Emily Brontë's "Wuthering Heights"

First published in 1847, Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights is set on the bleak Yorkshire moors, where the drama of Catherine and Heathcliff, Heathcliff's cruel revenge against Edgar and Isabella Linton, and the promise of redemption through the next generation, is enacted.

Patsy Stoneman, a leading authority on the nineteenth-century novel, applied the "Page 99 Test" to Brontë's classic novel and reported the following:

I used the Oxford World’s Classics edition, in which p. 99 is in the middle of Vol. 1 Ch. 10. It begins in the middle of a speech by ‘Mrs Linton’, who is identified as ‘Catherine’ later on the page. She is telling Nelly, who is also the narrator of the story, that Heathcliff has returned to Wuthering Heights. I am sure that after reading just this page, I would want to read on. These are my reasons:

• The situation is very intriguing. Mrs Linton/Catherine has quarrelled with her husband (whom she refers to as ‘that creature’) over the return of Heathcliff, to whom she is very much attached – so much so that his absence caused her ‘agony’ and his return means that she is ‘reconciled to God and humanity’. To complicate the situation, Heathcliff has come back to live at Wuthering Heights with Catherine’s brother, Hindley, who is described as ‘his ancient persecutor’. Heathcliff’s motive in returning is thus divided between a desire to be near Catherine and his desire for revenge on Hindley. Heathcliff, the beloved of Catherine, is thus an enemy of both Hindley and Mr Linton, and they are all to live in close proximity. The page ends with Catherine setting off to visit Heathcliff at Wuthering Heights, which promises a very exciting encounter.
• Catherine’s words are very forthright: she speaks of her brother’s ‘covetousness’ and ‘greed’ and her own ‘angry rebellion against providence’. She exhibits extremes of reaction, from ‘Oh, I’ve endured very, very bitter misery’ to ‘Good night – I’m an angel!’. One oddity is that she blames her husband for his ‘petulance’ over Heathcliff and seems confident that she can make their peculiar relationship work, but her heightened language suggests that the drama will be an emotional firework display.
• Nelly, the narrator, chooses a very different kind of language, cautious and foresightful, providing a great contrast to Catherine. When Nelly speaks of ‘fear of consequences’ from Heathcliff’s return, and describes Catherine’s angelic reformation as ‘self-complacent’, we sense a striking element of moral dissension to this drama which will raise difficult dilemmas while preventing us from easily taking sides with any of the characters.

Overall, the page suggests complex interactions between characters of very different motivations and moral attitudes, played out in dramatic and vivid language and promising unpredictable developments. If you read on, you are likely to get deeply involved; you will have to try to solve puzzles and to make judgements, in situations which raise fierce emotions.

Professor Stoneman is Emeritus Reader at The University of Hull. Her particular scholarly focus is on the works of Elizabeth Gaskell and the Brontë sisters, and her publications include Elizabeth Gaskell and Brontë Transformations: the Cultural Dissemination of ‘Jane Eyre' and ‘Wuthering Heights'.

She has also published extensively on Wuthering Heights, having written the Introduction to the Oxford World's Classics edition and edited both the Macmillan New Casebook and the Palgrave Reader's Guide to Essential Criticism of the novel, and contributed an essay to the MLA's Approaches to Teaching Emily Brontë's ‘Wuthering Heights'. She has also contributed essays to The Oxford Companion to the Brontës, The Cambridge Companion to the Brontës and The Cambridge Companion to Elizabeth Gaskell.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ted McClelland's "Horseplayers"

Formerly a staff writer for the Chicago Reader, Ted McClelland's stories and essays have been published in Salon, Utne, Mother Jones, the Chicago Tribune, Slate, and Potomac Review.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his book, Horseplayers: Life at the Track, and reported the following:

There is not a lot of action on page 99, but there is a lot of attitude. It’s very revealing of the racetrack culture, which is made up of men who prefer gambling to money and sex.

It’s Derby Day, and I’m in the grandstand of Hawthorne Race Course, in Stickney, Ill., waiting to watch the televised race with my friends Bob and Soren. Neither are racing fans, but the Kentucky Derby is the one race a year that interests squares who would ordinarily never risk $2 on a horse.

Bob and Soren “had each been to the track with me once and never returned … I’d taken Soren to Arlington during my first spell of gambling fever seven years before. After we’d both lost sixty dollars, he suddenly began moaning as though he’d locked his only child in a hot car.

