How the Brontës divide humanity

In Alison Flood's recent blog about the books she remembers most vividly from school , she mentioned that Jane Eyre bored her, but that the melodrama of Wuthering Heights kept her enthralled. This reminded me of my long-held pet theory about the Battle of the Brontës: everyone who's read both Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights is passionately devoted to one book but nose-holdingly repelled by the other. If you want to be particularly contentious, you can divide those who satisfy the basic entry criteria into two types – those drawn to demure, bookish Miss Eyre and those for whom the pyrotechnical hanky-panky between Cathy Earnshaw and black-browed Heathcliff is paramount – and call them Librarians and Rock Stars. Alison is undoubtedly a Rock Star. I, on the other hand, am a Librarian. A socially-inept only child, precociously devoted to solitary reading and with a wide-ranging, frequently pompous vocabulary, there was no way I wasn't going to adore Jane Eyre, the pale little scrap who introduced me to words like "moiety" and "redolent". But she was also a significant feminist role model, surviving the rigours and humiliations of education at Lowood to become a self-reliant artist and teacher; a grey-clad governess with a secret, banked core of embers, breaking out in occasional white flame to assert her revolutionary right to be respected and loved. It still thrills me to reread Jane's defiance of Rochester: "Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? ... it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God's feet, equal – as we are!" My Librarian loyalties, however, were nearly a deal-breaker for my partner during my first year at university. A hot-blooded northerner with a penchant for Kate Bush, he remained an Emily man to the core, finding Jane's post-mad-wife-revelation flight particulaqrly spineless: "No, really, though, what does she do? Walks for a few miles and then falls down!" Meanwhile, I turned up my nose at the apparently chaotic ordering of Wuthering Heights, and at the fact that I didn't like or identify with any of the characters. (Later I realised, to my shame, that my 18-year-old responses echoed those of the most beard-stroking contemporary critics, including the Examiner's anonymous reviewer in 1848 : "This is a strange book. It is not without evidences of considerable power: but, as a whole, it is wild, confused, disjointed, and improbable; and the people who make up the drama, which is tragic enough in its consequences, are savages ruder than those who lived before the days of Homer.") I still detest Cathy Earnshaw – to me she'll always be a selfish prima donna, who "never endeavoured to divert herself with reading, or occupation of any kind"; who deliberately shrills, starves and tantrums herself into the grave, leaving torment behind her. And Heathcliff is an absolute swine. In fact, the only WH character I have much time for is Nelly Dean the nursemaid, who is at least loyal and generally competent (although we only have her word for it and she's a notoriously unreliable narrator ). This, naturally, is because I am a Librarian at heart and boringly inclined to favour neatness and productivity over bellowing, breast-beating, and the wilful hanging of inoffensive little dogs . Judging from a recently conducted straw poll, however, my repressed, mob-capped fondness for Charlotte's heroine leaves me firmly in the minority. Men, particularly, seem much more likely to rate Wuthering Heights and slate Jane Eyre. Which is your favourite – are you a Librarian or a Rock Star? And are there people out there ready to disprove my theory by loving (or detesting) both books equally?