Culture
Book Review: ‘Bright Circle,’ by Randall Fuller
Both she and Lydia Emerson, who married Ralph Waldo, sustained their marriages by compromising their own intellectual talents. Lydia — a staunch abolitionist, committed to the rights of women and animals — came to consider Transcendentalism’s doctrine of self-sufficiency hypocritical, relying as it did on the domestic labor without which these men’s lives of peaceful contemplation would crumble.
The men play minor roles here — perhaps too minor, as it’s sometimes hard to see why these brilliant women found them so alluring. Emerson comes off particularly badly, practically plagiarizing his aunt Mary’s writings, and being shown up by his wife’s far more progressive stance on slavery.
By the early 20th century, Fuller writes, Transcendentalism’s legacy had solidified around its male practitioners, while the women were “reduced to caricatures who stood at the fringes.” Fuller’s avowedly revisionist account assumes a reader more familiar with the men’s work than the women’s.
But, arguably, this is no longer the case. For decades, feminist scholars have worked to reassert the women’s centrality to the movement: See Phyllis Cole’s pioneering work on Mary Moody Emerson, and Megan Marshall’s wonderful biographies of the Peabody sisters and Margaret Fuller (whose writings, in 2025, will receive a Library of America edition, nearly two centuries after she died in a shipwreck, along with the manuscript of her history of the Roman Revolution). The legacy-building was set in motion by Elizabeth Peabody herself, who doggedly transcribed the group’s conversations when Fuller worried that talk was too ephemeral to make a historical impact.
These strident, provocative, eccentric, determined women can no longer justly be left out of any narrative of this movement. Reading about their lives together — and, in particular, the pleasure they found in one another’s examples — makes for a stark indictment of the society that put obstacles in the way of their self-expression.
BRIGHT CIRCLE: Five Remarkable Women in the Age of Transcendentalism | By Randall Fuller | Oxford University Press | 405 pp. | $27.99
Culture
Try This Quiz on Passionate Lines From Popular Literature
Welcome to Literary Quotable Quotes, a quiz that tests your recognition of memorable lines. This week’s installment is all about love, highlighting lines about attraction and relationships from popular novels and short stories published in the late 20th century. In the five multiple-choice questions below, tap or click on the answer you think is correct. After the last question, you’ll find links to the books if you want to experience the entire work in context.
Culture
Video: Farewell, Pocket Books
new video loaded: Farewell, Pocket Books
By Elizabeth A. Harris, Léo Hamelin and Laura Salaberry
February 6, 2026
Culture
Is Emily Brontë’s ‘Wuthering Heights’ Actually the Greatest Love Story of All Time?
Catherine and Heathcliff. Since 1847, when Emily Brontë published her only novel, “Wuthering Heights,” those ill-starred lovers have inflamed the imaginations of generations of readers.
Who are these two? Definitely not the people you meet on vacation. The DNA of “Wuthering Heights,” set in a wild and desolate corner of Northern England, runs through the dark, gothic, obsessive strains of literary romance. Heathcliff, a tormented soul with terrible manners and a worse temper, may be the English novel’s most problematic boyfriend — mad, bad and dangerous to know. What redeems him, at least in the reader’s eyes, is Catherine’s love.
As children growing up in the same highly dysfunctional household, the two form a bond more passionate than siblinghood and purer than lust. (I don’t think a 179-year-old book can be spoiled, but some plot details will be revealed in what follows.) They go on to marry other people, living as neighbors and frenemies without benefits until tragedy inevitably strikes. In the meantime, they roil and seethe — it’s no accident that “wuthering” is a synonym for “stormy” — occasionally erupting into ardent eloquence.
Take this soliloquy delivered by Catherine to Nelly Dean, a patient and observant maidservant who narrates much of the novel:
This all-consuming love, thwarted in the book by circumstances, has flourished beyond its pages. Thanks to Catherine and Heathcliff — and also to the harsh, windswept beauty of the Yorkshire setting — “Wuthering Heights,” a touchstone of Victorian literature, has become a fixture of popular culture.
Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon played Heathcliff and Catherine in William Wyler’s 1939 multi-Oscar-nominated film adaptation.
Since then, the volatile Heathcliff has been embodied by a succession of British brooders: Richard Burton, Ralph Fiennes, Tom Hardy. At least for Gen X, the definitive Catherine will always be Kate Bush, dancing across the English countryside in a bright red dress in an indelible pre-MTV music video.
Now, just in time for Valentine’s Day, we’ll have Emerald Fennell’s new R-rated movie version, with Margot Robbie (recently Barbie) as Catherine and Jacob Elordi (recently Frankenstein’s monster) as Heathcliff.
Is theirs the greatest love story of all time, as the movie’s trailer insists? It might be. For the characters, the love itself overwhelms every other consideration of feeling. For Brontë, the most accomplished poet in a family of formidable novelists, that love is above all a matter of words. The immensity of Catherine and Heathcliff’s passion is measured by the intensity of their language, which of course is also Brontë’s.
Here is Heathcliff, in his hyperbolic fashion, belittling Catherine’s marriage to the pathetic Linton:
Which is what romance lives to do. It’s a genre often proudly unconstrained by what is possible, rational or sane, unafraid to favor sensation over sense or to pose unanswerable questions about the human heart. How could Catherine love a man like Heathcliff? How could he know himself to be worthy of her love?
We’ll never really have the answers, which is why we’ll never stop reading. And why no picture will ever quite match the book’s thousands of feverish, hungry, astonishing words.
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