Wuthering Heights

Wuthering Heights by Maggie Berg
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book gave me a lot of insight into Wuthering Heights' enduring status as a classic. I think the reason I disliked Wuthering Heights so violently was because I'd always heard it was a love story & that isn't the case at all. Heathcliff is pretty much a psycho and Catherine is a drama queen. Both are definitely narcissistic. Passionate, yes, but still damaged goods (I mean seriously, who'd dig up the corpse of their beloved - twice?). I liked this analysis of the book because it discussed the fact that all the action in the book is interpreted through at least one filter (Lockwood) and mostly through 2 - Lockwood telling us what Nelly told him what she observed and what the other characters told her. I can appreciate the unreliable narrator aspect and I think I can more fully appreciate the text - even though I still find it disturbing.

I would definitely recommend the book - with the caveat that I think the readers should read something else *about* the book also (doesn't have to be this particular work of criticism). I definitely got a lot more out of it that way.

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A Room of One's Own: Women Writers and the Politics of Creativity

After reading A Room of One's Own, I wanted to delve a little further into how the text came to be and how it's influenced both the women's movement as well as late-20th Century literary criticism. This book by Ellen B. Rosenman is well-written for the educated reader interested in exploring Woolf's essay. Though a literary study/critique, the book does not use a lot of jargon and is easy to follow. For more serious readers, Room of One's Own: Women Writers and the Politics of Creativity will only be a point of departure from which to dig deeper into other critical essays. While not a waste of time, it may not have the depth in each category to keep an academic reader satisfied.

Recommended only for those wishing to find out more about Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own (who have already read that book).