literature review of wuthering heights

• Ask LitCharts AI
• Discussion Question Generator
• Essay Prompt Generator
• Quiz Question Generator

• Literature Guides
• Poetry Guides
• Shakespeare Translations
• Literary Terms

Wuthering Heights

Emily brontë.

Ask LitCharts AI: The answer to your questions

Welcome to the LitCharts study guide on Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights . Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides.

Wuthering Heights: Introduction

Wuthering heights: plot summary, wuthering heights: detailed summary & analysis, wuthering heights: themes, wuthering heights: quotes, wuthering heights: characters, wuthering heights: symbols, wuthering heights: literary devices, wuthering heights: quizzes, wuthering heights: theme wheel, brief biography of emily brontë.

Historical Context of Wuthering Heights

Other books related to wuthering heights.

• Full Title: Wuthering Heights
• When Published: 1847
• Literary Period: Victorian
• Genre: Romanticism / Realism / Gothic (e.g., mysterious family relationships, vulnerable heroines, houses full of secrets, and wild landscapes)
• Setting: Yorkshire, England, late 18th to early 19th century
• Climax: Heathcliff and Catherine's tearful, impassioned reunion just hours before Catherine gives birth and then dies
• Antagonist: Heathcliff (we root both for and against Heathcliff)
• Point of View: Nelly Dean, a housekeeper, tells the story of the Lintons and Earnshaws to Mr. Lockwood, who passes along her story to the reader.

Extra Credit for Wuthering Heights

The Bronte Family: Two of Emily Brontë's sisters are also respected writers. Charlotte Brontë wrote Jane Eyre , Shirley , Villette , and The Professor , and Anne Brontë wrote Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall . Because the Brontës collaborated, critics love to analyze the whole family, not just the individual authors. The family also appeals to readers because it experienced so much tragedy: five of the six children died young (four daughters died of tuberculosis, or "consumption," as it was known at the time, and Branwell, the only son, turned to drugs and alcohol when his career as an artist failed).

• Quizzes, saving guides, requests, plus so much more.

• NONFICTION BOOKS
• BEST NONFICTION 2023
• BEST NONFICTION 2024
• Historical Biographies
• The Best Memoirs and Autobiographies
• Philosophical Biographies
• World War 2
• World History
• American History
• British History
• Chinese History
• Russian History
• Ancient History (up to c. 500 AD)
• Medieval History (500-1400)
• Military History
• Art History
• Travel Books
• Ancient Philosophy
• Contemporary Philosophy
• Ethics & Moral Philosophy
• Great Philosophers
• Social & Political Philosophy
• Classical Studies
• New Science Books
• Maths & Statistics
• Popular Science
• Physics Books
• Climate Change Books
• How to Write
• English Grammar & Usage
• Books for Learning Languages
• Linguistics
• Political Ideologies
• Foreign Policy & International Relations
• American Politics
• British Politics
• Religious History Books
• Mental Health
• Neuroscience
• Child Psychology
• Film & Cinema
• Opera & Classical Music
• Behavioural Economics
• Development Economics
• Economic History
• Financial Crisis
• World Economies
• Investing Books
• Artificial Intelligence/AI Books
• Data Science Books
• Sex & Sexuality
• Death & Dying
• Food & Cooking
• Sports, Games & Hobbies
• FICTION BOOKS
• BEST NOVELS 2024
• BEST FICTION 2023
• New Literary Fiction
• World Literature
• Literary Criticism
• Literary Figures
• Classic English Literature
• American Literature
• Comics & Graphic Novels
• Fairy Tales & Mythology
• Historical Fiction
• Crime Novels
• Science Fiction
• Short Stories
• South Africa
• United States
• Arctic & Antarctica
• Afghanistan
• Myanmar (Formerly Burma)
• Netherlands
• Kids Recommend Books for Kids
• High School Teachers Recommendations
• Prizewinning Kids' Books
• Popular Series Books for Kids
• BEST BOOKS FOR KIDS (ALL AGES)
• Books for Toddlers and Babies
• Books for Preschoolers
• Books for Kids Age 6-8
• Books for Kids Age 9-12
• Books for Teens and Young Adults
• THE BEST SCIENCE BOOKS FOR KIDS
• BEST KIDS' BOOKS OF 2024
• BEST BOOKS FOR TEENS OF 2024
• Best Audiobooks for Kids
• Environment
• Best Books for Teens of 2024
• Best Kids' Books of 2024
• Mystery & Crime
• Travel Writing
• New History Books
• New Historical Fiction
• New Biography
• New Memoirs
• New World Literature
• New Economics Books
• New Climate Books
• New Math Books
• New Philosophy Books
• New Psychology Books
• New Physics Books
• THE BEST AUDIOBOOKS
• Actors Read Great Books
• Books Narrated by Their Authors
• Best Audiobook Thrillers
• Best History Audiobooks
• Nobel Literature Prize
• Booker Prize (fiction)
• Baillie Gifford Prize (nonfiction)
• Financial Times (nonfiction)
• Wolfson Prize (history)
• Royal Society (science)
• Pushkin House Prize (Russia)
• Walter Scott Prize (historical fiction)
• Arthur C Clarke Prize (sci fi)
• The Hugos (sci fi & fantasy)
• Audie Awards (audiobooks)

The Best Fiction Books » Classic English Literature

Wuthering heights, by emily brontë.

