Editing Wuthering Heights (section)

== Critical response ==

=== Contemporary reviews ===
Early reviews of ''Wuthering Heights'' were mixed. Most critics recognised the power and imagination of the novel, but were baffled by the storyline, and objected to the savagery and selfishness of the characters.<ref>{{cite journal |last=Joudrey |first=Thomas J. |title='Well, we must be for ourselves in the long run': Selfishness and Sociality in ''Wuthering Heights'' |journal=Nineteenth-Century Literature |volume=70 |number=2 |year=2015 |pages=165–93 |doi=10.1525/ncl.2015.70.2.165 |jstor=10.1525/ncl.2015.70.2.165 }}</ref> In 1847, when the background of an author was given great importance in literary criticism, many critics were intrigued by the authorship of the Bell novels.<ref>[https://www.wuthering-heights.co.uk/reviews "Contemporary Reviews of ''Wuthering Heights''". Readers Guide to ''Wuthering Heights'' online.]</ref>

The ''[[The Atlas (newspaper)|Atlas]]'' review called it a "strange, inartistic story", but commented that every chapter seems to contain a "sort of rugged power."<ref>"Contemporary Reviews of ''Wuthering Heights''". Readers Guide to ''Wuthering Heights'' online.</ref>

''[[Graham's Magazine|Graham's Lady Magazine]]'' wrote: "How a human being could have attempted such a book as the present without committing suicide before he had finished a dozen chapters, is a mystery. It is a compound of vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors".<ref name="Publication Stir">{{cite news |url=https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/8396278/How-Wuthering-Heights-caused-a-critical-stir-when-first-published-in-1847.html|title=How Wuthering Heights caused a critical stir when first published in 1847|date=22 March 2011|newspaper=The Telegraph |last=Collins |first=Nick}}</ref>

''[[The American Review: A Whig Journal|The American Whig Review]]'' wrote: {{blockquote|Respecting a book so original as this, and written with so much power of imagination, it is natural that there should be many opinions. Indeed, its power is so predominant that it is not easy after a hasty reading to analyze one's impressions so as to speak of its merits and demerits with confidence. We have been taken and carried through a new region, a melancholy waste, with here and there patches of beauty; have been brought in contact with fierce passions, with extremes of love and hate, and with sorrow that none but those who have suffered can understand."<ref>{{cite web |url=http://digital.library.cornell.edu/cgi/t/text/pageviewer-idx?c=amwh;cc=amwh;rgn=full%20text;idno=amwh0007-6;didno=volume;view=image;seq=610;node=amwh0007-6%3A1;page=root;size=100 |title=The American Whig Review |volume=7 |issue=6 |date=June 1848}}</ref>}}

''[[Douglas Jerrold|Douglas Jerrold's Weekly Newspaper]]'' wrote: {{blockquote|''Wuthering Heights'' is a strange sort of book,—baffling all regular criticism; yet, it is impossible to begin and not finish it; and quite as impossible to lay it aside afterwards and say nothing about. In ''Wuthering Heights'' the reader is shocked, disgusted, almost sickened by details of cruelty, inhumanity, and the most diabolical hate and vengeance, and anon come passages of powerful testimony to the supreme power of love&nbsp;– even over demons in the human form. The women in the book are of a strange fiendish-angelic nature, tantalising, and terrible, and the men are indescribable out of the book itself.<ref name="Critical reception">{{cite web |url=https://www.wuthering-heights.co.uk/reviews |title=Contemporary Reviews of 'Wuthering Heights', 1847–1848 |work=Wuthering Heights UK}}</ref>}}

''[[The Examiner (1808–1886)|The Examiner]]'' wrote: {{blockquote|This is a strange book. It is not without evidences of considerable power: but, as a whole, it is wild, confused, disjointed, and improbable; and the people who make up the drama, which is tragic enough in its consequences, are savages ruder than those who lived before the days of [[Homer]].<ref name="Critical reception"/>|}}

