death. She was ill. “Her reserved nature occasions me great uneasiness,” Charlotte wrote to her friend. “It is useless to question her; you get no answers. It is still more useless to recommend remedies; they are never adopted.” When a doctor was sent for she would not see him. She made no complaints; she wanted neither sympathy nor help. She would let no one do anything for her and when anyone tried resented it. One morning she got up, dressed herself, and began to sew; she was short of breath and her eyes were glazed, but she went on working. She grew steadily worse and at midday asked for a doctor. It was too late. At two she died. Anne died a few months later.

Charlotte had been at work on another novel. Shirley, between the death of Branwell and that of Emily, but she put it aside to nurse Anne and did not finish it till after her death. She went to London in 1849 and in 1850 and was made much of. During 1852 she wrote Villette and in 1854 she married. She had had several offers of marriage before, mostly from her father’s curates, for his failing health had obliged him to have help in his parish; but Emily discouraged suitors, and her father disapproved, so she refused them all.

It was however a curate of her father’s whom she at last married. He had been attached to her for several years and, with Emily gone and her father resigned, she at last accepted him. They were married in June and in the following March she died of what is delicately described as an “illness incidental to childbirth.”

So the Reverend Patrick Brontë, having buried his wife, her sister, and his six children, was left to eat his meals alone in the solitude he liked, walk on the moors as far as his waning strength permitted, read his books, preach his sermons, and wind up the clock on his way to bed. He died at Haworth at the age of eighty-four.

3

IT is not without intention that in writing about Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights I have said so much about her father, her brother, and her sister Charlotte, for in the books written about the family it is of them that we hear most. Emily and Anne hardly come into the picture; Anne was a gentle, pretty little thing, but insignificant, and her talent was small. Emily was very different. She is a strange, mysterious, and shadowy figure. She is never seen directly but reflected, as it were, in a moorland pool. You have to guess what sort of woman she was from an allusion here and there and from scattered anecdotes. She was aloof, a harsh, uncomfortable creature and when you hear of her giving over to unrestrained gaiety, as she sometimes did on walks over the moors, it makes you uneasy. Charlotte had friends, Anne had friends, Emily had none.

Mary Robinson describes her at fifteen as ““a tall, long-armed girl, full grown, elastic as to tread; with a slight figure that looked queenly in her best dresses, but loose and boyish when she slouched over the moors, whistling to the dogs, and taking long strides over the rough earth. A tall, thin, loose-jointed girl not ugly, but with irregular features and a pallid thick complexion.” Like her father, her brother, and her sisters she wore spectacles. She had an aquiline nose and a large, expressive prominent mouth. She dressed regardless of fashion, with leg-of-mutton sleeves long after they had ceased to be worn; in straight long skirts clinging to her lanky figure.

She hated Brussels and was miserable there. She stayed only by an effort of will. Friends tried to be nice to the two girls and asked them to spend Sundays and holidays with them, but they were so shy that to go was an agony for them, and after a while their hosts thought it kinder not to invite them. It was natural that they should be shy; they had been brought up in seclusion and had had little experience of social life; but shyness is a somewhat complicated state of mind, there is diffidence in it, but also conceit, and from this Emily at least was not free.

During the hours of recreation at school the two sisters always walked together and generally in silence. When they were spoken to, Charlotte answered. Emily rarely spoke to anyone. Monsieur Héger thought her intelligent, but so stubborn that she would listen to no reason when it interfered with her wishes or beliefs. He found her egotistical, exacting, and with Charlotte tyrannical. But he recognized that there was something unusual in her. She should have been a man, he said, “her strong imperious will would never have been daunted by opposition or difficulty; never have given way but with life.”

When Emily went back to Haworth after her aunt’s death it was for good. She never left it again.

She got up in the morning before anybody else and did the roughest part of the day’s work before Tabby, the maid, who was old and frail, came down. She did the household ironing and most of the cooking. She made the bread and the bread was good. While she kneaded the dough she would glance at the book propped up before her. “Those who worked with her in the kitchen, young girls called in to help in stress of business, remember how she would keep a scrap of paper, a pencil at her side, and how when the moment came that she could pause in her cooking or her ironing, she would jot down some impatient thought and then resume her work.”