The novel Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë,  was first published under the pen name Ellis Bell in 1847, just a year before Emily’s death in 1848. Below, in our interviews with literary critics and journalists, you’ll see why many people still view it as one of the greatest novels ever written in English. Also worth looking at are the contemporary reviews, some of which were found in Emily’s desk after her death. These are available on the web (see links below), but are also included in the Norton Critical Edition of Wuthering Heights .

Recommendations from our site

“Wuthering Heights is a strange novel in a lot of ways. It’s a standalone—there’s not really another book like it.” Read more...

The best books on Sex in Victorian Literature

Claire Jarvis , Literary Scholar

“In Wuthering Heights once again it’s the landscape that underlines the choices the characters must make. Cathy must choose between the grand house in the lush valley: protected, comfortable and tame; or the wild, exhilarating bleakness of Wuthering Heights .” Read more...

Rachel Hickman recommends the best Novels Set in Wild Places

Rachel Hickman , Children's Author

“Cathy—and all of Emily Brontë’s characters—are more or less feral. That’s why we love them. It’s a different world, it’s a mad world. In some ways, Emily Brontë is more of a poet. But she has inspired many subsequent writers of fiction. You couldn’t imagine Lawrence without her, for example. You couldn’t imagine some of Hardy. “ Read more...

The Best Novels in English

Robert McCrum , Journalist

“The Brontës had this idea of a Samson figure. Rochester, like Samson, has to be mutilated before he can be domesticated. What is interesting about Heathcliff, in Wuthering Heights , is that he isn’t. He remains this superman. He is greater than a human being. He is named after two elemental things, the heath and the cliff. We never know what his first name is.” Read more...

The Best Victorian Novels

John Sutherland , Literary Scholar

“Again it’s about love turning into obsessions and being all-consuming and how even future generations are manipulated by this love.” Read more...

The best books on Enduring Love

Riz Khan , Journalist

“Wuthering Heights is a strange sort of book, baffling all regular criticism; yet, it is impossible to begin and not finish it; and quite as impossible to lay it aside afterwards and say nothing about it. In the midst of the reader’s perplexity the ideas predominant in his mind concerning this book are likely to be brutal cruelty, and semi-savage love…We strongly recommend all our readers who love novelty to get this story, for we can promise them that they never have read anything like it before.”

Review in Douglas Jerrold's Weekly Newspaper, January 15th, 1848, and found in Emily's desk after her death

“In spite of its truth to life in the remote nooks and corners of England Wuthering Heights is a disagreeable story.”

HF Chorley, review in the Athenaeum, Dec. 25, 1847 (cited in the Norton Critical Edition of Wuthering Heights)

“ Wuthering Heights is a strange, inartistic story. There are evidences in every chapter of a sort of rugged power–an unconscious strength–which the possessor seems never to think of turning to the best advantage. The general effect is inexpressibly painful. We know nothing in the whole range of our fictitious literature which presents such shocking pictures of the worst forms of humanity”

Review by Anonymous, Atlas, January 22,1848

Other books by Emily Brontë

Jane eyre and wuthering heights (illustrated) by charlotte brontë, emily brontë & fritz eichenberg (illustrator), the poems of emily brontë emily brontë (ed. by derek roper), our most recommended books, great expectations by charles dickens, jane eyre by charlotte brontë, wuthering heights by emily brontë, nineteen eighty-four by george orwell, jane austen: a life by claire tomalin, macbeth by william shakespeare.

Support Five Books

Five Books interviews are expensive to produce, please support us by donating a small amount .

We ask experts to recommend the five best books in their subject and explain their selection in an interview.

This site has an archive of more than one thousand seven hundred interviews, or eight thousand book recommendations. We publish at least two new interviews per week.

Five Books participates in the Amazon Associate program and earns money from qualifying purchases.

© Five Books 2024

• Book Reviews
• Authors' Works
• Classic & Masterpieces
• Self-Help Books
• Books for Women
• Business & Investing Books
• Health & Wellness Books
• Creative Learning
• Romance Books
• Best Horror Books
• Children & Family
• Holiday Books
• Reading Notes & Calendar

Book Recommender Tool

Book Summary Tool

Book Series Finder Tool

• Book Comparison Tool
• Diverse Children's Book Finder
• Book Events 2024
• Children's Book Festivals & Fair
• Synonym & Related Words Explorer Tool
• Recipe Generator Tool

This website is here to help you live a better life. Discover curated book recommendations and reviews to find joy, purpose, and balance in your work, relationships, health, and personal life.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte: Book Review & Summary

Read our Book Reviews & Recommendations Guidelines

We independently review books we recommend. When you buy through our links, we may earn a commission. Learn more.

" Wuthering Heights "   by Emily Bronte tells the story of the Earnshaw family of Wuthering Heights and the Linton family of Thrushcross Grange. Heathcliff was an orphan adopted by Old Earnshaw. 

Book: Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

Wuthering Heights is the only novel by the English author Emily Brontë, initially published in 1847 under her pen name "Ellis Bell". Wikipedia

• Originally published: December 1847
• Publisher: Penguin Classics 
• Author: Emily Brontë
• Pages: 416 
• Genres: Novel, Gothic fiction, Tragedy
• Adapted from: Wuthering Heights
• Characters: Heathcliff, Catherine Earnshaw, Hindley Earnshaw, MORE
• Protagonist: Heathcliff

About the Author: Emily Brontë

Excerpts from the original text.

I can't explain it clearly to you, but you, everyone, must have this idea: besides yourself, you have another you - there should be another you. Why did God create me, if all I am is in this body? My biggest trouble in this world is Heathcliff's trouble; I have noticed and felt every one of his troubles from the very beginning. 

