The Library In the Margin
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Emily Brontë’s one wild novel — a love that becomes a possession, and a revenge that outlives its object. We read the whole book closely, volume by volume, out on the Yorkshire moors, asking what love is for — and what happens when it falls out of order.

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A Living Literature & Language course — the whole novel, read closely.
A full feast
Literature · Language Arts · Nature Study · Art, Music & Poetry
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The Shape of the Term
Fifteen weeks on the moors
Volume I · Chapters 1–17
Lockwood arrives at the Grange and Nelly Dean begins the story — Catherine and Heathcliff on the moors, the betrayal that divides them, and the storm of Chapter 15.
Volume II · Chapters 18–34
Heathcliff’s long revenge, carried into a second generation — and what he finds waiting when the end he built is finally within reach.
Weeks 10–15 · Follow the Thread
The term gathers to a point: choose one question, write it in a character’s voice, carry it to a speech and an essay, defend it aloud, and reflect on what the reading showed you.
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The Threads We Keep
Practices that run all term
  • Read closely, volume by volumeThe whole novel, chapter by chapter — with a short, honest summary and a question to carry into each one.
  • The Habit of AttentionA line worth keeping and one small practice to open each week.
  • Find It · Follow It · Frame ItThe three moves of close reading, on the passages that matter most.
  • Four great lensesAugustine on ordered & disordered love, Rousseau on natural man, Victorian class & the outsider, and the modern lens of coercive control.
  • Narration & the commonplace bookTelling back what we’ve read, and keeping the lines that stop us.
  • Passages worth keepingThe moments the whole book turns on — read slowly, out loud, more than once.
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The Capstone
Follow the Thread
One question, carried to the last page.
Across the final weeks each student follows a single thread — Catherine’s divided heart, Heathcliff’s revenge, the question of ordered and disordered love — through six pieces, from a first choice all the way to a spoken defense.
A topic of your own A letter in a voice A speech An essay & thesis An oral defense A final reflection
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The Honors Path

An honors strand runs through every week — an invitation, not a requirement. A few of the ways it might look this term:

  • ✦ Read one lens in full — Augustine’s Confessions, Book I, or Rousseau — and bring it back to the novel.
  • ✦ An independent close reading of a single passage — Chapter 15, or Heathcliff’s last words in Chapter 34.
  • ✦ An extended composition that sets the coercive-control lens against the Romantic reading — passion, or possession?

And it all gathers into a portfolio at the end — a record of the work a student can carry into college applications.

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