Has anyone’s view of a favourite book changed on rereading? Just reread Wuthering Heights

[Duchessofmuchness]

I’ve just finished re reading Wuthering Heights. When I read it at 20 i remember I couldn’t put it down. Read long into the night and cried. (proper uncontrollable sobbing) reading the ending. I would always say was one of books had loved reading most.

This time around (reading 40 years later) I dragged myself through it I couldn’t bring myself to like any of the characters- except the loyal Ellen and Hareton. I felt empathy for Catherine and Cathy - young and impulsive.

I suppose I must have been crying because Heathcliff is determined and happy that he will be reunited with Catherine but I didn’t feel it way I felt at 20. This time I felt such strong dislike for Heathcliff and his anger and control and sorry for the lack of agency Catherine and Cathy have.

I’m actually amazed how differently it hit me this time. Be so interested in whether anyone else has experienced this. Was it just age or also that times have changed?

Not a classic but my favourite and very popular author in the 90s - Erich Segal. I asked for his newly published book Prizes as a prize for doing well in my A levels. Tried rereading it recently and actually threw it across the room. The misogyny and white male privilege was sickening!

Another one who always hated WH, utterly ridiculous book.

I do think it's a good thing to re read though. Andrew Marr wrote an article about re reading all the classics he read studying English at university, and how growing older changes your perspective, and I have found it quite an interesting exercise too. I do feel I'm getting a lot more out of writers like Elizabeth Bowen, Rosamund Lehmann and Jean Rhys than when I read them 40 odd years ago

Nelly Dean is usually seen as one of the earliest and most sophisticated uses of the unreliable narrator. The narrative (recounted to Lockwood) is full of omissions, prejudices, self justifications and obfuscation. You’re left questioning the ‘truth’ of anything she tells Lockwood (who is himself unreliable and who admits to condensing things he was told.)

Also WH for me.

Other ones: Flowers in the Attic as per a PP -- actually found it really a sad read about abuse. That mostly passed me by as a teen.

And more recently: Handmaid's Tale. I read it in my 20s and loved it; on re-reading I found so much about motherhood I simply hadn't seen in it before.

Jane Eyre, also as PP -- OMG Rochester. Freak.

I've never liked WH but I loved Jane Eyre as a teenager. My opinion of JE changed a lot as I grew older and 'saw through' Rochester, and the (in my opinion) poor structure of the novel then jarred, and the over-reliance on coincidence as a plot device. I still like it, but more now for its brooding atmosphere and description than its plot and characters.

I loved The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe and the rest of the books with a passion when I was a preteen. When I revisited them as an adult I found them unreadable. So sad

I was the same with Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre - I think I was actually angry with myself (and the characters) for rereading them. One that didn't let me down was Persuasion, I loved it even more.

Persuasion is an absolute beauty and completely underrated. There's just such an authenticity about it and lack of pretention or trying too hard to make it funny.

I do actually think that Rochester in JE is worse than any of the characters in WH. He's compeltely calculating in what he does and there appears to be no reason for his behaviour except boredom and selfishness. Even the gypsy scene shows him to be cruel, not a great laugh or unconventional, but that one I did fall hook, line and sinker for as a teen 🙄

Catcher in the rye. Loved it as an angst ridden pretentious teenager. Reread it as an adult and realised it’s actually a pile of self indulgent pish. Lol.

I didn’t read it until I was 50 but I loved it for what it was.
a gothic novel of pain suffering jealously and betrayal. Brilliant.

watched the film recently and an absolute pile of shiiit

Oh, yes - me too. Re-reading as an adult, Holden came over as spoilt more than anything else. I wouldn't say the novel had been a favourite in my teens, but I saw it as meaningful and Holden as sympathetic, which I no longer did when I was better acquainted with real life.

I read Brave New World a couple of times as a teenager, and didn't really understand what was meant to be so dystopian about a world where everyone was happy and there was no suffering. I tried to read it again recently and found it so bleak and depressing I couldn't finish it.

I agree - I'm sure there are a couple of other classics written by women where I read the heroine as a bit too uptight/priggish to love in the way I wanted to - but would now be standing up to applaud. Villette might be one? It's been a long time..

Oh also Middlemarch. But I may be entirely misremembering both. I have really bad ADHD so about a week after finishing a book all that's left for me is a vibe, a few crucial scenes, and the barest plot.

