Wuthering Heights

About this book

Wuthering Heights is the only novel Emily Brontë wrote. It was published in December 1847 under the name Ellis Bell, and she died a year later, at thirty, without seeing it widely understood. The book tells the story of two families living on the Yorkshire moors and of Heathcliff, a foundling taken into one of them, whose attachment to the daughter of the house and resentment of everyone else shape two generations.

It has lasted because it refuses to behave like the novel readers expect. The central relationship is not a courtship. Nearly every character is capable of cruelty. The narrative is passed from a visiting tenant to a housekeeper and sometimes to a third or fourth voice, so the reader is always hearing events at a remove. Early reviewers were disturbed by its violence and unsure what to make of it; later critics placed it among the most original English novels of the century.

The story

In 1801 a Mr. Lockwood rents Thrushcross Grange, a house in a remote part of Yorkshire, and pays a visit to his landlord, Heathcliff, at the neighboring farmhouse, Wuthering Heights. He finds a hostile household and spends an unpleasant night there. Back at the Grange, he asks the housekeeper, Nelly Dean, to explain what he has seen, and most of the book is her account.

Years earlier, Mr. Earnshaw of Wuthering Heights returned from Liverpool with a ragged boy he had found in the streets and raised him alongside his own children, Catherine and Hindley. Catherine and the boy, named Heathcliff, became inseparable; Hindley hated him. When Mr. Earnshaw dies, Hindley takes charge and reduces Heathcliff to a farm laborer, while Catherine is drawn toward the refined Linton family at the Grange. The choices she makes set Heathcliff on a course of revenge that extends to the children of all three families.

Themes and historical context

Emily Brontë lived almost her whole life at the parsonage in Haworth, Yorkshire, with her father and her siblings Charlotte, Anne, and Branwell. The moorland around the village is the book’s setting and, in a sense, its main character. The two houses stand for two ways of living: the Heights exposed and rough, the Grange sheltered and genteel, with the weather and the walk between them always present.

The novel’s treatment of revenge is unusually thorough. Heathcliff’s plan works through property law, marriage, and the deliberate neglect of children, and the book shows how injuries get passed down. It also asks what love is when it has nothing to do with kindness. Catherine’s and Heathcliff’s bond is described as a shared identity rather than an affection, and the novel neither endorses nor condemns it.

After Emily’s death, Charlotte Brontë edited a second edition (1850) with a preface defending her sister’s book and explaining its origins to readers who had found it coarse. That edition also toned down some of the Yorkshire dialect spoken by the servant Joseph, which is still a sticking point for some readers.

Who should read it

At around 107,000 words it is shorter than Jane Eyre, but it asks more of the reader. The frame narration means the chronology jumps, several characters share names across generations (a family tree helps), and Joseph’s speech is written in thick dialect. The reward is a book with no padding and a strange, intense atmosphere that few imitators have matched. Readers who found Jane Eyre comfortable will find this one stranger and colder.