“Oh my God, I can’t believe I lost sixty dollars. I could have bought a new guitar case with that money!”

“People who think money is for buying stuff shouldn’t be gambling,” I told him.

I then bet fifty dollars on a turf race. After my horse finished eighth, Soren grabbed me by the shirt and dragged me out of the track.

It had taken me longer to get Bob to the track … the first time I invited him he was married, which meant the track was in the same no-fly zone and strip clubs and wet t-shirt contests. Eventually Bob graduated to bachelorhood, and I was able to talk him into a trip to Sportsman’s during its final spring … The races were called on account of snow, after a horse belly flopped in the mud to finish the sixth race, and Bob left without cashing a ticket.”

I won’t go so far as to say this passage is misogynistic, but it does show the gambler’s disdain for the stability that women and marriage represent. A common theme throughout the book is that horse racing is a bachelor’s game. As one observer put it, “I don’t know if the bachelors are the kind of guys who play the horses, or if playing the horses makes you unattractive to the opposite sex.” Most men devote their lives to pursuing riches and women. Not horseplayers. We thought we were devoted hobbyists who’d found a more exciting, more satisfying pursuit. Re-reading page 99 at a point in my life when I’m finally more interested in women, money and stability than in playing the ponies, makes me see that we weren’t. We were just junkies.

Visit Ted McClelland's website and read an excerpt from Horseplayers.

--Marshal Zeringue

Winnifred Sullivan's "The Impossibility of Religious Freedom"

Winnifred Fallers Sullivan is Associate Professor of Law and Director of the Law and Religion Program at the University at Buffalo Law School, The State University of New York. She is currently the Lilly Endowment Fellow at the National Humanities Center.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her book, The Impossibility of Religious Freedom, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book does give one a sense of the U.S. legal issues that are the frame for my book -- the way in which American courts, in enforcing laws protecting religious freedom, paradoxically have a preference for highly structured orthodox religion over the popular religious practices of most Americans. What is not included on that page are the actual voices of the plaintiffs in the case, practitioners of what I call in the book "outlaw religion," (and what the court called "cemetery anarchy"), and of the five academic experts in religion who attempted to explain the nature of religion to the court. The “impossibility” of the title lies in the impossibility of defining religion, legally or academically, in such a way as to capture the religious lives of Americans.

Learn more about The Impossibility of Religious Freedom at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice"

Donald J. Gray is Culbertson Chair Emeritus of English at Indiana University, Bloomington.

He is the editor of the Norton Critical Edition of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. He applied the "Page 99 Test" to the novel and reported the following:

On p. 99 of the 3rd edition of the Norton Pride and Prejudice a young woman named Elizabeth, apparently resident in the country, shakes her head in worry over a letter from her sister Jane, who is visiting their uncle and aunt in London. A possible suitor for Jane has not profited from her temporary residence in London to call on her. Four weeks pass (in a phrase no longer than that), and Elizabeth receives another letter from Jane in which she confesses that she has been “entirely deceived” by a previous show of friendship on the part of a sister, a Miss Bingley, of the as yet unnamed suitor. Miss Bingley has paid a formal visit whose coldness Jane attributes to her fear that her brother is attracted to Jane, and thus is placing his courtship of and possible marriage to another (presumably more desirable) young woman in jeopardy. Jane wonders at Miss Bingley’s anxiety, “because if he had at all cared about me, we must have met long, long ago.” “But I will endeavor to banish every painful thought,” she writes to conclude her letter, “and think only of what will make me happy, your affection, and the invariable kindness of my dear uncle and aunt.”

On p. 99 of the second edition (1813) of the novel, a young man (Mr. Bingley) is paying a morning visit to house of Elizabeth and her sisters. He is flattered by their foolish mother as she prepares him for his role as a possible suitor, and then impulsively importuned by two of Elizabeth’s younger sisters to provide a ball at the house he is renting for the season.

Either passage will prepare a reader for a novel about the tactics of courtship – the schemes and hopes of mother and sisters, the apparatus of social events (calls and balls) in which young people meet one another, or (in the Norton edition) fail to meet, the play of forwardness (in the 1813 edition) and socially enforced passivity (in the Norton passage) in the game of courtship. Things look more promising in 1813 – there will be a ball, at which the couple in the courtship will meet. In the passage of the Norton edition the dark and risky aspects of the game come forward: Jane (and Elizabeth) can do nothing but wait, the sister of one family schemes against the courtship while the sister of the other family is at this moment at least distant and helpless, and can offer only affection to solace the “painful thought” of disappointment. A novel, then, about romance and courtship, played out within the complications and comforts of family, and the provisions of social custom. In 1813 the reader wonders: what is going to happen at the ball? After reading the passage in the Norton edition, the reader thinks: This is a hard way to conduct romance; is it all going to be ok?