@DisrobeDatrobe Agreed re JE - I was already an angry feminist when I read it the first couple of times I was beginning to understand ideology - so while I loved it, I read the fact that has to be effectively disabled in order for it to be acceptable for Jane to live as the epitome of liberalism. So much grist to my student mill! But when I re-read it recently for DD's gcse all I could see was the outrageously rambling and ridiculous structure! Fuck off St John ;-)

Getting much more out of Jane Austen than when first read as a late teen. Northanger Abbey was great her description of a bad date with a twat was actually genuinely funny.

Jane Eyre for me: what a dreadful role model for teenage girls, the narrative that good women rescue awful men

That supposedly romantic ideal has a lot to answer for!

So many. Jilly Cooper - many many “well that didn’t age well” moments now but adored (and still adore) them. Flowers in the attic series - agree with the previous poster. Loved them but now couldn’t read them. In terms of classics I would probably struggle to read them now as too much scrolling means I have the attention span of a gnat. But remembering them I think it is right that I would read them differently now and take different things away from them. The persuasion comments are interesting as it was probably my least favourite Jane Austen - maybe I should try that again. Also sense and sensibility - I used to find Marianne so dramatic and interesting but perhaps now I would find it a bit more annoying. Lord of the rings is my hill to die on though - gets better with age!

I was obsessed with the Brontes as a teenager and young woman. Read all their books, all the poems and biographies, visited Haworth several times and roamed the moors. Laurence Olivier was the best Heathcliff.
Now I'm old I agree what a dreadful set of people! But Emily was only in her twenties when she wrote it, and it's a culmination of all the things she wrote as a child from her imaginary kingdom. I can u derstand why she wrote as she did. And the Brontë men all seem to based on the Byronic heroes, who are all dark and brooding with awful secrets, which I devoured with equal passion.
everything of it's time I guess.

Well, yes, exactly. WH is essentially a story from Emily and Anne’s imaginary country, Gondal, but set in Yorkshire and with the fancy names replaced with notionally ordinary ones. Criticising it on grounds of realism, or the characters not being terribly nice, like saying the same of, I don’t know, Game of Thrones. Gondal, insofar as we understand it (because none of the prose survived, only the poems EB and AB wrote from the POV of its characters) was full of vengeful queens, illicit loves, wars, violence, betrayals, torment, deaths, Byronic heroes and heroines etc etc.

It fascinates me that EB was writing it, and reading it out loud nightly, as the three of them walked round and round the front room table in the parsonage talking about their work, while the other two were writing the strictly realistic The Professor and Agnes Grey.

It would have been fascinating to eavesdrop on those conversations, Slightlyajar! And all those little books with the Gondal and Angria stories, mostly gone, destroyed I think either by Emily herself, or Charlotte and Arthur, such a loss. I love her poems.

Yes! Though one of my favourite teenage fantasies was discovering the lost MS of Emily’s second novel!

We know it existed from a letter from Thomas Cautley Newby to her referring to her working on something new, so presumably either she destroyed it herself when she knew she wouldn’t live to finish it, or Charlotte destroyed it after her death, concerned for her reputation if it was even ‘coarser’ than WH.

I loved the Little House on the Prairie books as a child and reread them during Covid. What stayed with me was the racism… the white mans right to the land and the almost irrelevance of the Indians. Although there was one time when a scary Indian turned out to be good I think (sorry a bit hazy). As a child to my shame I thought Indian = bad. This was the 70s. Also Laura’s husband Almanzo sounded pretty exotic but on rereading, he was a bit feckless and a poor business man. I also think she may have had difficulties having children. But that’s not entirely clear.

Exactly the same here - didn't read it until well into middle age and was left wondering what all the fuss was about - really unlikeable characters.

It's interesting how well Austen comes out of rereading, compared to the Brontes. I think it's partly because she is more realistic about human beings, and doesn't try to make her characters too faultless and heroic: Both Lizzie and Darcy, for instance, clearly have faults, which makes it much more of a partnership of equals when they accept they've been twats.

Similar to others on here - I read WH as a teenager and thought it was a lovely, sad romance and then read it again in my 50s and thought it was an awful tale of abuse with virtually no likeable characters.

Interestingly, my DD read it at 19, and her view was the same as mine now. I wonder if this is individual to her, or indicative of a generational change - that young people are more aware of abusive relationships?

I think that's the case with P&P. You feel that Darcy and Elizabeth have both matured and that their marriage is one of equals who have truly got to know each other.

Persuasion on the other hand ... <I deleted what I wrote as a spoiler but I think the relationship is less well explored>