Like many people, I hadn't heard of Stephanie Meyer's wildly popular Twilight until it started to be mentioned in film reviews. This is probably because I'm thirty-one rather than fourteen, though I did notice a friend of mine being given it as a thirtieth birthday present with the recommendation that it was a perfect book to relax with. Based on reviews and extracts, it doesn't sound like my kind of novel, so unless I get interested enough in the cultural phenomenon to pick it up from the library I'll be in no position to say much about the book itself - but reading discussions of it - I'd particularly recommend this one from Salon - something stands out. Meyer, apparently, is a big fan of certain classics, particularly Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. Their heroes influenced hers - and, interestingly, hers is frequently described as 'perfect' (though a more jaundiced reviewer describes him as 'one of modern fiction's best candidates for a restraining order' - which adds up to the conclusion that he's a particularly effective version of the masterful hero that works so well in female fantasies and so seldom in real life; the guy who's kept Mills and Boon going all those years.

Which is a topical segue into the subject I'd really like to discuss, which is this: Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights appear to be among the most misremembered books in history.

It's a curious thing that both books are seen as great love stories, when the former spends vast amounts of time away from the romance - notably, it begins and ends elsewhere - and the latter ends with the 'hero' dying in sin and insanity. Both of these 'love stories' are in fact deeply problematic.

The word most commonly applied to Wuthering Heights is 'passion'. The Cathy-Heathcliff relationship is seen as a lifelong love, wild as the moors, that endures all life can throw at it. More accurate, perhaps, would be to say that it's a lifelong obsession on Heathcliff's part that survives all that Cathy can throw at it - and that, for fans of the masterful man, Heathcliff is very much the underdog. The break in their relationship comes where Cathy chooses to marry another man, primarily for his money, which she justifies thus:

My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath - a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff! He's always, always in my mind - not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being.

Catherine isn't saying this to declare herself: she's saying it to justify her abandonment of Heathcliff's love. She remarks that 'it would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now; so he shall never know how I love him.' Catherine's logic is convoluted and narcissistic: believing Heathcliff to be 'more myself than I am', it's inconceivable to her that he might have needs or desires of his own that are separate from, or in conflict with, hers. To please herself cannot be a betrayal of Heathcliff if he, too, is herself. He doesn't even need to know how she feels; she knows how she feels, and that's all that's necessary. This sense of two-in-one, which sounds so romantic taken out of context, is in fact an absolute objectification of the man she claims to love: not being separate from her in her own mind, she treats him as entirely without rights. Nelly calls her a 'wicked, unprincipled girl' for this, and it's hard not to see her point.

And Heathcliff takes it. Physically large he may be, but his powers are weak when put to the test. He's violent, but only towards women (though not Catherine), children and animals; in his one physical confrontation with a man, Edgar Linton punches him in the throat and Heathcliff runs away blustering. He simply isn't as big as he talks; Linton, whom he regards as a weakling, bests him in a physical conflict - and if we're considering virility as well as strength, it's worth noting that the child Heathcliff fathers, Linton Heathcliff, is sickly and frail, while Linton fathers a healthy and beautiful daughter. Such force as Heathcliff does exert on other men following his return from exile is largely financial rather than muscular - and he never, ever stands up to Catherine. He schemes furiously against everyone he perceives as standing between him and her, but the plain fact is that Catherine married another man of her own free will, and Heathcliff blames everyone but her. He's remembered as masterful, but Cathy has Heathcliff by the balls.

(It's also worth pointing out that the moors, while present, are not heavily described. Wuthering Heights is a novel of domestic scenes, of quarrels and conflicts indoors; the moors' main effect on the plot is to enforce isolation from the rest of the world and from other households, allowing emotional hothouses to thrive and grow rampant.)

Wuthering Heights, in short, is not in fact a love story. Heathcliff's thwarted rage at Catherine's desertion drives a great deal of the story, but that's only romantic if we believe what the characters say about themselves - take their statements as facts, rather than as the self-justifications of ruthless people. Primarily it's a story of conflict between large personalities trapped in a small space, a tale of family dynasty rather than two people, and in this tense environment, affectionate love is something that struggles.

Jane Eyre is another tricky customer. The famous love story in fact only occupies the central phase of the book; much of the action is entirely Rochester-less. Jane's struggles with her aunt, her travails at Lowood, have very little to do with the Rochester storyline, except to impress on her a need for independence and self-sustenance that later will stand her in good stead. A lot of people forget about St John RIvers, too, Jane's later implacable suitor who tries to persuade her to marry him and lead a missionary's life that will, he knows, destroy her - even though St John's final letter, in which he declares that he's dying and looks forward to Heaven, is what ends the book. Jane's primary relationship throughout, the only one that lasts, is with her own integrity: as she says, 'I care for myself'. No narcissist like Catherine, Jane is instead aware that she is accountable for her own actions, and the emotional arc of the novel concerns her fraught relationship with independence and self-sacrifice. Rochester is part of it, but not the whole story; as Jane herself declares, if the price of love is her self-respect, then she can do without love.

The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself. I will keep to the law given by God; sanctioned by man. I will hold to the principles given me when I was sane, and not mad - as I am now. Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation; they are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour; stringent are they; inviolate they shall be. If at my individual convenience I might break them, what would they be worth? They have a worth - so I have always believed - and if I cannot believe it now, it is because I am insane - quite insane, with my veins running fire and my heart beating faster than I can count its throbs. Preconceived opinions, foregone determinations, are all I have at this hour to stand by: there I plant my foot.

