Love Quote by Margaret Forster

Falling for Heathcliff is a confession and a provocation. Margaret Forster’s line turns a private teenage swoon into a diagnostic of how girls are trained to read desire: not toward the safe and available, but toward the brooding man who hurts people and calls it passion. The adverb “absolutely” performs the intensity she’s describing; it’s the voice of a reader overwhelmed, a little embarrassed by the scale of it, and still unwilling to apologize. “Adored” is deliberately excessive, a wink at the melodrama of first literary love.

The kicker is the casual generalization: “as most girls do.” Forster smuggles cultural critique in through a shrug. She’s not only remembering her own response; she’s pointing to a pattern, the way the canon has long offered girls a particular romantic script - obsession over stability, transgression over tenderness, the thrill of being the one who “understands” the difficult man. Heathcliff’s appeal isn’t his goodness but his force, his refusal to be managed. That’s intoxicating in a world where femininity is policed into compliance.

Context matters: Forster wrote biographies and novels attentive to women’s inner lives and social constraints. She knows how reading becomes rehearsal. By invoking Wuthering Heights as a common initiation, she’s also hinting at the double bind: women are expected to be rational caretakers, yet their formative stories glamorize emotional extremity. The line lands because it’s both affectionate and skeptical - a love letter to a book, and a raised eyebrow at what that love has been made to mean.