I've put off reading Wuthering Heights for years since I thought it was a pure romance novel and one I wouldn't really enjoy or care for. But it wasn't until the 2026 movie was released that I figured out how wrong I was about the book. I didn't watch the movie, but watched and read reviews on it and discovered how mostly every review was saying at how off and misrepresentative the movie was to the source material. Reading about how dark and unromantic the book actually was got me wanting to read it, and now I can say I have. And its now become one of my favorite reads of all time!
I'm always looking for any book or media in general thats in the gothic genre and this book has all the gothic tropes in waves. Maybe the most I've read in a while with the constant dark dreary weather, the dead landscape that surrounds the decaying estates, and the degradation of people as the book goes on. Which was one of the major things that caught me off guard with the book is how dark it actually was. For a book written in the 1800s, I don't know what I was actually expecting, but how violent and awful pretty much every character is in the book was just different from other classics I read around this era. The book feels modern in this way, with the usual classic tropes not really being utilized in this book.
What surprised me the most was how this book really isn't a romance as other media adaptions try to make it out to be. Romance is only used as a means for the characters to get what they want from other people and gain power. And when their is "love" between two people, it's violent and toxic to the point of insanity.
It's also probably one of the first books I read in a while that there wasn't a single character I liked as they were all awful in their own ways. Like selfish, abusive, crazy, manipulative, violent, greedy, or downright evil describes almost every character. But I still felt interested and compelled to read through of how the events play out with these characters, as the writing itself made want to see what happens, even if I didn't like the complex characters morally.
I really liked this annotation edition I got since it gave great context to certain passages or dialect that would've gone over my head if I read a regular edition. And this, I think, gave me deeper appreciation for the book overall and its history when it was written and its influence in the literary world.
Not much else I can say on Wuthering Heights, other than it does live up to the classic title it receives. It hit all the high notes for me being a Gothic lover and caught me off guard multiple times in the best ways. I highly reccomend the book to anyone who was put off by thinking it was a pure romance book or haven't got around to reading it yet!
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