The biggest thing I miss in my life is him. Even if everything else is destroyed and he alone remains, I will still be me. If everything else remained and he alone was destroyed, the whole universe would become a giant stranger of which I no longer seemed a part. My love for Linton is like clusters of leaves hanging in the forest. 

Time will change it. I know very well that in winter, the leaves will fall. My love for Heathcliff is like the eternal rock under my feet, from which a few visible sources of happiness flow, but it is indispensable. 

Nally, I am Heathcliff! He is always in my heart - not as a joy, as I cannot always be my own joy, but because he is my own being. So there is no need to mention that the two of us will separate. This is impossible. ——Quoted from page 90

Book Summary

1. the surprise of a blank piece of paper, 2. the knife should be sharper., 3. mortals don’t have to forgive., book  review, 1. spiritual twins.

2. Heathcliff's Revenge

3. Catherine's love and choice

4. emily bronte: a woman with a "beast" in her heart, 5. emily brontë’s emotional suspicion, 6. "good girl" and "beast": discipline and resistance, study notes(by page no#160), related post.

Looking For More Books To Read?

Explore and find your next good read - Book Recommendations for specific interests.

Discover ratings, reviews, summaries, and genres.

Instant Any Book Summary

Explore and find your next Book Summary for specific interests.

Looking For Books Series To Read?

Explore and find Book Series for specific interests.

Free Printable Calendar

Manage Reading Notes, Schedule & Events

Manage your reading schedule, write notes, and track your reading progress by downloading this printable calendar.

Popular Posts

25 Best Books to Understand the Israel-Palestine Conflict

We are talking about the historical books to understand the Palestine-Israel conflict.  If you want to study an academic issue thoroughly, t...

25 Best Books to Attract Women and Get the Girl

Today we will share the 25 Best Books to Attract Women and How to Get a Girl: The Ultimate Booklist for Attracting a Girl. Men like to impr...

The Moon and Sixpence: Book Review, Summary & Analysis

" The Moon and Sixpence " is a novel written by British novelist William Somerset Maugham. It was written in 1919.  The work desc...

Hamlet by William Shakespeare: Book Review, Summary & Analysis

I have received many requests to review the book Hamlet which was written by William Shakespeare'. In response, I'm pleased to offer...

Recent Post

I am Muhiuddin Alam, the Founder and Chief Editor of ReadingAndThinking.com. I consistently contribute content and articles to various websites and publications, including Medium , Quora , Linkedin , Substack , Vocal , Flipboard , and Amazon KDP . I always read books and, for the past 10 years, have been providing book recommendations and reviews. Find Me: About Me & Google Knowledge Panel. Contact: [email protected]

Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Literature › Analysis of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights

Analysis of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on March 25, 2019 • ( 3 )

Wuthering Heights is constructed around a series of dialectic motifs that interconnect and unify the elements of setting, character, and plot. An examination of these motifs will give the reader the clearest insight into the central meaning of the novel. Although Wuthering Heights is a “classic,” as Frank Kermode has noted, precisely because it is open to many different critical methods and conducive to many levels of interpretation, the novel grows from a coherent imaginative vision that underlies all the motifs. That vision demonstrates that all human perception is limited and failed. The fullest approach to Emily Brontë’s novel is through the basic patterns that support this vision.

Wuthering Heights concerns the interactions of two families, the Earnshaws and Lintons, over three generations. The novel is set in the desolate moors of Yorkshire and covers the years from 1771 to 1803. The Earnshaws and Lintons are in harmony with their environment, but their lives are disrupted by an outsider and catalyst of change, the orphan Heathcliff. Heathcliff is, first of all, an emblem of the social problems of a nation entering the age of industrial expansion and urban growth. Although Brontë sets the action of the novel entirely within the locale familiar to her, she reminds the reader continually of the contrast between that world and the larger world outside.

Aside from Heathcliff’s background as a child of the streets and the description of urban Liverpool, from which he is brought, the novel contains other reminders that Yorkshire, long insulated from change and susceptible only to the forces of nature, is no longer as remote as it once was. The servant Joseph’s religious cant, the class distinctions obvious in the treatment of Nelly Dean as well as of Heathcliff, and Lockwood’s pseudosophisticated urban values are all reminders that Wuthering Heights cannot remain as it has been, that religious, social, and economic change is rampant. Brontë clearly signifies in the courtship and marriage of young Cathy and Hareton that progress and enlightenment will come and the wilderness will be tamed. Heathcliff is both an embodiment of the force of this change and its victim. He brings about a change but cannot change himself. What he leaves behind, as Lockwood attests and the relationship of Cathy and Hareton verifies, is a new society, at peace with itself and its environment.

It is not necessary, however, to examine in depth the Victorian context of Wuthering Height s to sense the dialectic contrast of environments. Within the limited setting that the novel itself describes, society is divided between two opposing worlds: Wuthering Heights, ancestral home of the Earnshaws, and Thrushcross Grange, the Linton estate. Wuthering Heights is rustic and wild; it is open to the elements of nature and takes its name from “atmospheric tumult.” The house is strong, built with narrow windows and jutting cornerstones, fortified to withstand the battering of external forces. It is identified with the outdoors and nature and with strong, “masculine” values. Its appearance, both inside and out, is wild, untamed, disordered, and hard. The Grange expresses a more civilized, controlled atmosphere. The house is neat and orderly, and there is always an abundance of light—to Brontë’s mind, “feminine” values. It is not surprising that Lockwood is more comfortable at the Grange, since he takes pleasure in “feminine” behavior (gossip, vanity of appearance, adherence to social decorum, romantic self-delusion), while Heathcliff, entirely “masculine,” is always out of place there.