Donald J. Gray edited editions and collections of 19th-century British fiction and poetry, including the Norton Critical Edition of Alice in Wonderland and the anthology Victorian Poetry, and published essays on Victorian literature and culture, Victorian journalism and literary publishing, the teaching of English, the education of teachers, and the history of English studies.

Learn more about the Norton Critical Edition of Pride and Prejudice.

--Marshal Zeringue

Andrew Bacevich's "The New American Militarism"

Andrew J. Bacevich is Professor of History and International Relations at Boston University. His most recent book is The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to the book and reported the following:

I'm afraid that my book flunks the page 99 test -- although whether that's a reflection on the book or the test, I'm not prepared to say.

The New American Militarism argues that in the aftermath of the Cold War Americans had become infatuated with military power, an infatuation that has perversely affected US policy.

The book concerns itself less with the implications of this new American militarism than with its origins. In essence, it addresses the question: how was it that we came to have such inflated and misguided expectations of what American power could do? The short answer provided by the book is this: various groups in American society saw in the revival and celebration of US military power the antidote to all that in their eyes had gone wrong with the country in the 1960s. One of those "groups" was the Republican Party. Page 99 of the book just begins to introduce Ronald Reagan as the GOP's most effective advocate of a military revival -- although this particular chapter concludes by showing that Bill Clinton, a keen student of Reagan's political success, had come to embrace much of Reagan's posture in time for the presidential campaign of 1992.

Learn more about Bacevich's The New American Militarism at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ben Greenman's "A Circle Is a Balloon and Compass Both"

Ben Greenman is an editor at The New Yorker. His short fiction has appeared in the Paris Review, Zoetrope: All Story, McSweeney’s, Opium Magazine, the Mississippi Review, and elsewhere.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, A Circle Is a Balloon and Compass Both, and reported the following:

Well, my new book, A Circle Is a Balloon and Compass Both, is a book of stories, so opening to page 99 is like parachuting out of a plane and not knowing whether the locals are representative specimens of the national character or not. As a matter of fact, Page 99 is not very similar to the rest of the book. It's a section of a story called "How Little We Know About Cast Polymers, and About Life," which is about a man who assassinates another man in an airport during a time in history when America is preoccupied with the Terri Schiavo case. The story itself touches on the larger themes of the book — black humor, sex, sadness, imposture (the man is pretending to be a cast-polymer salesman) — but it's also a bit of an oddity, since it's one of the few pieces that's not a straightforward love story. Other stories deal with a man who is in love with a friend, a woman who is not in love with the man she is sleeping with, and a woman who can't admit her love for a man. This one is about a murder in an airport. There's love, but you have to get down on your knees to look for it.

Then there's the matter of Page 99 itself, which is a particularly talky moment in the story. The assassin is sitting at a gate at the airport, waiting for the man he will kill, and he's listening to two men nearby discuss Terri Schiavo (who is referred to as the Hospice Pathetic). It's basically just a transcript of a conversation I had with a conservative friend of mine who wasn't convinced that she was in a persistent vegetative state, or that she had made her wishes clear to her husband. "Well, you know," one man says, "even knowing about the bias ahead of time, I was quite disappointed with how they covered the case." He is referring to the liberal bias of the media. A back-and-forth follows. Again, this is a darker story than some of the others, and more yoked to the headlines. But we have friendship tested, the larger world keeping the contents of a relationship under pressure, an emotional (if not, in this case, romantic) thesis and antithesis, and the hope for a synthesis.

Visit Ben Greenman's website and hear him read "Black, Gray, Green, Red, Blue: A Letter From a Famous Painter on the Moon" from A Circle Is a Balloon and Compass Both.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lindsey Davis's "Saturnalia"

Lindsey Davis is the author of 18 novels featuring Marcus Didius Falco (born AD41) as well as other works. The first Falco novel, The Silver Pigs, won the Authors' Club Best First Novel award in 1989; Davis has since won the Crimewriters' Association Dagger in the Library and Ellis Peters Historical Dagger, while Falco has won the Sherlock Award for Best Comic Detective.

