The Bronte sisters - don't you just love them

Terry Eagleton writes of the Brontes: Partly to keep this oppressive world at bay, as well as to compensate for its harshness, the sisters reached back in their fiction to Gothic romance and fairy tale, whose magical devices could be used to unpick problems that resisted realist solutions. If you can’t get Jane back to Rochester in a convincing way, you can always have her hear his plaintive cry on the wind. And if mad Bertha stands in the way of their union, you can topple her from the burning rooftop in an agreeably sadistic Gothic cameo. The rage that makes a character take a poker to a child is also released to maim, blind and disfigure Rochester, who has dared to tempt Jane into a social and moral wilderness. But the disfiguring also evens up the power balance between the two, and even puts the heroine on top. Charlotte’s novels are adept at having things both ways, allowing her heroines to fulfil their desire but to do so on socially acceptable terms. Wuthering Heights, by contrast, is a tragedy (one of the astonishingly few tragic novels in England between Richardson and Hardy) because no such reconciliation is possible.