Even Cathy’s passionate cry for Heathcliff, “Nelly, I am Heathcliff,” is less love for him as an individual than the deepest form of self-love. Cathy cannot exist without him, but a meaningful relationship is not possible because Cathy sees Heathcliff only as a reflection of herself. Heathcliff, too, has denied an important aspect of his personality. Archetypally masculine, Heathcliff acts out only the aggressive, violent parts of himself.

The settings and the characters are patterned against each other, and explosions are the only possible results. Only Hareton and young Cathy, each of whom embodies the psychological characteristics of both Heights and Grange, can successfully sustain a mutual relationship.

This dialectic structure extends into the roles of the narrators as well. The story is reflected through the words of Nelly Dean—an inmate of both houses, a participant in the events of the narrative, and a confidant of the major characters—and Lockwood, an outsider who witnesses only the results of the characters’ interactions. Nelly is a companion and servant in the Earnshaw and Linton households, and she shares many of the values and perceptions of the families. Lockwood, an urban sophisticate on retreat, misunderstands his own character as well as the characters of others. His brief romantic “adventure” in Bath and his awkwardness when he arrives at the Heights (he thinks Cathy will fall in love with him; he mistakes the dead rabbits for puppies) exemplify his obtuseness. His perceptions are always to be questioned. Occasionally, however, even a denizen of the conventional world may gain a glimpse of the forces at work beneath the surface of reality. Lockwood’s dream of the dead Cathy, which sets off his curiosity and Heathcliff’s final plans, is a reminder that even the placid, normal world may be disrupted by the psychic violence of a willful personality.

The presentation of two family units and parallel brother-sister, husband-wife relationships in each also emphasizes the dialectic. That two such opposing modes of behavior could arise in the same environment prevents the reader from easy condemnation of either pair. The use of flashback for the major part of the narration—it begins in medias res—reminds the reader that he or she is seeing events out of their natural order, recounted by two individuals whose reliability must be questioned. The working out of the plot over three generations further suggests that no one group, much less one individual, can perceive the complexity of the human personality.

Taken together, the setting, plot, characters, and structure combine into a whole when they are seen as parts of the dialectic nature of existence. In a world where opposing forces are continually arrayed against each other in the environment, in society, in families, and in relationships, as well as within the individual, there can be no easy route to perception of another human soul. Wuthering Heights convincingly demonstrates the complexity of this dialectic and portrays the limitations of human perception.

Bibliography Barnard, Robert. Emily Brontë. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Benvenuto, Richard. Emily Brontë. Boston: Twayne, 1982. Berg, Maggie. “Wuthering Heights”: The Writing in the Margin. New York: Twayne, 1996. Davies, Stevie. Emily Brontë: Heretic. London: Women’s Press, 1994. Frank, Katherine. A Chainless Soul: A Life of Emily Brontë. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990. Glen, Heather, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Brontës. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Liddell, Robert. Twin Spirits: The Novels of Emily and Anne Brontë. London: Peter Owen, 1990. Miller, Lucasta. The Brontë Myth. London: Jonathan Cape, 2001. Pykett, Lyn. Emily Brontë. Savage, Md.: Barnes & Noble, 1989. Rollyson, Carl, and Lisa Paddock. The Brontës A to Z: The Essential Reference to Their Lives and Work. New York: Facts On File, 2003. Vine, Steve. Emily Brontë. New York: Twayne, 1998. Winnifrith, Tom, ed. Critical Essays on Emily Brontë. NewYork: G. K. Hall, 1997.

Major works Poetry: Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, 1846 (with Charlotte Brontë and Anne Brontë); The Complete Poems of Emily Jane Brontë, 1941 (C. W. Hatfield, editor); Gondal’s Queen: A Novel in Verse by Emily Jane Brontë, 1955 (Fannie E. Ratchford, editor). Nonfiction : Five Essays Written in French, 1948 (Lorine White Nagel, translator); The Brontë Letters, 1954 (Muriel Spark, editor).

Share this:

Categories: Literature , Novel Analysis

Tags: Analysis of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights , Character Study of Catherine Earnshaw , Character Study of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights , Character Study of Heathcliff , Character Study of Lockwood , Character Study of Nelly Dean , Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights , Frank Kermode , Gothic Literature , Literary Criticism , Literary Theory , Motifs in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights , Nelly Dean , Study Guide of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights , Summary of Analysis of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights , Summary of Wuthering Heights , Themes of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights , Victorian Literature , Wuthering Heights , Wuthering Heights as a Gothic Novel

Related Articles

I found it very informative. Representation of the two worlds is amazing. Thanks a lot.

VERY NICE;I LIKED THE WAY OF ANALYSIS OF WHOLE NOVEL AND DESCRIBE EVERY THING,

• Wuthering Heights: A Journey from the Novel to the Movie - Different Truths

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

• English Literature
• Short Stories
• Literary Terms
• Web Stories

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte | Summary, Setting & Analysis

“Wuthering Heights” is a classic novel written by Emily Bronte. It is renowned for its intense portrayal of love, revenge, and the complexities of human nature. In this article, we will delve into the various aspects of this timeless piece of literature, including its summary, setting, and analysis.