''[[The Literary World (New York City)|The Literary World]]'' wrote: {{blockquote|In the whole story not a single trait of character is elicited which can command our admiration, not one of the fine feelings of our nature seems to have formed a part in the composition of its principal actors. In spite of the disgusting coarsness of much of the dialogue, and the improbabilities of much of the plot, we are spellbound.<ref>{{cite book |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=W76TqSDM0vYC&pg=PA11 |title=Reviews of "Wuthering Heights"|isbn=978-3638395526 |last=Haberlag|first=Berit |publisher=GRIN Verlag |date=12 July 2005}}</ref>}}

The English poet and painter [[Dante Gabriel Rossetti]] admired the book, writing in 1854 that it was "the first novel I've read for an age, and the best (as regards power and sound style) for two ages, except ''Sidonia''",<ref>"Originally written in German in 1848 by [[Wilhelm Meinhold]], 'Sidonia the Sorceress' was translated into English the following year by Lady Wilde, Oscar Wilde's mother. The painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti was fascinated by the story and introduced William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones to it in the 1850s. Burne-Jones was inspired to paint various scenes from the text including full-length figure studies of Sidonia and her foil Clara in 1860. Both paintings are now in the Tate collection." [[Kelmscott Press]] edition of ''[https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/kelmscott-press-edition-of-sidonia-the-sorceress-kelmscott-press/wAGgDTqZT1dddg?hl=en Sidonia the Sorceress]'', [[Jane Wilde]], 1893.</ref> but, in the same letter, he also referred to it as "a fiend of a book&nbsp;– an incredible monster&nbsp; ... The action is laid in hell,&nbsp;– only it seems places and people have English names there".<ref name=Rossetti1854>{{cite web |url=https://archive.org/stream/cu31924013541895/cu31924013541895_djvu.txt |title=Full text of "Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti to William Allingham, 1854–1870" |first=Dante Gabriel |last=Rossetti |year=1854 }}</ref>

Rossetti's friend, the poet [[Algernon Charles Swinburne]] was another early admirer of the novel, and in conclusion for an essay on Emily Brontë, published in ''[[The Athenaeum (British magazine)|The Athenaeum]]'' in 1883, writes: "As was the author's life, so is her book in all things: troubled and taintless, with little of rest in it, and nothing of reproach. It may be true that not many will ever take it to their hearts; it is certain that those who do like it will like nothing very much better in the whole world of poetry or prose."<ref>{{cite web|url=https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uiug.30112042709938&seq=777 |title=Emily Bronte |last=Swinburne |first=Algernon Charles|work=The Athenaeum |page=763| date=1883}}</ref>

===Twentieth century===
Until late in the 19th century "''[[Jane Eyre]]'' was regarded as the best of the Brontë sisters' novels". This view began to change in the 1880s with the publication of [[A. Mary F. Robinson]]'s biography of Emily in 1883.<ref name=Lcr>[http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/novel_19c/wuthering/critics.html "Later critical response"], [[City University of New York|cuny.edu]]</ref>

Modernist novelist [[Virginia Woolf]] affirmed the greatness of ''Wuthering Heights'' in 1925:
{{blockquote|''Wuthering Heights'' is a more difficult book to understand than ''[[Jane Eyre]]'', because Emily was a greater poet than Charlotte.{{nbsp}}... She looked out upon a world cleft into gigantic disorder and felt within her the power to unite it in a book. That gigantic ambition is to be felt throughout the novel{{nbsp}}... It is this suggestion of power underlying the apparitions of human nature and lifting them up into the presence of greatness that gives the book its huge stature among other novels.<ref>Virginia Woolf, ''The Common Reader: First series'', 1925</ref>}}

Similarly, Woolf's contemporary [[John Cowper Powys]] referred in 1916 to Emily Brontë's "tremendous vision".<ref>"Emily Brontë". ''Suspended Judgment: Essays on Books and Sensations''. New York: G. Arnold Shaw, 1916, p.319.</ref>

