A Girl Walks Into a Book

by Miranda K. Pennington

The anonymous critic of Graham’s Magazine reacted even more strongly than I did—“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.”3 As you might imagine, the chorus of similarly vociferous reviews actually did more to drive sales than to warn off impressionable youth. Today, Heights competes with Jane Eyre for most-read novel in the Brontë canon.

  But some of those readers—anyone who thinks Heights is just a thrilling epic love story, really—are clearly just skimming the CliffsNotes. Heights is a snake pit! The famous passages, where Cathy cries out that her soul and Heathcliff’s are the same, and that her love for him resembles the eternal rocks? Those only come after Cathy announces she will marry Edgar because he’s handsome and rich and loves her or whatever. Later, Edgar’s sister Isabella develops a crush on Heathcliff, and Cathy reveals that she knows full well what Heathcliff is. He’s not a sheep in wolf’s clothing, tragically misunderstood, or in need of a friendly hand; he’s a regular wolf in exactly the kind of wardrobe one expects on a lupine specimen. There is no mystique. There is no soft underbelly.

  Heathcliff and Cathy’s love is rude and unmannerly and untidy, and not in a good way. It doesn’t enlarge or improve anybody, least of all the two of them. When Cathy is on her deathbed, Heathcliff sneaks in to see her, and even there she’s not repentant or tender:

  Heathcliff had knelt on one knee to embrace her; he attempted to rise, but she seized his hair, and kept him down.

  “I wish I could hold you,” she continued, bitterly, “till we were both dead! I shouldn’t care what you suffered. I care nothing for your sufferings. Why shouldn’t you suffer? I do! Will you forget me? Will you be happy when I am in the earth?”4

  But they reconcile, sort of. As Nelly Dean watches with stunned detachment,

  an instant they held asunder, and then how they met I hardly saw, but Catherine made a spring, and he caught her, and they were locked in an embrace from which I thought my mistress would never be released alive: in fact, to my eyes, she seemed directly insensible. He flung himself into the nearest seat, and on my approaching hurriedly to ascertain if she had fainted, he gnashed at me, and foamed like a mad dog, and gathered her to him with greedy jealousy.5

  What is that?! And I’m not even going to get into the scene where Heathcliff gets the sexton who’s burying Edgar Linton to let him open Cathy’s coffin in the cemetery. These two have hooks in one another that they use only for torment, in life and afterward. Never have I aspired less to a love than this one, forged in malice and spite. Sure, I found Rochester’s rudeness appealing—but his version of being rude was asking impertinent questions of his governess, or neglecting to disclose the occasional spouse. Happens all the time. Heathcliff’s rudeness is rage-induced callousness built on neglect.

  If I met Wuthering Heights at a cocktail party, I would have literally nothing to say to it. “Sure, Cathy seems great, but what did you really accomplish by spite-marrying your neighbor, Mr. Heathcliff?” “What’s that, Cathy? You’re just too in love with Heathcliff to stop yourself from running shoeless out on the moors and catching a cold? Was this before or after he strangled your puppy just to make a point?” “Ah, Linton. Still no self-respect I see.” Fortunately there wouldn’t be much time for small talk, as the book and its denizens would be busy smashing ceramics and digging up landscaping and drinking everything in sight. It’s the Macbeth, if not the Titus Andronicus, of the Brontë canon—it shows us evil, but teaches us nothing.6 On the other hand, Macbeth and Titus still get produced on stages all over the world. People like a good train wreck, a bar fight, a PR meltdown, a bloodbath. And let’s not overlook the timeline. Emily wrote Heights thirty years after Jane Austen’s death; only thirty years to go from the Netherfield Ball to Heathcliff clutching Cathy’s corpse, howling his agony to the sky. There were still forty years to go before Dracula would make the undead look good!

  In modern literary criticism, Wuthering Heights is often celebrated for the exact same rough-edged quality that early critics found so dismaying; many a feminist booklover admires it for being so daring. Although I find much of Heights extremely unpleasant, I know there is major triumph in the idea that a female protagonist doesn’t have to be “likable” to deserve to be heard, and that an anti-hero is merely a hero who has been very badly treated and takes a while to snap out of it.