Table of Contents

Emily Bronte, born in 1818, was an English novelist and poet. She, along with her sisters Charlotte and Anne Bronte, is best known for her contribution to English literature. Emily’s only novel, “Wuthering Heights,” was published in 1847 under the pseudonym Ellis Bell.

Overview of the Plot

The narrative of “Wuthering Heights” revolves around the passionate yet destructive love story between Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw. The novel is set in the harsh Yorkshire moors and spans several decades, depicting the lives of the inhabitants of Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange.

Introduction to Characters

Key characters include Heathcliff, an orphan taken in by the Earnshaw family; Catherine Earnshaw, Heathcliff’s childhood friend and love interest; Edgar Linton, Catherine’s husband; and Nelly Dean, the housekeeper and narrator of the story.

Physical Setting

The novel is primarily set in two neighboring houses: Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange. The former is depicted as a dark, gloomy mansion on the Yorkshire moors, while the latter represents a more refined and civilized environment.

Historical Setting

“Wuthering Heights” is set against the backdrop of early 19th-century England, a time marked by social and economic upheaval. The novel reflects the rigid class structure and societal norms of the period.

Themes Explored

Love and revenge.

At its core, “Wuthering Heights” explores the destructive power of love and the desire for revenge. The tumultuous relationship between Heathcliff and Catherine drives much of the plot, as their love becomes entangled with themes of jealousy, betrayal, and vengeance.

Social Class

The novel also delves into the theme of social class, highlighting the divisions and tensions between the characters from different backgrounds. Heathcliff’s rise from poverty to wealth underscores the fluidity of class distinctions and the complexities of social hierarchy.

Nature vs. Culture

The rugged landscape of the Yorkshire moors serves as a powerful backdrop for the story, emphasizing the contrast between the untamed forces of nature and the constraints of human civilization.

Analysis of Characters

Heathcliff is a complex and enigmatic character whose dark and brooding nature captivates readers. His intense love for Catherine is overshadowed by his thirst for revenge, making him one of literature’s most compelling antiheroes.

Catherine Earnshaw

Catherine Earnshaw is portrayed as a spirited and passionate young woman torn between her love for Heathcliff and her desire for social status. Her tragic fate reflects the novel’s exploration of the destructive effects of societal expectations on individual happiness.

Edgar Linton

Edgar Linton represents the opposite of Heathcliff, embodying the refined manners and social status prized by Victorian society. Despite his gentleness and kindness, he is ultimately unable to compete with Heathcliff for Catherine’s affections.

Nelly Dean serves as the primary narrator of the story, providing insight into the lives of the characters and the events that unfold at Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange. Her perspective offers a nuanced understanding of the complex relationships within the novel.

Narrative Structure

Framing device.

“Wuthering Heights” is structured as a series of nested narratives, with the story being recounted by multiple characters. This framing device adds depth and complexity to the narrative, allowing readers to see events from different perspectives.

Multiple Perspectives

The use of multiple narrators in the novel allows for a rich and multifaceted exploration of the characters and their motivations. Each narrator brings their own biases and interpretations to the story, adding layers of complexity to the overall narrative.

Symbolism in “Wuthering Heights”

The weather in “Wuthering Heights” often mirrors the emotional states of the characters, with storms and tempests reflecting their inner turmoil. The harsh and unforgiving landscape of the moors serves as a metaphor for the tumultuous relationships depicted in the novel.

The houses of Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange are symbolic of the characters who inhabit them. Wuthering Heights represents passion, wildness, and untamed nature, while Thrushcross Grange symbolizes civility, refinement, and social order.

Writing Style and Language

Gothic elements.

“Wuthering Heights” is characterized by its Gothic elements, including themes of madness, the supernatural, and the macabre. The novel’s dark and atmospheric prose creates a sense of unease and foreboding, adding to its haunting appeal.

Psychological Depth

Bronte’s exploration of the inner workings of the human psyche adds a layer of psychological depth to the novel. The characters’ inner thoughts and emotions are laid bare, allowing readers to empathize with their struggles and motivations.

Critical Reception

Despite receiving mixed reviews upon its publication, “Wuthering Heights” has since been recognized as a literary masterpiece. Its unconventional narrative structure, complex characters, and powerful themes have cemented its place in the canon of English literature.

Influence and Legacy

“Wuthering Heights” has had a profound influence on subsequent generations of writers and artists. Its themes of love, revenge, and redemption continue to resonate with readers around the world, ensuring its enduring legacy.

Comparisons with Other Works

“Wuthering Heights” is often compared to other works of Gothic literature, such as Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” and Bram Stoker’s “Dracula.” Its exploration of dark and taboo subjects sets it apart from more conventional Victorian novels.

Film Adaptations

Numerous film adaptations of “Wuthering Heights” have been produced over the years, with directors seeking to capture the novel’s haunting atmosphere and complex characters on screen. Notable adaptations include the 1939 film starring Laurence Olivier and the 2011 version directed by Andrea Arnold.

READ MORE : 

• What is George Orwell’s real name?
• Which Brontë sister wrote “Jane Eyre”?
• Beowulf | Summary, Poem, Characters, Monster, Analysis

“Wuthering Heights” continues to captivate readers with its timeless tale of love, revenge, and redemption. Emily Bronte’s masterful storytelling and richly drawn characters ensure that the novel remains a classic of English literature.

Is “Wuthering Heights” based on a true story?

