Jane Eyre vs Wuthering Hights

I have read every novel that Storm Constantine has ever written, I also read Anne McCaffrey, Poppy Z. Bryte, Freda Warrington, Jane Austen and Trudy Canavan. 

Unlike Jane Austen, the Bronte's wrote 19th Century Chick Lit.

Having high school students read the Brontes and Shakespeare is just wrong. It frankly took me a long time to enjoy Shakespeare and Jane Eyre; it took a brilliant professor to show me how and why, for example, Hamlet is important and can be enjoyed and appreciated. If an alien arrives and you give him, say, "The Tempest" to read, it'll be worthless to him/her, without the proper keys to unlocking it (e.g. historical and cultural knowledge, literary conventions, and all the delicious ambiguities and subversive elements embedded underneath the surface of the text). As the saying goes, Joyce didn't just write novels, he had to teach people how to read them as well. I don't know how it is for other people, but I had to learn how to appreciate and enjoy literary works from other epochs... (As a socialist, I guess I should appreciate Dickens more, lol.)

 

To be fair, I understood Jane Eyre perfectly, just I wasn't really a fan of it.

Wuthering Heights left my utterly dazed and confused, for starters, and on top of it I didn't like it all (granted not knowing what was going on doesn't help). My teacher at the time wasn't really helpful...I remember asking "What is this?" in better words, and asking for help on understanding and I just never got it. Soooo yeah, kinda just gave up on it.

 

I purposely never looked up any analysis or even what it was about because I wanted to give it a try again, since others have said they didn't care for it when young but appreciated it later. ....Well, I have been wanting some new things to read. Never thought I'd touch WH again

 

Never been a great fan of these works, and probably way too sentimental and whiney for my tastes.

 

I got into the history of horror in literature, going as far back as Horace Walpole and Ann Ratcliff, and took it all the way to Anne Rice, and in general, the material that was written between 1750 and 1800 in the Gothic genre, were far superior than the Bronte's and their over the top stuff that movies love to suck on!

 

I still think that Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the one and only original, is one of the best novels ever written! And that includes its subtle meanings, instead of telling us that over-wrought emotions are more important to you, than the realities behind it all!

 

For that matter, even the Marquis de Sade is a better writer, and more entertaining and "real" than any of hte Bronte's ever will! I'm just tired of that over bearing English upper class snobbery thing in literature!