The Magnanimity of Wuthering Heights by Joyce Carol Oates

once upon a time, it seems, an English clergyman born Brunty or Branty, self-baptized the more romantic Bronte, brought home to his four children a box of twelve wooden soldiers. The children lived in isolation in a parsonage high on the Yorkshire moors, which is to say, at the edge of the world; each was possessed of an extraordinarily fecund imagination; the wooden soldiers soon acquired life and identities (among them the Duke of Wellington …

…given a sort of sickly, fevered radiance by way of the "narrowness" of Emily Bronte's imagination, Wuthering Heights can be more accurately be seen as a work of mature and astonishing magnitude. The poetic and the "prosaic" are in exquisite harmony; the metaphysical is balanced by the physical. An anomaly, a sport, a freak in its own time, it can be seen by us, in ours, as brilliantly of that time--and contemporaneous with our own.