Saturnalia, the eighteenth Falco novel, is already out in the U.K. and releases in the U.S. in May.

Does page 99 of Saturnalia "reveal the quality of the whole" to the reader, I asked the author, and would the browser who read that page be inclined to take up the book from the start?

Davis's answer:

Yes, I would read the book, but as we say here I would say that, wouldn't I? Does any author ever say no? (Shame on them if so; their self-editing must be terrible. Every page should grab you.) From which readers will gather my work freely raises speculation on all issues, and my professional standards are high.

In this page my hero, the Roman detective Falco, goes to see his mother when he is tired and has had a frustrating day. He finds his rival and bugbear Anacrites, the Chief Spy, tucking into food at his mother's table, almost certainly as a pretext for spying on Falco. They discuss the current case, in which they have been pitted against one another in a race against time. They are trying to find a missing foreigner whose presence in Rome poses such a great threat that the authorities don't want it known she is there. The conversation involves philosophical arguments about imperialism - who are the barbarians? and how far should a state abandon its principles for issues of security? Topical stuff, though I hope lightly done. There are nice clashes over bureaucracy. Falco shows us the eternally hopeless task of dealing with your mother. A curious aspect of Roman law features. There are hints of barely suppressed violence between the two men. And there is a final cliff-hanger as Falco demands that Anacrites hand over a prisoner:

'Better give him to me voluntarily.'

'Falco, I can't - '

Why not? What will Falco riposte? Will Falco ever get the man?.... You have to turn the page, don't you?

Yes, I'm proud of this.

Visit Lindsey Davis's comprehensive website and read an excerpt from Saturnalia.

--Marshal Zeringue

Thomas Hardy's "The Woodlanders"

Thomas Hardy published The Woodlanders in 1887.

Penny Boumelha is Jury Professor of English Language and Literature at The University of Adelaide and a world-renowned expert on the works of Hardy.

She wrote the introduction to the Oxford World Classics edition of Hardy's The Woodlanders, and now has applied the "Page 99 Test" to the novel reported the following:

The Woodlanders is a novel that sets its stories of love and marriage within an investigation of the social and economic relationships that shape the lives of the various lovers. Page 99 of the current Oxford World’s Classics edition illustrates characteristically this interplay of personal feeling and social circumstance. It encapsulates in a single episode the long and wavering emotional commitment that forms the centre of the novel, between the timber waggoner Giles Winterborne and Grace Melbury, once promised to him by her father but then sent away to town for an education that has changed their relationship to each other. Grace’s father is keen not to ‘waste’ the expensive education he has given her by letting her marry a man socially beneath her. At the same time, Giles’s fortunes have taken a turn for the worse as he inadvertently allows the lease on his cottage to expire, and stands to lose both his home and his business. In The Woodlanders, the lives and feelings of the characters are often overshadowed by the life of the wood itself, the sounds of the trees and the birds that live in them, the light and shade of the forest. Here, Giles first thinks the ‘scraping on the wall outside his house’ that he hears is made by the boughs of a rose that grows there, ‘but as no wind was stirring he knew that it could not be the rose-tree.’ By the flickering light of a candle, he discovers instead the anonymous but pervasive human malice embodied in charcoal graffiti on his wall:

‘O Giles, you’ve lost your dwelling-place,

And therefore, Giles, you’ll lose your Grace.’

Several of Hardy’s novels contain such scenes, where characters encounter anonymous texts that seem to express a community judgement upon their own individual lives. But in this episode, it is not the last word. Set in a small woodland community in which everybody knows everybody else’s business, the novel is full of scenes of people watching one another, stumbling upon each other’s secrets or eavesdropping on their conversations. In this scene, Grace herself, out for a morning walk, sees the inscription, and, fired with a sense of injustice and a longstanding loyalty to Giles, decides to change it so that it now reads … but that‘s on page 100.

Professor Penny Boumelha's DPhil thesis at Oxford was on Thomas Hardy, and a significant proportion of her scholarship has been on the same author. Her first book, Thomas Hardy and Women (1982), was published in the UK and USA and was reprinted in 1984; sections from it have been widely reprinted in collections and anthologies. Charlotte Bronte (1990) and the edited Casebook on Jude the Obscure (2000) are two further books. Penny Boumelha has continued to publish on Hardy, on other nineteenth-century writers (including Meredith, Bronte, Eliot, and women writers of the fin-de-siecle ), on ideologies of gender and race, and on literary genres. She has provided critical introductions for new editions of three Hardy novels by Oxford University Press and Penguin, and is to provide a chapter on Hardy for the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to English Novelists.

