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?