In 1926 Charles Percy Sanger's work on the chronology of ''Wuthering Heights'' "affirmed Emily's literary craft and meticulous planning of the novel and disproved Charlotte's presentation of her sister as an unconscious artist who 'did not know what she had done'." However, for a later critic, [[Albert J. Guerard]], "it is a splendid, imperfect novel which Brontë loses control over occasionally".<ref name=Lcr />

Still, in 1934, [[Lord David Cecil]], writing in ''Early Victorian Novelists'', commented "that Emily Brontë was not properly appreciated; even her admirers saw her as an 'unequal genius',"<ref name=Lcr /> and in 1948 [[F. R. Leavis]] excluded ''Wuthering Heights'' from [[The Great Tradition|the great tradition]] of the English novel because it was "a 'kind of sport'—an anomaly with 'some influence of an essentially undetectable kind.'"<ref>Michael S. Macovski, "Wuthering Heights and the Rhetoric of Interpretation". ''[[ELH]]'', vol. 54, no. 2 (Summer 1987), p. 363.</ref>

The novelist [[Daphne du Maurier]] argued the status of ''Wuthering Heights'' as a "supreme romantic novel" in 1971:
{{blockquote|There is more savagery, more brutality, in the pages of ''Wuthering Heights'' than in any novel of the nineteenth century, and, for good measure, more beauty too, more poetry, and, what is more unusual, a complete lack of sexual emotion. ... Emily Brontë, striding over the Yorkshire moors with her dog, did not conjure from her imagination any cozy tale of happy lovers to console women readers sitting snugly within doors.<ref>{{cite news|url=https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-buffalo-news-daphne-du-maurier-on-wu/153814179/|title=Great Love Stories Romantic Humbug|work=The Buffalo News|page=19|date=April 10, 1971}}</ref> }}

===Twenty-first century===
Writing in ''The Guardian'' in 2003 writer and editor [[Robert McCrum]] placed ''Wuthering Heights'' in his list of 100 greatest novels of all time.<ref>''The 100 greatest novels of all time: The list'' [https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/oct/12/features.fiction].</ref> And in 2015 he placed it in his list of 100 best novels written in English.<ref>''The 100 best novels written in English: the full list'' [https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/aug/17/the-100-best-novels-written-in-english-the-full-list].</ref> He said that {{blockquote|''Wuthering Heights'' releases extraordinary new energies in the novel, renews its potential, and almost reinvents the genre. The scope and drift of its imagination, its passionate exploration of a fatal yet regenerative love affair, and its brilliant manipulation of time and space put it in a league of its own.<ref>''The 100 best novels: No 13 – Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1847)'' [https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/dec/16/emily-bronte-wuthering-heights-100-best].</ref>}}

Writing for BBC Culture in 2015 author and book reviewer Jane Ciabattari<ref>[http://www.janeciabattari.com/index.htm Jane Ciabattari: Biography].</ref> polled 82 book critics from outside the UK and presented ''Wuthering Heights'' as number 7 in the resulting list of 100 greatest British novels.<ref>''The 100 greatest British novels'' [https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20151204-the-100-greatest-british-novels].</ref>

In 2018 [[Penguin Books|Penguin]] presented a list of 100 must-read classic books and placed ''Wuthering Heights'' at number 71, saying: "Widely considered a staple of Gothic fiction and the English literary canon, this book has gone on to inspire many generations of writers{{snd}}and will continue to do so".<ref>''100 must-read classic books, as chosen by our readers'' [https://www.penguin.co.uk/articles/2018/100-must-read-classic-books.html].</ref>

Writing in ''The Independent'' journalist and author Ceri Radford and news presenter, journalist, and TV producer Chris Harvey included ''Wuthering Heights'' in a list of the 40 best books to read during [[COVID-19 lockdowns|lockdown]]. Harvey said that "It's impossible to imagine this novel ever provoking quiet slumbers; Emily Brontë's vision of nature blazes with poetry".<ref>''The 40 best books to read during lockdown'' [https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/books-best-lockdown-novels-suggestions-a9255191.html].</ref>