Someone at The Guardian feels similarly:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jul/21/emily-bronte-strange-cult-wuthering-heights-romantic-novel
That is one of the weirdest takedowns I've ever read. So the writer hates
Wuthering Heights. Fine, I completely get that. It's not everybody's cup of tea and it's not easy reading. But her reasons for insisting that Emily Brontë herself was a terrible person:
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She insisted that her music students take their lessons after school, cutting into their playtime. And she did it "to suit herself" so she could study earlier in the day. Wow -- practically child abuse! I took my piano lessons after school and did not even realize I should have called child protection.
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Her clothes were "deeply unfashionable." Whoa -- another major strike against Emily Brontë.
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She was "testy" with her sisters. OMG. Who can imagine anyone ever being less than pleasant with their siblings!
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Her real life does not exactly fit the way it has been portrayed elsewhere. I don't know enough about it to judge the truth of that, but how is it a fault of hers that others have misrepresented her life? My impression is that all the Brontë siblings lived a fairly isolated life, but were all unusually bright and imaginative, so as small children they made up their own elaborately detailed country and eventually turned to writing, two of them turning out timeless classics of English literature.
But here's what I thought was the weirdest part of all:
And to offset her lack of income, she became an expert financial investor, studying newspapers to ensure that the family’s modest savings were placed in the best-performing railway stocks. She was cannily alert, too, to the way that the literary market worked. When the Brontës’ first book, a joint collection of poetry, sold only a handful of copies, she was quick to turn to the much more profitable genre of fiction.
... The family at the parsonage enjoyed no such financial elasticity, which makes Brontë’s insistence on the right to abandon her economic obligations all the more audacious. There is a certain topsy-turvy irony too in the fact that, unlike Nightingale and Barrett, Brontë was actually pretty sick. Yet she refused to use her rackety health as an excuse, instead throwing herself into strenuous physical domestic labour.She apparently did make money with investments and worked hard to do the same by writing a novel (the exact reason Louisa May Alcott wrote
Little Women, BTW). Yet she's also a useless deadbeat because she didn't take an unpleasant job as a governess. And the fact that she was very sick is no excuse to live at home, nor does her ignoring health problems to perform strenuous domestic labor count for anything.
She even leaps to the conclusion that Brontë -- a woman living in the early 1800s who taught herself to be an expert investor, wrote a book that was considered shockingly unfeminine, who disliked the limited work opportunities available for women in that time, was strong-willed enough to arrange her life so she could write a masterpiece -- would definitely hate feminism. Yet this writer, who presumably considers herself a great feminist, I guess, considers it perfectly valid to snark about another woman for dressing unfashionably. Umm ... OK?
That's probably the weirdest collection of reasons for disliking a person I've ever seen.
I once had a copy of
Wuthering Heights -- and may still, though I'm not sure where I put it -- that included Charlotte's piece defending it, which seemed at the time i read it (I was 10 or 11) unnecessary but I guess, as I said, the book was seen as shocking in some almost immoral way. There's no sex, very little violence, but her characters are rough around the edges and emotional, I guess. By today's standards, needless to say, it's nothing.
Also, the professors were both men and women, contrary to the writer's insistence that the only people who like WH are women (a curious criticism from somebody who implies she's a feminist, but whatever). Many male professors do have incredibly male-skewed literary tastes, but WH often makes the cut even in those. Maybe for the reasons readers in the 1830s were shocked by it?
I will agree with the takedown writer that it's weird so many characters have the same names. I think maybe Emily had some subtle metaphorical reason for that -- I've probably seen one explained at some point -- but I agree that it unnecessarily complicates things without adding much.