  I do enjoy the way Cathy acknowledges that Heathcliff isn’t always a treat to be around—any more than she herself is—but she loves him anyway. It was news to me that such a thing was even possible, devoted as I was then to the idea of a perfect love that never made mistakes or crossed the line from supportive to demanding.

  Virginia Woolf even called Emily Brontë’s gifts “the rarest of all powers,” and dubbed her a greater poet than Charlotte (fighting words!). Woolf said she observed “a struggle, half thwarted but of superb conviction, to say something through the mouths of her characters which is not merely ‘I love’ or ‘I hate,’ but ‘we, the whole human race’ and ‘you, the eternal powers.’”7 I think Woolf is overstating Heights’ lofty ambitions a bit, and even missing the fun of it. There’s a lot more dark humor in Heights than many people recognize—just as Jane Austen was both satirizing and celebrating the Gothic novel in Northanger Abbey, I think Emily Brontë was deliberate in her salaciousness. She was well versed in fiction that kept you coming back to see what horrible thing was about to happen. Why else would she write about a family so dysfunctional that Nelly Dean has to recite the entire saga in flashback to a visiting idiot whose name I can never remember?* Nobody else is qualified or stable enough to contain the narrative! Try to imagine another character whose head you could stand to be in for more than a chapter or two. Heathcliff would leave you homicidal, Cathy would leave you self-absorbed and flighty, poor Isabella probably has wuthering-related PTSD, Edgar Linton would put you to sleep, and Lockwood… well, let’s just say if Bram Stoker got a hold of Lockwood, he’d be eating bugs within an hour.

  The other element that explains the novel’s appeal is her depiction of the moors, which demand to be populated with people as dramatic as they are. The steep hills, the mossy stones, the isolated cottages, the vast unfathomable sky, the constant wind that does nothing so much as “wuther” as it rips over and around the fields. If you go climb Penistone Hill, you can see why she loved it. You can see why she suffered so much after leaving it. You begin to understand the home it provided for her imagination. And maybe that’s the kind of home Wuthering Heights provides for its fans—it gives you a place to be wild and antisocial and uncivilized and stubborn. If that’s what you’re into.

  I’d like to say Heights inspired an out-of-character fling or encouraged me to follow my heart and damn the consequences, but it mostly made me feel like I needed a shower and some vitamin D. However, though I still feel like Wuthering Heights is almost alone among the Brontë literature in having almost nothing to offer by way of life advice,* I respect it, and Emily’s audacity as a writer. If I knew more about her, I know I’d like her better. She didn’t like very many people, and neither do I, but she wasn’t afraid to let them see it, which is a skill I have not yet acquired.

  And you know, if I hadn’t been so wrapped up in hating everything about it at the time, I might have noticed that Wuthering Heights actually serves as a cautionary tale for overzealous attachment to one’s first love. It’s a rare romance that acknowledges enduring love can have a painful tinge to it. Heights might have reminded me to let go when it’s time, or not to hold a grudge, because it can ruin your life.* I do wish I could have filed away the most urgent lesson of Wuthering Heights: be honest with yourself if the person you want to marry is still obviously entangled with someone else. But that lesson would be a long time coming.

  Agnes Grey

  The story of “Agnes Grey” was accused of extravagant over-colouring in those very parts that were carefully copied from the life, with a most scrupulous avoidance of
all exaggeration.

  —Anne Brontë, Preface to Tenant of Wildfell Hall1

  I came to Agnes Grey at something of a low point in my planned meteoric ascendance to fame—or at least rise to bill-paying self-sufficiency. Freshly graduated from college, I moved to New York City, teamed up with roommates, found a temp gig, and applied to every publishing job I could find. And then, after a few months, I actually got one! It was at a test-prep publisher, not a trade house, but I still went into it with starry-eyed expectations. I would be the best, most indispensable editorial assistant the test-prep publishing industry had ever seen. I would be beloved by my bosses. I would skip straight to the competent part of The Devil Wears Prada, minus the makeover. Eventually I’d find a foothold in trade publishing, I consoled myself, and get back on track. I made some significant progress, too—I acquired and edited an anthology inspired by my mom’s experience as a lawyer, developed a few manuscripts, gained experience copywriting, and saw how a small trade program is built. Then I got to see how it’s shuttered and dismantled, piece by piece. In April, I was laid off alongside a handful of colleagues.