With these girls she was always friendly and hearty — “pleasant, sometimes quite jovial like a boy.” “So genial and kind, a little masculine,” say my informants, “but of strangers she was exceedingly timid, and if the butcher’s boy or the baker’s man came to the kitchen door she would be off like a bird into the hall or the parlour till she heard their hobnails clumping down the path.” I think that much in her behavior that was strange to her contemporaries would be clear to a psychiatrist today.

4

IT IS evident that Charlotte did not quite know what to make of Wuthering Heights; she had no notion that her sister had produced a book of astonishing originality and one compared with which her own were commonplace. She felt compelled to apologize for it. When it was proposed to republish it she undertook to edit it. “I am likewise compelling myself to read it over, for the first time of opening the book since my sister’s death. Its power fills me with renewed admiration; but yet I am oppressed: the reader is scarcely ever permitted a taste of unalloyed pleasure; every beam of sunshine is poured down through black bars of threatening cloud; every page is surcharged with a sort of moral electricity; and the writer was unconscious of all this — nothing could make her conscious of it.”

One is inclined to think that she little knew her sister. Wuthering Heights is an extraordinary book. It is a very bad one. It is a very fine one. It is ugly. It has beauty. It is a terrible, an agonizing, a passionate book. Some have thought it impossible that a clergyman’s daughter who led a retired, humdrum life and knew few people and nothing of the world could have written it. This seems to me absurd. Wuthering Heights is wildly romantic: now romanticism eschews the patient observation of realism; it revels in the unbridled flight of the imagination and indulges, sometimes with gusto, sometimes with gloom, in horror, mystery, fearful passions, and deeds of violence. It is an escape from reality. Given Emily Brontë’s character, of which I have tried to give some indication, and fierce, repressed passions, which what we know of her suggests, Wuthering Heights is just the sort of book one would have expected her to write. But on the face of it, it is much more the sort of book that her scapegrace brother Branwell might have written and a number of people have been able to persuade themselves that he had either in whole or in part done so.

Some of his friends were convinced of it. Francis Grundy wrote: “Patrick Brontë declared to me, and what his sister said bore out the assertion, that he wrote a great part of Wuthering Heights himself. . . . The weird fancies of diseased genius with which he used to entertain me in our long talks at Luddendenfoot, reappear in the pages of the novel, and I am inclined to believe that the very plot was his invention rather than his sister’s.” On one occasion two of Branwell’s friends, Dearden and Leyland by name, arranged to meet him at an inn on the road to Keighley to read their poetical effusions to one another and this is what Dearden some twenty years later wrote to the Halifax Guardian: “I read the first act of The Demon Queen; but when Branwell dived into his hat — the usual receptacle of his fugitive scraps—where he supposed he had deposited his manuscript poem, he found he had by mistake placed there a number of stray leaves of a novel on which he had been trying his ‘prentice hand.’ Chagrined at the disappointment he had caused, he was about to return the papers to his hat, when both friends earnestly pressed him to read them, as they felt a curiosity to see how he could wield the pen of a novelist. After some hesitation, he complied with the request, and riveted our attention for about an hour, dropping each sheet , when read, into his hat. The story broke off abruptly in the middle of a sentence, and he gave us the sequel, viva voce, together with the real names of the prototypes of his characters; but, as some of these persons are still living, I refrain from pointing them out to the public. He said he had not yet fixed upon a title for his production, and was afraid he would never be able to meet with a publisher who would have the hardihood to usher it into the world. The scene of the fragment which Branwell road, and the characters introduced in it — so far as they developed — were the same as those in Wuthering Heights, which Charlotte Brontë confidently asserts was ihc production of her sister Emily.”

