One of my beefs with Meyer is that she seems to pick some of the most shallow readings of the works she chooses to reference. *Romeo and Juliet* and *Wuthering Heights* are reduced to mere love stories with no other content. Where’s the family drama? The social or generational conflict? The class consciousness? I also am not crazy about the idea of *Jane Eyre*, or *Pride and Prejudice* being read as only, or primarily, love stories. Where’s Jane’s moral fiber? Her self-sufficiency? How can you skim right over a moment like the one in which, worried that if she does not agree to being Rochester’s mistress, he will destroy himself, and anyway, “who cares for you?” and her response “I care for myself,” adding that her ethical and religious commitments trump “love conquers all.”

Arabella Figg, I do hope you will give *Jane Eyre* another chance and try looking at it as about Jane’s personal and spiritual growth. She goes from a girl who says she would let someone break her arm if only they would love her, to a young woman who determines to be self-supporting, with strong moral values. She even is able to look back at some of the more miserable experiences of her life, such as the extreme deprivation at Lowood School, as something that has formed her character. It’s not really about Rochester, though Jean Rhys’ *The Wide Sargasso Sea* is an interesting counterpoint, written from the point of view of Bertha.

And as someone brought up in a largely Jewish town with a fairly high number of people who had lost family in the Holocaust, I was very surprised to see an old-fashioned reading of *Merchant of Venice* as being about “justice.” A shallow Venetians = good, Shylock = bad reading is really reactionary at this point, and, to me, very disturbing. Also, Christine should have stuck with the Phantom? Devil’s Island Erik? Shudder. They need to see the Lon Chaney Sr. version.

ROTFL. That’s beautiful! Nice pun, too.

Of course this is sending Wuthering Heights to the top of the classics chart. I don’t think everyone will find it as romantic as Bella did–I’m not expecting to (I put it on the requests list for one of my book clubs, so we’ll read it within the next few months.) Reading the classics is a good thing, however, even when said classics are painful to get through. Although I still think Tess of the D’Urbervilles is an awful book.

The American cover for Wuthering Heights is particularly lovely. For whatever it’s worth, all these covers–starting with the Twilight ones–remind me of some of the imagery in the 2004 Phantom of the Opera movie. [Hmm. I bet Bella and Edward really appealed to all those girls who saw that movie and thought Christine should have stuck with the (Gerard Butler) Phantom.]