  The recession brought a lot of us thumping down to earth again, resolving not to be so misguidedly enthusiastic in the future. I searched for more publishing jobs and applied to administrative positions and assistant positions and clerical positions, but New York was awash in editorial assistants and it turned out precious little of my test-prep experience put me in the running for real trade publishing. I was beginning to contemplate moving home in disgrace when I was offered a place in a New York year-of-service program, which paid a stipend to volunteer coordinators who worked with nonprofit and city programs. I was assigned to an arts education organization where I would write grants, assist in classrooms, and help plan the annual benefit. I gathered the dregs of my idealistic vigor and went into my first day on the job like someone who had never been smacked in the face with the resistance of institutions to change.

  When Charlotte Brontë was lonely and desperate in Brussels, she went to Confession despite her staunch Protestantism. So, despite being baptized and confirmed in the Church of Jane Eyre, when I was lonely and desperate in New York I decided to get to know her sister Anne. I could hardly have chosen a less worldly mentor. Compared to her sisters, we know the least about Anne as a person—though she’s going through a bit of a renaissance at the moment, she isn’t mentioned with the same reverence as Emily and Charlotte. Her work doesn’t receive the same kind of breathless attention. But the more I’ve gotten to know her, the more underrated she has seemed.

  In the biographical notice that Charlotte added to Smith, Elder & Co.’s later editions of Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey, she refers to Emily’s poetry as “condensed and terse, vigorous and genuine”; having “a peculiar music—wild, melancholy, and elevating.” Of Anne’s poetry she says only, “I thought that these verses too had a sweet and sincere pathos of their own.”2 These pages that Anne handed Charlotte, after she’d “rediscovered” Emily’s work, are bound in a small red leather volume at the Morgan Library and Museum, where I visited them one blustery January afternoon. Anne’s handwriting is more assertive than Charlotte’s, I noticed immediately. In addition to figuratively patting Anne’s head with lukewarm praise, Charlotte had excised all traces that Anne’s poetry resided in Gondal. This means that the poems are missing a huge part of their personality—their rooted origins in this vibrant imaginary kingdom! Without the names and places, there’s no way to know Anne was writing in character, just as Emily was. Alongside the dominant personalities of Charlotte, Branwell, and Emily, no wonder Anne was “the quiet one.” Agnes Grey, up against the wildness of Wuthering Heights and the intensity of Jane Eyre, seems even tamer by comparison than it actually is. Truly, it differs from an Austen novel mostly in having a heroine who actually works for her living. I’m very fond of Austen’s wit and her social commentary, and I don’t even have a problem with her repetitive marriage plots—it doesn’t seem like there was much else to do besides play the piano forte, go for walks, and marry off daughters. But the Brontës broke away from those social conventions in their novels—Charlotte by giving Jane Eyre passion, Emily by unraveling the fabric of society, and Anne by telling the truth.

  Anne, like her sisters, had several opportunities to earn a living away from home. She possessed the longest unbroken stretch of schooling (the two years at Miss Wooler’s) and the most work experience. As governesses the Brontës offered instruction in reading, writing, natural sciences, geography, French, and sewing, and were also expected to help with laundry and other household chores. As usual, Anne’s quiet, professional perseverance lasted the longest. Anne spent eight months with the Inghams of Blake Hall in Mirfield and three years with the Robinsons of Thorp Green (where Branwell was also employed as a tutor for a year or so). She found the behavior of her charges appalling, and in some cases their parents even worse. This is actually what makes me like Agnes Grey a little bit better than some of Austen’s work: it lets us in on Agnes’s inner monologue, which reflects, I imagine, Anne’s perspective more directly. Anne was “the help”—she didn’t need to stay a gloved-arm’s-length away from the action. The social circles in which she was a governess were more than just absurd; she knew them to be actively harmful and even dangerous.

  There is something very clear-eyed and pragmatic about Agnes Grey that I respond to. It depicts a capable young woman finding a job, losing it because her employers are horrible, finding another one, persevering despite the difficulties, opening her own business, and doing all this without worrying about her romantic relationship. Agnes Grey also has some strong commentary for the wealthy classes’ treatment of their domestic employees and the horrid behavior of their children. When I came to it, I needed a novel that would reinforce the idea that my purpose in life involved self-sufficiency as much as it did l’amour. I read Agnes Grey in installments on the R train that took me from my apartment in not-quite-Park-Slope to my cramped desk in a minuscule Columbus Circle office.

