She vindicates her and gently shifts the original narrative converting the housekeeper of Wuthering Heights in the moral centre of the story and a protofeminist heroine. Mid twentieth century critics begged to differ qualifiying Nelly Dean as literally 'one of the consummate villains in English literature' (2) or 'an agent of patriarchal law' (3).Īlison Case herself comes from the academical world (4) but her approach to the figure of Nelly Dean is closer to Charlotte Brontë's than to most of the modern critics'. Charlotte Brontë herself defended her on the whole in her 1850 preface to the new edition of Wuthering Heights: For a specimen of true benevolence and homely fidelity, look at the character of Nelly Dean (1). She is considered as the embodiment of the unreliable narrator (and her embedded narrative inside Lockwood's one is full of contradictory statements) but not necessarily for the wrong reasons. Nelly Dean is a controversial character in the critical history of Emily Brontë's novel.
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