Now this is either a tissue of lies or it is true. Charlotte despised and within the bounds of Christian charity hated her brother, but as we know, Christian charity has always been able to make allowances for a lot of good honest hatred, and Charlotte’s unsupported word cannot be accepted. She may, as people often do. have persuaded herself to believe what she wanted to believe. The story is circumstantial and it is odd that anyone for no particular reason should have invented it.

What is the explanation? There is none. It has been suggested that Branwell wrote the first four chapters, and then, drunk and doped as he was, gave it up, whereupon Emily took it over. The argument adduced is that these chapters are written in a more stilted style than the rest of the novel. That I cannot see. The whole book is very badly written in the bogus literary manner that the amateur is apt to affect. When the amateur, and it must be remembered that Emily Brontë had never written a book before, sits down to write he thinks he must use grand words rather than ordinary ones. It is only by practice that he learns to write naturally.

The main part of the story is told by a Yorkshire servant and she expresses herself in a way that no human being could. Emily Brontë was perhaps aware that she was putting words into Mrs. Dean’s mouth that she could hardly have known and, to explain it, makes her say that she has in the course of her service had the opportunity to read a number of books, but even at that the pretentiousness of her discourse is appalling. She never fries to do a thing, but endeavors or essays, she never leaves a room but quits it, she never meets anybody but encounters him. I should have said that whoever wrote the first chapters wrote the rest, and if in the early ones there is somewhat more pomposity in the writing I surmise that this is owing to a not unsuccessful attempt on Emily’s part to show that Lockwood was a silly, conceited young man.

I have read somewhere the conjecture that if it was Branwell who wrote the beginning of the novel his intention was to make Lockwood take a much greater part in the action. There is indeed a hint that he was attracted by the younger Catherine and it is obvious that if he had fallen in love with her a complication would have been added to the intrigue. As it is, Lockwood is merely a nuisance. The novel is very clumsily constructed. But is this surprising? Emily Brontë had a complicated story to tell dealing with two generations. This is always a difficult thing to do because the author has to give some sort of unity to a narrative that concerns two sets of characters and two sets of events; and he must be careful not to allow the interest of one set to overshadow the interest of the other. He has also to compress the passage of years into a period of time that can be accepted by the reader with a comprehensive glance as one seizes in a single view the whole of a vast fresco.

I do not suppose that Emily Brontë deliberately thought out how to get a unity of impression into a straggling story, but I think she must have wondered how to make it coherent and it occurred to her that she could best do this by making one character narrate the long succession of events to another. It is a convenient way of telling a story and she did not invent it. Its disadvantage is, as I pointed out just now, that it is almost impossible to maintain a conversational manner when the narrator has to tell a number of things, descriptions of scenery for instance, which no sane person would think of doing. An experienced novelist might have found a bet ter way of telling the story of Wuthering Heights, but I cannot persuade myself that Emily Brontë was working on a foundation of someone else’s invention.

5

I THINK that Emily Brontë’s method might have been expected of her when you consider her extreme, her morbid, shyness and reticence. What were the alternatives? One was to write the novel from the standpoint of omniscience, as for instance Middlemarch and Madame Bovary were written. I think it would have shocked her harsh, uncompromising virtue to tell the outrageous story as a creation of her own; and if she had, moreover, she could hardly have avoided giving some account of Heathcliff during the years he spent away from Wuthering Heights when he managed to acquire an education and make money. She couldn’t do this because she simply didn’t know how he had done it.

The fact the reader is asked to accept is hard to believe and she was content to state it and leave it at that.

Another alternative was to have the story narrated to her by Mrs. Dean, say, and telling it then in the first person, but I suspect that too would have brought her into a contact with the reader too close for her quivering sensibility. By having the story in its beginning told by Lockwood and unfolded to Lockwood by Mrs. Dean she hid herself behind as it were a double mask.

And why did Emily need to hide herself when she wrote this powerful, terrible book? I think because she disclosed in it her innermost instincts. She looked deep into the well of loneliness of her heart and saw there undisclosable secrets which, notwithstanding, her impulse as a writer drove her to unburden herself of. It is said that her imagination was kindled by the weird stories her father used to tell of the Ireland of his youth and by the tales of Hoffmann which she learned to read when she went to school in Belgium and which she continued to read, we are told, back at the parsonage seated on a hearthrug by the fire with her arm round her dog’s neck.

