Wuthering Heights is Emily Brontë’s dark novel of obsessive love and revenge set on the bleak Yorkshire moors, following Heathcliff and Catherine whose destructive bond scars two generations. Charlotte Brontë described her sister Emily’s only novel as ‘moorish, and wild, and knotty as root of heath’. The wild landscapes mirror violent emotions, while ghostly elements and themes of class, cruelty and loyalty create a tragic and unsettling story about loss and fate.

During this session, we will be discussing the novel with Dr Jenny Bavidge, Associate Professor in English at the University of Cambridge Professional and Continuing Education, and Fellow in English, Murray Edwards College.

To aide the conversation, we have prepared three 'thinking points' to consider when reading the book:

1. Is it right to describe Wuthering Heights as a love story?
2. The novel’s title describes both a sound and a place: what is the role of the landscape and the houses in the novel?
3. What are the effects of the novel’s combination of realist and gothic elements? To what extent do they create a strange reading experience?

About The Really Popular Book Club

The Really Popular Book Club is Cambridge University Libraries' book group. Everyone is welcome to come and discuss a really popular book with the group, library staff, and an expert on the novel. Hosted on Zoom, the book club is completely free and open to everyone, people attend from all over the world. The Really Popular Book Club celebrates the huge range of books at Cambridge University Library. We have more than 8 million books and as a legal deposit library we keep a copy of every book published in the UK, and have done since 1710.

If you haven't attended one of our book club events before, you can find more information at www.lib.cam.ac.uk/bookclub.