  Agnes arrived at her first governess post with the Bloomfields just as my position at the arts education nonprofit was beginning to feel thankless and hopeless. She found herself between a rock and a hard place—discipline the bratty, destructive children and find herself dressed down by her employers for not managing them more gently, or let them have their way, get abused by the children, and then be reprimanded by their unreasonable parents for not keeping them in better order. In addition to assistant-teaching in challenging classrooms, I was working with wealthy board members to solicit donations and plan the annual benefit. I had never felt so invisible—the board members ignored me in meetings, berated me over the phone, and talked down to me in emails while cc’ing my boss. The things I loved doing—volunteering in elementary school classrooms in the Bronx and leading an afterschool mosaic program in Harlem—nobody seemed to notice, even when I worked hard and did well. As my ideas were passed over and my projects micromanaged, my enthusiasm for everything except for the art classes waned. And even in those classes, all the flaws of any big city’s public school system were alive and well. Too many students in a class, behavioral issues and no accessible accommodations, hardworking classroom teachers, and aides with inadequate administrative support. Instead of being given more responsibility or independence, I got less and less of either as my year at the nonprofit went on. I thought of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne and their litany of complaints about working in private houses, which would have been tolerable without the pupils, and agreed that nonprofits wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t for their boards.

  Unlike Agnes, I didn’t work resolutely to improve. I dragged my feet. I frittered time in the office. I discovered Twitter. I got yelled at. I slacked off harder. Agnes was lucky enough to be fired by the Bloomfields for refusing to overlook the children’s more egregious lapses in behavior. It all went down before her professionalism and good intentions had a chance to lapse. I had four more months on my contract by the time
I hit bottom.

  Refusing to be discouraged, Agnes set off again, this time to the Murray family at Horton Lodge. The Murrays were based on Anne’s second employers, the Robinsons. She never spoke especially fondly of her charges, but the Robinson girls stayed in contact with her after she left their mother’s employ, and even asked to be invited to visit the Parsonage once.*

  Agnes’s charges at Horton Lodge are considerably older than the Bloomfield children. She meets two young boys, who are sent off to school soon after she arrives; Rosalie, a ringleted marriage-minded beauty of sixteen, who seems borrowed directly from the supporting cast of Sense and Sensibility; and Matilda, a “strapping hoyden” of fourteen, who prefers swearing and running around with horses, dogs, and livestock to any of the more maidenly pursuits. She is one of my favorite Brontë characters. A pre-Victorian tomboy with a foul mouth—finally a Brontë character who could have spoken to my teenage self in her primary language!

  Though they are less vexatious than her previous pupils, Agnes finds the Murrays irritating. They disregard her wishes, her schedule, her physical comfort, and most gallingly, her moral counsel. Agnes’s tenure with the Murrays progresses from months to years, through Rosalie’s coming out into society, Matilda’s profane exultations over her new mare, and assorted shenanigans with local bachelors, until at last something interesting happens—the arrival of a new curate. Mr. Weston sees through (but is courteous to) silly, shallow Rosalie, he is admired by the less fortunate in the village surrounding Horton Lodge, and he becomes a fixation for our Miss Grey. When caught together in a timely rainstorm, Miss Grey and Mr. Weston develop a quiet rapport, so polite and respectful that nobody is sure of anybody’s feelings for an impossibly long time.

  After Rosalie’s marriage to an unpleasant wealthy older man (over which Agnes shrugs: “There are, I suppose, some men as vain, as selfish, and as heartless as she is, and, perhaps, such women may be useful to punish them.”3), Lady Murray’s attentions fall on her younger daughter, my tomboy heroine Matilda. It was time for her to be civilized. No more traipsing through the stables. No more hunting with her dogs. No more swearing. It seemed that maybe a similar transformation was in order for me. Perhaps it was time to actually grow up, to stop slacking off. But rather than changing the way I dressed or acted, or curbing my takeout habits, I still believed the key to transitioning to adulthood was a serious relationship.