Reading Wuthering Heights shifted how the speaker understood love, replacing the light Harlequin romances they'd grown up with. The novel's raw anger and obsessive longing exposed a depth of feeling they'd never encountered before, reshaping their view of relationships toward the darker, more complex sides of desire.
I mean, this is definitely a book full of longing, but it's also full of anger. To me, this story and at the time even represents every the way love can really you up in a way that the Harlequin romances were not giving me because I was reading those too early, like I said. And this kind of stuff, this obsessive thing where he burned down his life and the lives of her children like he was awful to them because he was mad. And that kind of stuff doesn't happen in a dime store romance novel back then. So this was an introduction to real literature to me, I think. And an anger that I didn't know. It had a depth. It had a depth and it was an anger I didn't know how to feel or that existed because I'm a little bit light and fluffy in a lot of ways. So this was. I. I really was turned by this because it exposed me to an emotion that I didn't know.