No, “Wuthering Heights” is a work of fiction, although it may have been inspired by elements of Emily Bronte’s own life and experiences.

Why is “Wuthering Heights” considered a Gothic novel?

The novel features many elements typical of Gothic literature, including a dark and foreboding atmosphere, supernatural occurrences, and themes of madness and obsession.

What is the significance of the title “Wuthering Heights”?

The term “wuthering” refers to the fierce winds that often blow across the Yorkshire moors, emphasizing the wild and untamed nature of the setting.

Why did Emily Bronte use a male pseudonym for “Wuthering Heights”?

During the 19th century, it was common for female authors to use male or gender-neutral pen names to avoid gender bias and discrimination in the publishing industry.

What is the legacy of “Wuthering Heights” in popular culture?

“Wuthering Heights” has inspired countless adaptations in various media, including film, television, and music. Its themes and characters continue to resonate with audiences worldwide.

Related Posts

When was the golden notebook first published, the title of the first book in j.r.r. tolkien’s “the lord of the rings” series, who wrote “the chronicles of barsetshire” series.

Attempt a critical appreciation of The Triumph of Life by P.B. Shelley.

Consider The Garden by Andrew Marvell as a didactic poem.

Why does Plato want the artists to be kept away from the ideal state

Do any of the characters surprise you at any stage in the novel Tamas

William Shakespeare Biography and Works

Discuss the theme of freedom in Frederick Douglass’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

How does William Shakespeare use the concept of power in Richard III

Analyze the use of imagery in William Shakespeare’s sonnets

Meg 05 literary criticism & theory solved assignment 2024-25, name an australian author known for their memoirs, what is the significance of the character “nathanial delaney” in “the secret river”.

Poem Summary Easter by Jill Alexander Essbaum Line by Line Explanation

• Advertisement
• Privacy & Policy
• Other Links

© 2023 Literopedia

Welcome Back!

Login to your account below

Remember Me

Retrieve your password

Please enter your username or email address to reset your password.

Are you sure want to unlock this post?

Are you sure want to cancel subscription.

• Login / Sign Up

Wuthering Heights is a masterpiece of literary genius that is incredibly unpleasant to read

What makes Emily Brontë’s novel great is the way it thinks about abuse.

by Constance Grady

The cliché about bookish women and the novels of the 19th century is that you have to pick from three authors, and you’re only allowed to love one of them: Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, or Emily Brontë — you have to have one favorite, and whichever one it is says something profound about you.

Of the canonical three, personally, I will go to bat for both Austen and for Charlotte Brontë — witty women and sad men having charged conversations in the drawing room, sign me up. But Emily Brontë — with her child ghosts sobbing at the window and her brutal, violent men; Emily Brontë, whose 200th birthday is Monday — I have never quite known what to do with her.

In part, that’s because Emily’s whole thing is to be elusive, to make you not know quite what to do with her. She left behind very little documentation of her life: there’s a novel, Wuthering Heights, that is considered to be one of the greatest in the English canon, some astonishingly brilliant poetry, and almost nothing else.

Our ideas about Emily that persist into the modern day mostly come from a few descriptions written by Charlotte, who depicted her sister as a wild spirit of the moors, and, more colorfully, from Charlotte’s biographer Elizabeth Gaskell. We have no way of knowing how true Gaskell’s ideas are, but they created the image of Emily that we tend to rely on today: that she beat her dog with her bare fists to discipline him; that when she was attacked by a rabid dog she cauterized the wound herself with a red hot poker.

• The Brontë sisters are the feminist heroes we need in 2017

The few concrete facts we have about Emily tend to center on how little of her there is. Her lifetime was little: She died young of tuberculosis, at just 30 years old. Her body was little: She was so emaciated when she died that her coffin was only 16 inches wide (although it’s unclear that 16 inches was really quite so small at the time as it seems to us now ). Her body of work is unfairly little: She had time to leave behind only Wuthering Heights and her poetry, plus the persistent, unconfirmed rumor that she was working on a second novel and that Charlotte burnt the manuscript after Emily died.

When we talk about Emily, then, we are left with the poetry and with Wuthering Heights to talk about. And of Wuthering Heights I can only say that it is a staggering literary accomplishment that I would be quite happy to never read again.

The genius of Wuthering Heights lies in the way it thinks about cycles of abuse

When I read Wuthering Heights for the first time in college, I read it under the belief that it was a romantic love story, and as such, I hated it.

That’s not to say that Wuthering Heights is not romantic, or that people who enjoy reading it as a love story are wrong; to an extent, this is a book that wants to be read as a love story. Heathcliff and Cathy are elementally connected: They scream each other’s names across the moors, and it’s all very wild and passionate. But I’ve never been able to root for the lovers to be happy, and when I try to read Wuthering Heights as though I should be rooting for them, I can’t stand anything about the book.

Heathcliff and Cathy are both such manifestly awful people — he tortures puppies and beats women and children; she plays elaborate intergenerational mind games — that I want them together only so that they will stop inflicting themselves on their friends and relations out of sheer spite. If Heathcliff and Cathy had the common decency to get married in Volume 1 like they clearly wanted to, they would have saved everyone around them a great deal of time and trouble for generations to come.

To appreciate the greatness of Wuthering Heights , I had to stop trying to read it as a love story. It’s when I began to read it instead as a story of intergenerational abuse, and how that abuse creates monsters, that I started to understand why it’s such a beloved book.