This is passionate language, but her passion is for principle more than for a man. Love is dismissed precisely because it is so overwhelming; because it unseats the judgement and overwhelms the emotions, it is not to be relied upon.

Even prior to this temptation, though, Jane is notably hard-headed in her dealings with Rochester. His attempts to buy her fine clothes are an 'annoyance and a degradation' because she doesn't want to be dressed up like a toy: 'I thought his smile was such as sultan might, in a blissful and fond moment, bestow on a slave his gold and gems had enriched,' and she isn't having it. Jane knows perfectly well that he's had affairs in the past and tired of those women; to 'be your English Celine Varens' isn't something she's prepared to risk. Becoming engaged to him, she is 'flinty' in her refusal to accept sweet nothings, certain that he's unlikely to respect or stay interested in a woman who falls for his line of talk: 'a lamb-like submission and turtle-dove sensibility, while fostering his despotism more, would have pleased his judgement, satisfied his common-sense, and even suited his taste less.' She views this as keeping him 'in reasonable check', to the relief of the housekeeper Mrs Fairfax - and one can hardly blame her for this. Rochester himself owns that 'To women who please me only by their faces, I am the very devil when I find out that they have neither souls nor hearts - when they open to me a perspective of flatness, triviality, and perhaps imbecility, coarseness and ill-temper' - and while Rochester believes that Jane can never display any such vices, Jane herself reckons that this is infatuation talking, and that once the first flush has worn off he will lose interest in a woman who hasn't conducted herself carefully in the meantime.

Jane, in short, is aware that their social discrepancy puts all the power on his side, and recognises that she must continually assert herself if she isn't to be overwhelmed and then lost. The Salon article I linked to above remarks that in the stories descended from Jane Eyre, 'The chief point of this story is that the couple aren't equals, that his love rescues her from herself by elevating her to a class she could not otherwise join.' But this isn't entirely accurate in this instance. Jane is impoverished, but a lady by birth: marrying Rochester doesn't so much elevate her to a class she couldn't otherwise join as return her to a class from which she has been exiled; a legacy finally enables her to marry him on equal terms, indeed. Power is delicately balanced, but rather than surrendering herself to love, Jane treads a fine tightrope to prevent either her own emotions or his social power from entrapping her.

The Bronte sisters are remembered as great romantics, and if we capitalise the R, that's true: they were Romantic novelists, interested in the internal and the extreme. But love is a fraught business in their stories, and their heroes are questionable. Neither Heathcliff nor Rochester really likes women; both make something of an exception for their beloved, but are quick to scorn those they can impress or intimidate, and are only tender towards women whose force of personality exceeds their own. In the light of this, it's curious to see them as the grandfathers of your template masterful hero; both of them talk a good game, but if we look at their actions, they're not as all-fired tough as you think. The Strong Man Mastered By Love is, of course, essential to the alpha romance hero, but in fact, neither Heathcliff nor Rochester are strong in asserting their will against others. Heathcliff, as I've said, takes his temper out on those frailer than himself, but tends not to win conflicts with his contemporaries; Rochester fails to resist his family's pressure to marry a stranger and deals very poorly with the situation he finds himself in, fleeing abroad, hiding the truth and generally taking the easiest option wherever he can. There are other ways of defining manhood than the ability to win conflicts, of course, and the capacity to love certainly impresses women, but neither Heathcliff's nor Rochester's love is, to use an old-fashioned word, disinterested. Neither man loves the woman's good; each views love possessively rather than as a desire to see the beloved happy - else why does Heathcliff turn so vengeful, or Rochester try to trick Jane into an illegal marriage?

To be intensely desired is seductive, but dangerous when not associated with the desire to preserve and benefit that lies at the root of true love. Both of these men represent the dangerous type of love - which may be part of the appeal to a woman who's temporarily tired of the kind of love that helps with the dishes. But the Bronte romances are not, so to speak, defanged versions: their heroes are depicted as genuinely dangerous, as life-ruiners driven by selfishness, rather than as idealised lovers whose 'badness' is cosmetic and ineffective. There's something sleazy about genuine badness, which both these novels capture, with Heathcliff's loan-sharking and alcoholism-fostering, with Rochester's affairs and lies and callousness towards every mistress or wife who fails to please him. It's possible, of course, to love a man despite his faults, which is certainly what Jane does - and what real people do too, men and women both, because we're none of us perfect - but the Brontes are unusually frank about what those faults are, and clear that love for such men can never be unconnected with power play - and that it such relationships can be fatal to women who don't have the resilience to play for power hard and skillfully. Heathcliff's wife makes the mistake of assuming that love is the answer, for instance, and finds to her cost that it wasn't.

And yet, and yet. Somehow, many, many readers seem to lose sight of these faults. They remember 'I am Heathcliff' and not its context; they remember the proposal under the horse-chestnut and not the haggles about money and flattery that follow it. The rhetoric of love, spoken by the lovers themselves, overwhelms recollection of the details. This may just be a variant of the Sanjuro Effect, the tendency to perceive a character's charisma and notice little else to the degree that you've actively misunderstood the point - or possibly a tendency to fall in love with a character on not-too-close reading followed by the usual state of love being blind.

Readers do sometimes rewrite books in their heads to smooth off the uncomfortable bits, and the Brontes seem unusually prone to that. It's a curious thing, nonetheless.