eply felt and deeply unconventional. This assumption alone transgresses the traditional placing of a woman in nineteenth- and even twentieth-century society.
Most readers, as Stoneman notes, "make sense of what they read only by invoking a combination of socially pervasive myths" (521). But, while the truly transgressive nature of nature of Wuthering Heights has been the focus of criticism since the book was published, few readers seem to have taken Emily BrontF's transgressive intentions seriously. Catherine Earnshaw is a character of great complexity whose nature has been read in the light of her author's life and the difficulty of understanding her character (and others) has meant that a great number of critics have approached this work "with the aid of psychological theory" (Levy 158). What Catherine says and does in the novel often seem to be taken as the echoes of a confused sensibility in a selfish individual whose egotism is a function of her failure to mature in many ways. As Nestor notes, critics have begun to hold that there can be, of course, "a multiplicity of readings" of the novel and that complex "works of art like Wuthering Heights [demand] an openness or 'patience' of interpretation [that] forms a measure of greatness" (ix). Any reading of BrontF's great novel is, like others before it, a contribution to a critical flow that will never end in a single, frozen interpretation. But some readings approach the essential qualities of the book that render it a masterpiece and offer a vivid challenge to the reader and her/his preconceptions.
Even while setting aside biographical interpretation, the facts of the BrontFs lives are still important as a preliminary to understanding Charlotte's influence on Emily's reputation. Aside from a few impressions of Emily provided by Charlotte, by the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell (who was Charlotte's biographer), and the remarks of their Belgian principal, M. Heger about Emil...