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Wuthering Heights-呼啸山庄:
【内容简介】
Wuthering Heights opens with Lockwood, a tenant of Heathcliff’s, visiting the home of his landlord. A subsequent visit to Wuthering Heights yields an accident and a curious supernatural encounter, which pique Lockwood’s curiosity. Back at Thrushcross Grange and recuperating from his illness, Lockwood begs Nelly Dean, a servant who grew up in Wuthering Heights and now cares for Thrushcross Grange, to tell him of the history of Heathcliff. Nelly narrates the main plot line of Wuthering Heights.
Mr. Earnshaw, a Yorkshire Farmer and owner of Wuthering Heights, brings home an orphan from Liverpool. The boy is named Heathcliff and is raised with the Earnshaw children, Hindley and Catherine. Catherine loves Heathcliff but Hindley hates him because Heathcliff has replaced Hindley in Mr. Earnshaw’s affection. After Mr. Earnshaw’s death, Hindley does what he can to destroy Heathcliff, but Catherine and Heathcliff grow up playing wildly on the moors, oblivious of anything or anyone else—until they encounter the Lintons.
Edgar and Isabella Linton live at Thrushcross Grange and are the complete opposites of Heathcliff and Catherine. The Lintons welcome Catherine into their home but shun Heathcliff. Treated as an outsider once again, Heathcliff begins to think about revenge. Catherine, at first, splits her time between Heathcliff and Edgar, but soon she spends more time with Edgar, which makes Heathcliff jealous. When Heathcliff overhears Catherine tell Nelly that she can never marry him (Heathcliff), he leaves Wuthering Heights and is gone for three years.
While he is gone, Catherine continues to court and ends up marrying Edgar. Their happiness is short-lived because they are from two different worlds, and their relationship is strained further when Heathcliff returns. Relationships are complicated even more as Heathcliff winds up living with his enemy, Hindley (and Hindley’s son, Hareton), at Wuthering Heights and marries Isabella, Edgar’s sister. Soon after Heathcliff’s marriage, Catherine gives birth to Edgar’s daughter, Cathy, and dies.
Heathcliff vows revenge and does not care who he hurts while executing it. He desires to gain control of Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange and to destroy everything Edgar Linton holds dear. In order to exact his revenge, Heathcliff must wait 17 years. Finally, he forces Cathy to marry his son, Linton. By this time he has control of the Heights and with Edgar’s death, he has control of the Grange.
Through all of this, though, the ghost of Catherine haunts Heathcliff. What he truly desires more than anything else is to be reunited with his soul mate. At the end of the novel, Heathcliff and Catherine are united in death, and Hareton and Cathy are going to be united in marriage.
【作者简介】
Emily Brontë was born in Thornton, near Bradford in Yorkshire, to Patrick Brontë and Maria Branwell. She was the younger sister of Charlotte Brontë and the fifth of six children. In 1824, the family moved to Haworth, where Emily-s father was perpetual curate, and it was in these surroundings that their literary oddities flourished. In childhood, after the death of their mother, the three sisters and their brother Patrick Branwell Brontë created imaginary lands, which were featured in stories they wrote. Little of Emily-s work from this period survived, except for poems spoken by characters (The Brontës- Web of Childhood, Fannie Ratchford, 1941).
In 1838, Emily commenced work as a governess at Miss Patchett-s Ladies Academy at Law Hill School, near Halifax, leaving after about six months due to homesickness. Later, with her sister Charlotte, she attended a private school in Brussels run by Constantin Heger and his wife, Claire Zoë Parent Heger. They later tried to open up a school at their home, but had no pupils.
It was the discovery of Emily-s poetic talent by Charlotte that led her and her sisters to publish a joint collection of their poetry in 1846, Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. To evade contemporary prejudice against female writers, the Brontë sisters adopted androgynous first names. All three retained the same initials: Charlotte became Currer Bell, Anne became Acton Bell and Emily became Ellis Bell.
In 1847, she published her only novel, Wuthering Heights, as two volumes of a three volume set (the last volume being Agnes Grey by her sister Anne). Its innovative structure somewhat puzzled critics. Although it received mixed reviews when it first came out, the book subsequently became an English literary classic. In 1850, Charlotte edited and published Wuthering Heights as a stand-alone novel and under Emily-s real name.
A portrait of Constantin Heger (1865), Professor of Emily and Charlotte during their stay in Brussels in 1842Emily-s health, like her sisters-, had been weakened by the harsh local climate at home and at school. She caught a cold during the funeral of her brother in September, which led to tuberculosis. Refusing medical help, she died on 19 December 1848 at about two in the afternoon. She was interred .
【专业书评】
Published in 1847, WUTHERING HEIGHTS was not well received by the reading public, many of whom condemned it as sordid, vulgar, and unnatural--and author Emily Bronte went to her grave in 1848 believing that her only novel was a failure. It was not until 1850, when WUTHERING HEIGHTS received a second printing with an introduction by Emily-s sister Charlotte, that it attracted a wide readership. And from that point the reputation of the book has never looked back. Today it is widely recognized as one of the great novels of English literature.
Even so, WUTHERING HEIGHTS continues to divide readers. It is not a pretty love story; rather, it is swirling tale of largely unlikeable people caught up in obsessive love that turns to dark madness. It is cruel, violent, dark and brooding, and many people find it extremely unpleasant. And yet--it possesses a grandeur of language and design, a sense of tremendous pity and great loss that sets it apart from virtually every other novel written.
The novel is told in the form of an extended flashback. After a visit to his strange landlord, a newcomer to the area desires to know the history of the family--which he receives from Nelly Deans, a servant who introduces us to the Earnshaw family who once resided in the house known as Wuthering Heights. It was once a cheerful place, but Old Earnshaw adopted a "Gipsy" child who he named Heathcliff. And Catherine, daughter of the house, found in him the perfect companion: wild, rude, and as proud and cruel as she. But although Catherine loves him, even recognizes him as her soulmate, she cannot lower herself to marry so far below her social station. She instead marries another, and in so doing sets in motion an obsession that will destroy them all.
WUTHERING HEIGHTS is a bit difficult to "get into;" the opening chapters are so dark in their portrait of the end result of this obsessive love that they are somewhat off-putting. But they feed into the flow of the work in a remarkable way, setting the stage for one of the most remarkable structures in all of literature, a story that circles upon itself in a series of repetitions as it plays out across two generations. Catherine and Heathcliff are equally remarkable, both vicious and cruel, and yet never able to shed their impossible love no matter how brutally one may wound the other.
As the novel coils further into alcoholism, seduction, and one of the most elaborately imagined plans of revenge it gathers into a ghostly tone: Heathcliff, driven to madness by a woman who is not there but who seems reflected in every part of his world--dragging her corpse from the grave, hearing her calling to him from the moors, escalating his brutality not for the sake of brutality but so that her memory will never fade, so that she may never leave his mind until death itself. Yes, this is madness, insanity, and there is no peace this side of the grave or even beyond.
It is a stunning novel, frightening, inexorable, unsettling, filled with unbridled passion that makes one cringe. Even if you do not like it, you should read it at least once--and those who do like it will return to it again and again.
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