Charlotte was at pains to state that Emily, whatever she had heard of them, had no communication with the people round her who might be supposed to have suggested the characters of her novel. I am willing to believe that, this is true and I am willing to believe that she found in the stories of mystery and horror of the German romantic writers something that appealed to her own fierce nature; but I think she found Heathcliff and Cat herine Earnshaw in the hidden depths of her own soul. It may be that in the lesser characters — Linton and his sister, Earnshaw’s wife and Heathcliff’s objects of her disdain for their weakness and frailty, she found hints in persons she had known, but readers seldom give an author credit for a power of invention and it is just as likely that she created them out of her own overbearing and contemptuous imagination.

I think she was herself Catherine Earnshaw, wild, tempestuous, passionate; and I think she was Heathcliff. Is it strange that she should have put herself into the two chief characters of her book? Not at all. We are none of us all of a piece; more than one person dwells within us, often in uneasy companionship with his fellows. And the peculiarity of the writer of fiction is that he has the power to objectify the diverse persons of which he is compounded into individual characters: his misfortune is that he cannot bring to life characters, however necessary to his story they may be, in which there is no part of himself. It is not only not uncommon for an author writing his first, novel, as Wuthering Heights was, to make himself his principal character. it is not uncommon either that in his theme there will be something of wish-fulfillment. It becomes then a confession of the reveries, on solitary walks or in wakeful hours at night, in which he has imagined himself saint or sinner, great lover or great statesman, heroic general or cold-blooded murderer; and it is because there is a lot of absurdity in most people’s reveries that there is a great deal of nonsense in most writers’ first novels. I think Wuthering Heights is just such a confession.

I think Emily Brontë put the whole of herself into Heathcliff. She gave him, I think, her violent rage, her sexuality, vehement but frustrated, her passion of unsatisfied love, her jealousy, her hatred and contempt of human beings, her cruelty, her sadism. There is a curious incident related by Charlotte’s friend, Ellen Nussey: “She enjoyed loading Charlotte where she would not dare go of her own free will. Charlotte had a mortal dread of unknown animals, and it was Emily’s pleasure to lead her into close vicinity, and then tell her of how and what she had done, laughing at her horror with great amusement.”

I think Emily loved Catherine Earnshaw with Heathcliff’s masculine, purely animal love, and I think she laughed, as she had laughed at Charlotte’s fears, when as Heathcliff she kicked and trampled on Earnshaw and dashed his head repeatedly against the stone flags, and I think she laughed when, as Heathcliff, she hit the younger Catherine in the face and heaped humiliations upon her; I think it gave her a thrill of release when she bullied, reviled, and browbeat the persons of her invention because in real life she suffered such bitter mortification in the company of her fellow creatures. And I think as Catherine, doubling the roles, as it were, though she fought Heathcliff, though she despised him, though she knew him for the evil thing he was, she loved him with her body and soul, she exulted in her power over him, she felt they were kin (as indeed they were if I am right in supposing they were both Emily Brontë) and since there is in the sadist often something of the masochist too, she was fascinated by his violence, his brutality, his untamed nature.

But I have said enough. Wuthering Heights is not a book to talk about; it is a book to read. It is easy to find fault with it: it is very imperfect; and yet it has what few novelists can give you, power. I do not know a novel in which the pain, the ecstasy, the ruthlessness, the obsessiveness of love have been so wonderfully described. Wuthering Heights reminds me of one of those great pictures of El Greco in which in a somber, arid landscape under dark clouds heavy with thunder, long, emaciated figures in contorted attitudes, spellbound by an unearthly emotion, hold their breath. A streak of lightning flitting across the leaden sky gives a final touch of mysterious terror to the scene.

(The next novel to be discussed by Mr. Maugham will be Dostocvski’s The Brothers Karamazov.)