AQA (A): Paper 1 Love through the ages
The structure of Wuthering Heights was one of the features that first caught the attention of the novel’s earliest readers. Or, to be more precise, it was its apparent lack of effective structure that seemed to trouble the reviewers. In January 1848, the Examiner described the novel as ‘confused, disjointed, and improbable’ and complained that ‘[i]t is not easy to disentangle the incidents and set them forth in chronological order’. Even the novel’s admirers tended to mention its supposed structural ‘flaws’ but accounted for them by seeing them as an aspect of the ‘wild’, untamed power of its naive, inspired, Romantic creator. The Britannia’s January 1848 review describes the novel as ‘so rude, so unfinished and so careless’, suggesting that its author is at this stage ‘a rough hewer of marble’ but has the potential to ‘become a great and noble sculptor’ (Brontë 2019, p. 282).
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