The Book That Refuses to Be Ignored
Some novels invite polite discussion. Others demand a response. Henry Oliver's compilation of reactions to Wuthering Heights reveals a literary phenomenon that has baffled, enraged, and captivated critics since 1847. The book's power lies not in universal acclaim but in its ability to force every reader into a position — admiration or revulsion, but never indifference.
Early Revulsion and Moral Outrage
The initial critical reception was overwhelmingly hostile. Oliver documents how early reviewers treated the novel as a moral threat rather than a literary work. An anonymous critic in the Athenaeum wrote in 1847 that "in spite of its truth to life in the remote nooks and corners of England Wuthering Heights is a disagreeable story." The objection was not to craft but to content — the Brontë sisters were accused of dwelling on "painful and exceptional subjects" and "physical acts of cruelty which we know to have their warrant in the real annals of crime and suffering."
Another anonymous reviewer, this time in Graham's Magazine, escalated the rhetoric: "It is a compound of vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors, such as we might suppose a person, inspired by a mixture of brandy and gunpowder, might write for the edification of fifth-rate blackguards." Oliver notes the toasted cheese superstition — "those who eat toasted cheese at night will dream of Lucifer" — deployed as explanation for how any human could produce such work without self-destructing.
"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 it."
Charlotte Brontë herself lamented the misreading. Oliver quotes her 1850 defense: "Critics failed to do them justice. The immature but very real powers revealed in Wuthering Heights were scarcely recognised; its import and nature were misunderstood." She feared the prejudice against the book arose from false claims that it was an inferior attempt by the Jane Eyre author — a "cheat" that made reviewers "look darkly on the cheat."
The Turn Toward Recognition
Not all early voices were condemnatory. Oliver includes the Literary World reviewer who acknowledged "the immense power, of the book, – a rough, shaggy, uncouth power that turns up the dark side of human nature." George Henry Lewes observed the paradox of "two retiring, solitary, consumptive girls" producing work "coarse even for men, coarse in language and coarse in conception."
D.G. Rossetti's 1854 letter captures the ambivalence that would define the novel's reputation: "But it is a fiend of a book, an incredible monster, combining all the stronger female tendencies from Mrs Browning to Mrs Brownrigg. The action is laid in Hell, – only it seems places and people have English names there."
By the late Victorian period, the tone shifted. Algernon Charles Swinburne declared in 1883 that "to the last the changing wind and flying sunlight are in keeping with the stormy promise of the dawn. There is no monotony, there is no repetition, but there is no discord." Virginia Woolf, writing in 1924, located the novel's achievement in its grounding: "we reach these summits of emotion not by rant or rhapsody but by hearing a girl sing old songs to herself as she rocks in the branches of a tree; by watching the moor sheep crop the turf; by listening to the soft wind breathing through the grass."
The Metaphysical Question
Oliver traces how criticism moved from moral judgment to metaphysical interpretation. Lord David Cecil observed in 1934 that Emily Brontë "does away with the most universally accepted of all antitheses—the antithesis between life and death." Her supernatural elements are not decorative but structural — "a natural feature of the world as she sees it."
F.R. Leavis dismissed the novel as "a kind of sport" while acknowledging Emily as "the genius" among the Brontës. Dorothy Van Ghent placed the characters on "some ground of the psychic life where ethical ideas are not at home," comparing them to figures in Chinese paintings animated by "some mysterious, universal, half-divine life which can only be 'recognized,' not understood."
Critics might note that Oliver's compilation itself reveals a pattern: the harshest early judgments came from anonymous reviewers, while named critics — Woolf, Swinburne, Cecil — tended toward appreciation. The anonymity may have permitted moral outrage that individual reputation would have tempered.
Bottom Line
Henry Oliver's anthology demonstrates that Wuthering Heights achieved classic status not through consensus but through its capacity to generate irreconcilable responses. The novel's enduring power lies in its refusal to be categorized — too brutal for moralists, too structured for romantics, too supernatural for realists, yet indispensable to each tradition. A classic that divides is more valuable than one that comforts.