Heathcliff deserves a book of his own without nasty Catherine and her terrible family.

Yesss! Unhearing a voice is almost impossible — I feel the same way about TV and movie adaptations. If I’ve seen a movie first that’s how I picture things in a book.

Sometimes it’s a good thing though — I listened to the audio of Anansi Boys and Lenny Henry was so brilliant, I always imagine his voice when I reread the book, which is one of my favorites. I always picture Fat Charlie as looking like Lenny.

The whole thing was like that girl in the window for me! Promise undelivered, dead ends. And believe it or not, I was considering doing a sort of “give it a second chance” reading project. Wuthering Heights was going to top the list. I would say you have spared me the pain, but I may still bite the bullet.

I was very surprised at what Anne has her protagonist get away with… the romantic part is strictly lite Harlequin but I think you’d enjoy Helen Graham. She is pretty badass.

Hard to say. It won’t ruin Jane for you (says the devoted Jane fan – isn’t she awesome?). Where you might end up on the ‘Kind of glad a house fell on Rochester’ scale is harder to predict.

I still like him for Jane, because Jane should have everything she wants all the time and I think she corrals Rochester into an equal partnership through her strength of will. But now whenever he is doing something off the wall in the book (dressing as a gypsy, lying to Jane…) I am less inclined to be tolerant of his actions. So he is no longer my perfect romantic lead (Captain Wentworth forever now then), but I don’t spend the whole book wishing they didn’t end up together. And I’m still very pleased by the ending.

Besides if I ever do get a bit too annoyed at him I just think about the satisfying ending to ‘South Riding’ which seems to me to be yet another Jane Eyre riffing book (based on what I saw of the recent BBC series). The dodgy man who is supposedly the hero gets his well deserved death and the mad woman gets to go back to her house. That’s one of the great things about JE being such a well loved classic I guess, everyone is riffing on it so you get multiple alternate universe versions of it.

Have you read Villette? It’s totally different from Jane Eyre and kind of strange; it takes some getting used to, but it pays off.