Sarah Moss prefers Jane Eyre to Wuthering Heights

Author Sarah Moss said she never liked Wuthering Heights as much as Jane Eyre and that "these days I can’t see around the eroticised abuse", while noting Jane Eyre contains some of that too and praising Wuthering Heights' narrative structure.

Moss recalled her earliest reading memory as Swallowdale by Arthur Ransome at age seven, saying she became entrenched in illiteracy until her grandmother, a retired primary school teacher, intervened. She named Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie series as her favourite growing up, though she now finds its politics "obviously objectionable", and described how Victorian fiction, the Beat poets, John Updike and Kingsley Amis shaped her as a teenager. She said Christina Sharpe’s Ordinary Notes recently altered how she understands the world, and that storytelling as a child—rather than a single book—made her want to be a writer.

Moss said she has rediscovered Barbara Pym and regularly rereads Austen, Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot, alongside favourites such as Janet Frame, Miriam Toews and Bill Reid, and practical books by Meera Sodha, Anna Jones, Felix Ford and Kate Davies. She listed later discoveries including Magda Szabo, Alba De Céspedes and Azar Nafisi, and said she is currently reading Helen Garner’s How to End a Story, Gun‑Britt Sundström’s Engagement and Kathleen Jamie’s Selected Poems. "All books change my mind," she added.

Key Topics

Culture, Sarah Moss, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Barbara Pym, Laura Ingalls Wilder