I’m reading Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and getting my fair share of the Yorkshire Moors. A book to read on these dark, cold, windy Melbourne nights.

But geez, already, Cathy and Heathcliff!

I have to get a hold of myself and rethink how I approach this book every night as I reach for it. Cathy is tedious. She’s arrogant, impetuous, selfish. I see Heathcliff as the victim here. Who can begrudge him when he’s had life so hard. After all, I would say his only love was the father who found him on the streets of Liverpool and well, Cathy? I’m struggling to think of that as love. It’s obsession. Of the destructive kind.

After reading Jane Eyre, by her sister Charlotte Brontë, I went out and bought a new copy to gift to my niece about the same age as Jane Eyre. I loved it. I loved the character of Jane Eyre, a confident young woman wanting to hold her own in a patriarchal society. However Cathy in Wuthering Heights is something else altogether. She’s the toxic friend obsessed with the life of another – and everything about her.

I need to rethink this novel and put my “current day thinking” of how people act and just be blind to it. To look at this obsession as a crazy, blind, destructive love (it’s hard because we see on our televisions how this emotion destroys families and kills people).

I have heard that if you loved Jane Eyre, you’d despise Wuthering Heights and vice versa. There’s something in that I believe. Yeah I’m definitely a Jane Eyre girl. I would have told Cathy to go out the front door and not let it hit her on the way out hoping she’d get lost on the moors. I would have told Heathcliff to wake up to himself.

I’ll have a video book review soon which I’ll share my thoughts but I know I’ll be in the minority. I do think that I need to approach this book differently. In the eyes of someone who’s not so pragmatic or cynical about how different people think of love or obsession.