Professor Boumelha was elected a Fellow of the Academy of the Humanities in 1997. In 2003 she was awarded a Centenary Medal for services to Australian society and the humanities in English language and literature.

--Marshal Zeringue

Julian Baggini's "Welcome to Everytown"

Julian Baggini is a philosopher and a writer about philosophy. He is a founding editor of The Philosophers’ Magazine and author of a number of books and papers.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Welcome to Everytown, and reported the following:

Turn to page 99 of Welcome to Everytown and I guess you will see a pretty representative selection. You join a discussion half-way through about the mundane issue of the parking situation outside my temporary home, and the removal of a front garden with a paved parking area. Taken in isolation, that might be very uninspiring. But mine is a book which starts from the commonplace and everyday and tries to understand what it reveals about our society and our mindset. Hence, the second, and first full paragraph, on the page, is an example of the kind of reflection my quotidian observations lead me to:

"But he had missed the point. When Pete and Johnny had lamented the decline in well-maintained front gardens they weren’t concerned that people weren't using them. Such gardens are a contribution to the collective well-being. If all the front gardens in your street look nice, you feel more content in your environment. No one garden brings significant pleasure, but if everyone does their bit, a street of them benefits everyone. The rise of individualism and the decline of community may have been exaggerated, but it has gone far enough for us to care less about what the neighbours think. While that's good in that it liberates us from the oppression of peer disapproval, caring is two-way business, and when we all worry less about how those around us feel, we stop doing things that contribute to the general welfare of the area."

That, I hope, gives you a feel for what the book is doing. But still, I’m not sure p99 alone gives you the full feel. This is a book where lots of small things gradually accumulate to form a bigger picture.

Ford Madox Ford's statement, however, was about quality. If by that you mean quality of the writing, p99 is as good or bad as any. If you mean quality of the argument, again, I’m afraid there’s a cumulative aspect to that one page can’t capture.

Visit Baggini's website, the publisher's page for Welcome to Everytown, and The Philosophers' Magazine online.

--Marshal Zeringue

Megan Marshall's "The Peabody Sisters"

Megan Marshall worked for two decades on her award-winning biography The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism, spending many years tracking down the sisters’ letters and journals.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her book and reported the following:

My first editor on The Peabody Sisters -- and there were five to see me through the twenty-year labor, all at Houghton Mifflin -- was Robie Macauley, novelist, acclaimed fiction editor at Playboy, and life-long friend of the poet Robert Lowell. Robie advised me that when writing a biography, I should never leave the consciousness of my subject for even so much as a page. That's a hard rule to follow when you're trying to establish context, flesh out the other characters in the story, detail the history of morphine use or of an upstart religion your subject happens to have joined. But p. 99 of The Peabody Sisters shows me rising to Robie's challenge, practicing the narrative technique that I think has caused the book's more enthusiastic readers to say "it reads just like a novel." Although much of the page describes the Peabody sisters' father's struggle to make a living as a doctor in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1820, digressing even farther to explain the tight economics in that region at the time, it begins with one of Elizabeth Peabody's characteristic pleas, in this case to a circle of teenaged friends, to pursue the life of the mind, to examine their beliefs, to persist in seeking spiritual enlightenment. "Every person who has talents time and opportunity should not rest contentedly with any creed however simple until they have discussed every article of it," she wrote to members of a writing group she'd organized called The Social Circle. "To sit still and pray for light is farcical when we have opportunity to search." And search she did, for the rest of her life, hectoring her two younger sisters Mary and Sophia (reformer and artist, wives respectively of Horace Mann and Nathaniel Hawthorne), along the way. The book concludes (p. 451) with a group of Cambridge intellectuals talking late into the night about the "perfecting of the character," and with the great American painter Washington Allston's benediction, uttered just days before his death: "God bless you," he said, placing his hands on her head and stooping to kiss her: "Go on to perfection, my child!" If there is one message I hope readers of my book will take in, it is that intellectual and spiritual seeking can be a way of life. If you are a like-minded person, you will find The Peabody Sisters a good companion in your search.

The Peabody Sisters was a Pulitzer finalist in biography and memoir in 2006, and has won the Mark Lynton History Prize, the Frances Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians, and the Massachusetts Book Award in nonfiction.

Read the publisher's description of The Peabody Sisters.

--Marshal Zeringue