Wuthering Heights is widely considered to be a romantic novel because of Heathcliff and Cathy. Their semi-incestuous bond is the emotional core of the novel; the passages between them are forever throbbing with so much feeling that the only way for them to possibly express it is to refuse to marry and just spend their lives gazing longingly at each other across the moors while they ruin the lives of everyone around them.

The nightmarish quality of the world around Cathy and Heathcliff seems to be almost a consequence of their violently passionate love, not the other way around, and the pleasurable appeal of the fantasy that their love embodies — of someone loving you so deeply that all they can do is burn down the world in response — is hard to overstate.

But Brontë pays just as much attention to the nightmarish world around Heathcliff and Cathy as she does to their doomed, passionate love, and it’s because of that attention that Heathcliff is also the central monster of Wuthering Heights . As part of his plan to wreak revenge against his abusive adoptive brother Hindly, Heathcliff manages to do the following over the course of the novel: he ruins Hindley, marries and abuses Cathy’s sister-in-law, abuses the ensuing son, abuses Hindley’s son, and then forces his own son to marry Cathy’s daughter. Also he hangs a puppy with a handkerchief somewhere in there.

What makes Heathcliff psychologically compelling is that his monstrousness has a clear cause: He was abused by Hindley, whom he considered a brother for most of his childhood, and who forced him to live and work as a servant for the family as soon as he inherited the family home.

It is Hindley’s abuse that leads to Heathcliff’s abuse, and Heathcliff in turn creates his son Linton, the cruelest and most selfish of the novel’s younger generation. It is only the capacity of Cathy’s daughter, Young Catherine, and Hindley’s son, Hareton, to rise above the abuse showered upon them by the older generations that creates the possibility of redemption at the novel’s end.

As a portrait of the cycle of abuse, this is heady stuff. Wuthering Heights takes place in a viciously brutal world, one in which casual interfamily violence is the norm, and it is clear-eyed about the emotional dynamics that build such a world and allow it to flourish.

But that world is a nightmare. It’s an undeniably well-crafted nightmare of deep psychological resonance, and it is rich and immersive, so that when you read it, you feel that you are trapped on the moors and there are people screaming all around you. It’s an incredible literary effect and Emily Brontë was probably a genius to achieve it, and holy god I want no part in it .

So on Emily Brontë’s 200th birthday, here’s to the monumental achievement of a woman who left very little behind. Wuthering Heights is one of the only windows we have available to the interior life of its fiercely private author, and it is a staggering accomplishment.

Please never force me to read it again.

Most Popular

• The yellow school bus is in trouble
• OpenAI as we knew it is dead
• Weather radar showed a strange blue mass in the eye of Hurricane Helene. What was it?
• The ugly reality behind Tim Walz’s farm-friendly image
• 7 questions — and zero conspiracy theories — about the allegations against Sean “Diddy” Combs

Today, Explained

Understand the world with a daily explainer plus the most compelling stories of the day.

This is the title for the native ad

More in Culture

The comedian and former talk show host wants to girlboss her way to sympathy.

The aesthetic of Cybertrucks, energy drinks, and MMA, explained.

Everything we know about the growing case against the music mogul.

In defense of the supremely useful and unfairly maligned word.

The toxic stans aren’t the problem, it’s fan culture itself.

Kids love to eat them. Parents love to fight about them.

Wuthering Heights

By emily brontë.

Out of the Romantic Movement in English literature comes ‘Wuthering Heights’ by Emily Brontë, a gothic fiction whose plot mysteriousness causes its initial public reception to be one characterized by verbal backlashes and callouts.

About the Book

Article written by Victor Onuorah

Degree in Journalism from University of Nigeria, Nsukka.

Despite the fact, ‘ Wuthering Heights ’ would later attain an esteemed height and even gets to be called a classic, a fit it didn’t previously manage following poor ratings. After Emily Brontë’s passing, the book goes on to score higher reviews from critics following a careful re-evaluation of the fine piece of art.

Key Facts About Wuthering Heights

• Book Name : ‘ Wuthering Heights ’
• Book Author : Emily Jane Brontë
• Publishers : Thomas Cautley Newby
• Date : December 1847
• Genre : Gotic fiction, tragedy
• Pages : 416 pages
• Settings : Yorkshire, England.
• Climax : When Catherine decided against marrying Heathcliff, the man for whom she had a longtime affection, to wed Edgar.

Emily Brontë and Wuthering Heights

Emily Brontë started by writing poems and got quite good at it. By her early adult age, she had garnered several good poems and created great fictional stories and characters. Before publishing ‘ Wuthering Heights ’ in 1847, she had a few years back published a collection of poems along with those written by her two sisters, Catherine and Anne.

In the late 1830s, during the release of their anthology, their first publication, the Brontë sisters resolved to use male-given names each, including only their initials. This decision was perhaps driven because the sisters wanted the public to view their works objectively and not based on the gender behind the works’ authorship – as, at the time, there was a prevalence of existing prejudices and gender inequalities

Later in 1847 when Emily went solo and published her would-be groundbreaking and only book, she continued using her pseudonym and the same happened with Charlotte and Anne, who also used their pen names. Of the three sisters, Charlotte’s book, ‘ Jane Eyre ,’ was more popular and became an instant hit – and even influenced the publisher’s acceptance of Emily’s ‘ Wuthering Heights ’ and later, Anne’s ‘ The Tenant of Wildfell Hall .’

