Wuthering Heights, which has long been one of the most popular and highly regarded novels in English literature, emed to hold little promi when it was published in 1847, lling very poorly and receiving only a few mixed reviews. Victorian readers found the book shocking and inappropriate in its depiction of passionate, ungoverned love and cruelty (despite the fact that the novel portrays no x or bloodshed), and the work was virtually ignored. Even Emily Brontë’s sister Charlotte—an author who works contained similar motifs of Gothic love and desolate landscapes—remained ambivalent toward the unapologetic intensity of her sister’s novel. In a preface to the book, which she wrote shortly after Emily Brontë’s death, Charlotte Brontë stated, “Whether it is right or advisable to create beings like Heathcliff, I do not know. I scarcely think it is.”
Emily Brontë lived an eccentric, cloly guarded life. She was born in 1818, two years after Charlotte and a year and a half before her sister Anne, who also became an author. Her father worked as a church rector, and her aunt, who raid the Brontë children after their mother died, was deeply religious. Emily Brontë did not take to her aunt’s Christian fervor; the character of Joph, a caricature of an evangelical, may have been inspired by her aunt
’s religiosity. The Brontës lived in Haworth, a Yorkshire village in the midst of the moors. The wild, desolate expans—later the tting of Wuthering Heights—made up the Brontës’ daily environment, and Emily lived among them her entire life. She died in 1848, at the age of thirty.
As witnesd by their extraordinary literary accomplishments, the Brontë children were a highly creative group, writing stories, plays, and poems for their own amument. Largely left to their own devices, the children created imaginary worlds in which to play. Yet the sisters knew that the outside world would not respond favorably to their creative expression; female authors were often treated less riously than their male counterparts in the nineteenth century. Thus the Brontë sisters thought it best to publish their adult works under assumed names. Charlotte wrote as Currer Bell, Emily as Ellis Bell, and Anne as Acton Bell. Their real identities remained cret until after Emily and Anne had died, when Charlotte at last revealed the truth of their novels’ authorship.
Today, Wuthering Heights has a cure position in the canon of world literature, and Emil
y Brontë is revered as one of the finest writers—male or female—of the nineteenth century. Like Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights is bad partly on the Gothic tradition of the late eighteenth century, a style of literature that featured supernatural encounters, crumbling ruins, moonless nights, and grotesque imagery, eking to create effects of mystery and fear. But Wuthering Heights transcends its genre in its sophisticated obrvation and artistic subtlety. The novel has been studied, analyzed, discted, and discusd from every imaginable critical perspective, yet it remains unexhausted. And while the novel’s symbolism, themes, structure, and language may all spark fertile exploration, the bulk of its popularity may rest on its unforgettable characters. As a shattering prentation of the doomed love affair between the fiercely passionate Catherine and Heathcliff, it remains one of the most haunting love stories in all of literature.
Plot Overview
In the late winter months of 1801, a man named Lockwood rents a manor hous
e called Thrushcross Grange in the isolated moor country of England. Here, he meets his dour landlord, Heathcliff, a wealthy man who lives in the ancient manor of Wuthering Heights, four miles away from the Grange. In this wild, stormy countryside, Lockwood asks his houkeeper, Nelly Dean, to tell him the story of Heathcliff and the strange denizens of Wuthering Heights. Nelly connts, and Lockwood writes down his recollections of her tale in his diary; the written recollections form the main part of Wuthering Heights.
Nelly remembers her childhood. As a young girl, she works as a rvant at Wuthering Heights for the owner of the manor, Mr. Earnshaw, and his family. One day, Mr. Earnshaw goes to Liverpool and returns home with an orphan boy whom he will rai with his own children. At first, the Earnshaw children—a boy named Hindley and his younger sister Catherine—detest the dark-skinned Heathcliff. But Catherine quickly comes to love him, and the two soon grow inparable, spending their days playing on the moors. After his wife’s death, Mr. Earnshaw grows to prefer Heathcliff to his own son, and when Hindley continues his cruelty to Heathcliff, Mr. Earnshaw nds Hindley away to college, keeping
Heathcliff nearby.
Three years later, Mr. Earnshaw dies, and Hindley inherits Wuthering Heights. He returns with a wife, Frances, and immediately eks revenge on Heathcliff. Once an orphan, later a pampered and favored son, Heathcliff now finds himlf treated as a common laborer, forced to work in the fields. Heathcliff continues his clo relationship with Catherine, however. One night they wander to Thrushcross Grange, hoping to tea Edgar and Isabella Linton, the cowardly, snobbish children who live there. Catherine is bitten by a dog and is forced to stay at the Grange to recuperate for five weeks, during which time Mrs. Linton works to make her a proper young lady. By the time Catherine returns, she has become infatuated with Edgar, and her relationship with Heathcliff grows more complicated.
When Frances dies after giving birth to a baby boy named Hareton, Hindley descends into the depths of alcoholism, and behaves even more cruelly and abusively toward Heathcliff. Eventually, Catherine’s desire for social advancement prompts her to become
engaged to Edgar Linton, despite her overpowering love for Heathcliff. Heathcliff runs away from Wuthering Heights, staying away for three years, and returning shortly after Catherine and Edgar’s marriage.
