Karly

I didn’t start Wuthering Heights because I woke up on Friday with a sudden, morally upright desire to immerse myself in nineteenth-century fiction. I started it because I kept seeing people slandering Emerald Fennell’s adaptation and I realised, with a level of indignation that was honestly disproportionate, that I could not participate in the discourse without having properly read the source material, and I absolutely refuse to have academic FOMO.

There is something deeply humiliating about being excluded from an argument about a book you technically own but have never truly committed to, so I opened it with the righteous energy of someone determined to form her own opinion about Heathcliff before any cinematic interpretation could get there first.

And my most immediate, completely sincere takeaway from the first chapters was this:

Dogs.

Not because I’m incapable of recognising narrative structure or social tension or the early signs of inherited cruelty, but because it’s been a while since I read something that wasn’t a poem or a memoir, and my brain apparently needed to reacquaint itself with the fact that long nineteenth-century novels contain wind, property, livestock, emotionally unstable men, and an alarming number of aggressively present dogs. Lockwood being essentially assaulted by animals felt so vivid and physical that my mind latched onto it instinctively, almost gratefully, because cataloguing dogs is easier than immediately tracking layered narration and simmering class resentment.

The structure doesn’t ease you in, and I think that’s what unsettled me. We begin with Lockwood, who is both observant and faintly ridiculous, narrating a space he doesn’t understand, and just as you begin to settle into his voice the novel hands you to Nelly and slides backward in time without apology. Suddenly, you’re juggling perspectives, timelines, children who will grow into adults with the same names, and emotional dynamics that are already charged long before they’re explained. It requires a steadiness of attention that isn’t decorative but foundational.

And here’s where it gets embarrassing.

When Nelly’s perspective properly began, I had to physically write her name in the margin with a pencil.

Not because I didn’t understand the shift, I did. But because I could feel my concentration wobbling, and I didn’t trust myself to hold the thread unaided. I needed graphite confirmation that I knew who was speaking. I needed to anchor the narrative in the most literal way possible because my brain, which has recently been very comfortable consuming poetry in concentrated doses and memoir in single-voice arcs, has not been doing the kind of sustained multi-layered tracking that Victorian fiction assumes as baseline competence.

It’s not that I can’t read it. It’s that I’ve grown used to reading in lyric mode.

Poetry lets you zoom in, savour an image, live inside a line break. Memoir lets you follow one consciousness across memory and confession. But a novel like this demands endurance. It expects you to hold multiple voices in your head at once, to recognise that dialect encodes class and that narrative mediation shapes moral perception, and to do all of that without rewarding you every thirty seconds with spectacle.

Which brings me to the other thing I didn’t expect: how often I felt the urge to interrupt myself.

Not with generic phone scrolling, but with something very specific and very incriminating. At least twice during the first five chapters I felt the pull to check a Bridgerton edit, to momentarily replace wind and resentment with slow-motion longing set to pop music. It wasn’t boredom. It was the discomfort of narrative that refuses to compete for you. I’ve gotten used to stories that announce themselves, that glitter a little, that move quickly enough to prevent doubt.

Wuthering Heights doesn’t really glitter, it broods.

And once I stopped resisting that, something shifted. Around chapter seven or eight, the rhythm settled into me rather than against me. Nelly’s voice stopped feeling like a complication and started feeling like texture. The dogs receded from being my primary focal point and became what they probably always were, extensions of the house’s hostility and territorial energy rather than narrative distractions.

The initial friction wasn’t about difficulty, which Chels had already warned me about, it was about patience, which I famously don’t have much of.

Reading nine chapters in three days shouldn’t feel like rehabilitation, and yet it does in the quietest, most modern way. Not because the novel is inaccessible, but because I’ve grown accustomed to partial presence. I’ve been reading beautifully, intensely, but in fragments. I’ve been consuming stories that resolve quickly. This one waits and assumes you’ll stay long enough for the architecture to reveal itself.

I started on Friday because I didn’t want FOMO about an adaptation.

I’m on chapter nine now, pencil annotations and all, and I’m realising that the real bootcamp isn’t about proving I can understand Emily Brontë. It’s about proving to myself that I can still sit with something that doesn’t rush to reward me, that I can resist the glitter long enough to let the wind do its work.

And yes, there are still a lot of dogs.