Falling in love for the first time is always dangerous, but when you're foolish enough to fall in love with a fictional character you can pretty much be assured it's going to be unrequited. Also, you're not going to be the first or the last, for that matter, to have been involved with this fictional character. He's got a string of women, some of whom have been involved with him for years, rereading him again and again. And in the long run he belongs to his author, heart and soul.

Tonight, I speak for anyone who has ever fallen in love with Heathcliff and survived. Heathcliff is not only the most romantic man in literature, he's the most dysfunctional. There are a lot of men who wouldn't be half as attractive if not for Heathcliff's literary precedent. Some men are interesting only to women who have read Wuthering Heights. Everyone else considers them sociopaths. So, tonight I just wanted to give a short list of men who ought to be most grateful to Heathcliff, and I think you know who you are:
Men who disappear for three years, then come back and expect to find you've waited for them.

Men who wear only black.

Men who marry your sister-in-law and still expect to date you. Men who are more interested in their own pain than they are in you.

Men who'd prefer your tortured spirit to wander for twenty years, because if they can't have you, no one will.

One rainy summer when I was twelve, I did fall in love with Heathcliff and I have never recovered. For a young girl, Wuthering Heights is an extremely radical text. It allows her to see herself in the role of a rescuer. It's the fairy tale reversed: the man who will destroy himself without her help, the man who is trapped in a tower of grief or drink or self-hate. The older the reader, the more Wuthering Heights has to offer. It's the most psychologically complex novel ever written about what women and men want. It offers no easy answers and it gives us a world of conflicting desires where heaven and hell can be the very same place, depending on who you are and what you want.

In my opinion, Wuthering Heights is the Book of Love, but it's also a brilliant cautionary tale. What happens to any woman who falls in love with Heathcliff is right there on the page. She dies of love. She's turned into a ghost. And yet Heathcliff continues to make readers fall in love with him. We're in love with him because of how deeply and how truly we know him. When we fall in love with him, we are falling in love with everything on the page: with the power of fiction, with the idea that a man like Heathcliff can be created by a gorgeous combination of passion and prose. If all people were fashioned by Heathcliff's author, if all were imbued with her consciousness, we would know them as deeply and love them as well. During that summer long ago, when the sky was gray each afternoon, and I could not stop reading, when the words "Nellie, I am Heathcliff,” seemed to stop time itself, I fell in love with Emily Bronte and have never recovered, and quite frankly, I never want to.