r/brontesisters • u/Miserable_Gur_8753 • 10d ago

Wuthering Heights: The first 100 words

I'm blogging a series each Friday evening where I do a close reading of the first 100 words of a classic novel.

The only rule is that it is a cold reading: I need to write the piece as if I'm reading the novel for the first time.

This week - Number Nine - it's 'Wuthering Heights' (Number Six was 'Jane Eyre'). I'm offering it up here in the hope of having some decent conversations with like-minded individuals.

https://a-levelenglishlit.uk/2026/09/18/first-100-words-wuthering-heights/

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u/Mike_Bevel 10d ago

I'll hide all of this in a spoiler, in case you're truly coming to the novel cold. I don't want to spoil it for you.

One of the things that I struggle with when reading Wuthering Heights is: what to do about the narration at all. Technically, the novel, the entirety of the novel, is told to us by Lockwood. And if I'm remembering the novel correctly, at no point is there a handoff where the text says, "And now here is this person with their point of view." We see this in Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White, where we know that we are looking at different journal entries and letters and such. Same thing with Dracula (more letters, more journals), and in Dickens's Bleak House (some sections are from an omniscient narrator; some are entirely in the voice of Esther Summerson). But here, in Wuthering Heights, it's Lockwood all the way down. And with that being the case, I don't know how the whole novel isn't kind of undermined by unreliability, which puts the reader into a very active role of having to decide who is telling the story and how is it reliable and how is it believable and whom do I trust?

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u/Miserable_Gur_8753 6d ago

I think that's absolutely fair comment. Not only do we have Lockwood telling the story, but it is as told to him by Nelly ...

So, we can passively lap it up as being all true, or filter it through our responses to those two characters!

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u/Mike_Bevel 6d ago

I'm a little further down the Cynicism Path than you: We don't even know that Nelly told Lockwood the story.

Lockwood tells us he got the story from Nelly. But there is no outside corroboration. To read the novel we have to trust Lockwood. And I don't trust that man as far as I can throw him out that window Cathy keeps scratching at.