CATHYYYYY ok we NEED to talk about Cathy!! I have just gotten to the part where she pinched Nelly & slapped Edgar & generally lost her shit. And I have to say she really is my favorite of the gothic 19th century literary heroines 😍. I LOVE that Cathy is generous & wild & loving, but also nasty & self-centered & generally thought of as irredeemable from start to finish. Everyone lauds Charlotte for writing a female protagonist who has an authentic, rich interior world / personality etc. in Jane Eyre and that's great. But to write a girl who is fully ✨unlikeable✨ & offering no apology for it? In THAT ERA? The feminist in me is howling with glee!

Ok, I suppose this is an unpopular opinion:

I do think this book is, in part, a love story. Terrible, awful, abusive people can still experience love. It is one of the messy truths of the human experience, I fear. Just bc the lovers in question are fantastically horrific to each other and others doesn’t mean they didn’t have a love story. They did. But there’s a reason why we call it a “compelling but toxic af love story the likes of which I hope never finds me,” and NOT “the greatest love story of all time” or whatever. We certainly don’t classify it as a romance by today’s genre standards. Love story, yes. Romance by modern definitions, no.

I know a lot of folks will disagree with me and that’s okay!

(These musings brought to you by me reading about Cathy & Heathcliff running wild across the moors as children & becoming devoted to each other more and more over time 🫶🏽)

What do you do when you enjoyed a book that gets pretty low and harsh reviews?

Sometimes I feel bad that I wasn’t reading (and thinking) as critically as I could have when tons of reviews come out with lots of valid and thought-provoking critiques on a book that I somehow completely missed with my experience of it.