Wuthering Heights was written around the same time as photography started to become somewhat prominent in society. It was expensive and not very common, but it was coming about. I personally appreciate the fact that there are no photographs of the Bronte sisters because it adds greatly to the mystery of their existence. Fiction is my favorite type of literature, and while I sometimes like at least an idea of what a place or scene looks like, I am much more imaginative with out one. Movies often disappoint me because they do not portray something as exotically or romantically as I would have thought. In the same way, if I just knew what moors were before reading Wuthering Heights, the setting of the novel would not have been nearly as spooky or mysterious as I made it out to be in my mind. Because of that, I enjoyed reading it a lot more than I would have. I also love the picture on page 450 that may or may not be Charlotte Bronte. It is just a black figure standing against a brick wall, but it is of course, in black and white. Maybe it is Charlotte; maybe it is not. The truth is we will probably never know, and I am perfectly fine with that. Keep the mystery alive.
I agree that the mystery is what is so interesting about this. It sparks the imagination in ways way greater than any photograph could. The paintings of the Bronte sisters that I was able to find by on Google are interesting in that they are obviously close to what they actually looked like but are not as clear or as accurate as an actual photograph would be.
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