Before actually reading it I'd gotten it into my head at some point that this was a romance novel, and it is, but only in a cautionary sense. Brontë believes in an ethereal 'true' love but as a wicked force so consuming that it cannot be contained by the flesh and blood of its victims. A sickly magma oozing out from within them, breathlessly and mercilessly disfiguring everything it comes in contact with, only for the lovers to discover the closest space and soonest time to their world-ending power is each other, right now.

Through its pair of narrators, the book exposits in obfuscated, shallow and biased ways that force the reader to engage in far richer character analysis themselves. Mr Lockwood, in the opening hoky rich guy comedy of manners (a total tonal coup that pays off in droves with the miserablism odyssey that follows), completely fails to observe as to why Heathcliff or young Catherine are 'rude,' so the job then rests on us to unfurl their personalities over the remainder of the page count. Lockwood is especially interesting, a pseudo-audience surrogate who eventually attempts a kind of idealised self-insert into his own misbegotten reading of the story, only to discover the same thing anyone who ever fantasised about living inside a romance would quickly find. There is nothing glamorous when confronting these people face to face and life is cruel, and random, and does not in any way structure itself around what is most clawingly beautiful. Perhaps everything is futile anyway, Heathcliff, for the shadow he casts over the entire story, never actually 'gets the girl' and leaves the wealth he's fucked people over so callously for to the offspring of the person he sought revenge on. But perhaps not, for even when held by a man as heinous as he, the love persists forever. Aww. Isn't that nice?

Spellbinding semicolons.