For Emily’s ‘ Wuthering Heights ,’ reviews were bad and critics were relentless with it. However, in later years, after a much better understanding of the message of the book, ‘ Wuthering Heights ’ started gathering momentum as critics, and public readers began praising the superior creativity and imagination the book carried. By this time, Emily had already passed away, aged 30.

Books Related to Wuthering Heights

Many might see Emily Brontë’s ‘ Wuthering Heights ’ as a book overly inflicted with scenic plots, awash with grim events and outcomes. This may be true, judging by how the plot plays throughout the book. But to Emily, ‘ Wuthering Heights ’ was much more than just another gothic fiction filled with a little sweet, but mostly bitter, tragic events. She tailored the book to suitably portray a fictional version of her life’s experiences.

Several books are related to Emily Brontë’s ‘ Wuthering Heights ,’ in terms of the book’s character, themes, and intent of the author. One such book is Jane Austen ’s ‘ Pride and Prejudice . ’ Other books in this category include ‘ Jane Eyre ’ written by Charlotte Brontë, Emily’s older sister.

The Lasting Impact of Wuthering Heights

Emily Brontë’s book, ‘ Wuthering Heights ,’ has lived well beyond the reputation earlier imagined for such a book. Following a rocky start to life, the book saw huge setbacks, as ratings went down, and comments were mostly complaints and backlash. But in no time, the book picked up and ever since risen to fame – and even reached the level of being tagged an English classic.

‘ Wuthering Heights ’ may be a book criticized for featuring several strong themes considered unsuitable to 19th-century public and book critics, but it is surely one book that provides helpful moral lessons to its readers in areas such as love, revenge, and kindness, among others . 

Wuthering Heights Review 

Wuthering heights themes and analysis, wuthering heights character list , wuthering heights historical context , wuthering heights quotes , wuthering heights summary , about victor onuorah.

Victor is as much a prolific writer as he is an avid reader. With a degree in Journalism, he goes around scouring literary storehouses and archives; picking up, dusting the dirt off, and leaving clean even the most crooked pieces of literature all with the skill of analysis.

Discover the secrets to learning and enjoying literature.

Join Book Analysis

'Wuthering Heights' Overview

OLI SCARFF / AFP / Getty Images

• M.A., Classics, Catholic University of Milan
• M.A., Journalism, New York University.
• B.A., Classics, Catholic University of Milan

Set in the moorlands of northern England, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is part love story, part Gothic novel, and part class novel. The story centers on the dynamics of two generations of the residents of Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange, with Catherine Earnshaw's and Heathcliff's unconsummated love as a guiding force. Wuthering Heights is deemed one of the greatest love stories in fiction. 

Fast Facts: Wuthering Heights

• Title: Wuthering Heights
• Author: Emily Brontë
• Publisher: Thomas Cautley Newby
• Year Published: 1847
• Genre: Gothic romance
• Type of Work: Novel
• Original Language: English
• Themes: Love, hate, revenge and social class
• Characters: Catherine Earnshaw, Heathcliff, Hindley Earnshaw, Edgar Linton, Isabella Linton, Lockwood, Nelly Dean, Hareton Earnshaw, Linton Heathcliff, Catherine Linton
• Notable Adaptations: 1939 movie adaptation starring Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon; 1992 movie adaptation starring Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche; 1978 song “Wuthering Heights” by Kate Bush
• Fun Fact:   Wuthering Heights inspired notable power-ballad author Jim Steinman on several occasions. Hits such as “It’s All Coming Back To Me Now” and “Total Eclipse of The Heart” drew from the tumultuous romance between Cathy and Heathcliff.

Plot Summary

The story is told through diary entries by a London-based gentleman named Lockwood, which relate the events as told by the former Wuthering Heights housekeeper, Nelly Dean. Spanning a period of 40 years, Wuthering Heights is divided in two parts: the first deals with the all-consuming (but not consummated) love between Catherine Earnshaw and the outcast Heathcliff, and her subsequent marriage to the delicate Edgar Linton; while the second part deals with Heathcliff as a stereotypical Gothic villain and his vengeful mistreatment of Catherine’s daughter (also named Catherine), his own son, and his former abuser’s son.

Major Characters

Catherine Earnshaw. The heroine of the novel, she is temperamental and strong-willed. She is torn between the raggedy Heathcliff, whom she loves to the point of self-identification, and the delicate Edgar Linton, who is her equal in social status. She dies during childbirth.

Heathcliff. The hero/villain of the novel, Heathcliff is an ethnically ambiguous character whom Mr. Earnshaw brought to Wuthering Heights after finding him on the streets of Liverpool. He develops an all-consuming love for Cathy, and is routinely degraded by Hindley, who is jealous of him. After Cathy marries Edgar Linton, Heathcliff swears revenge upon all those who wronged him.

Edgar Linton. A delicate and effeminate man, he is Catherine’s husband. He is usually mild-mannered, but Heathcliff routinely tests his politeness.

Isabella Linton. Edgar’s sister, she elopes with Heathcliff, who uses her to jumpstart his revenge plan. She eventually escapes from him and dies more than a decade later. 

Hindley Earnshaw. Catherine’s older brother, he takes over Wuthering Heights after their father dies. He always disliked Heathcliff and starts mistreating him after the death of his father, who openly favored Heathcliff. He becomes a drunkard and a gambler after his wife’s death, and, through gambling, he loses Wuthering Heights to Heathcliff.

Hareton Earnshaw. He is Hindley’s son, whom Heathcliff mistreats as part of his revenge against Hindley. Illiterate but kind, he falls for Catherine Linton, who, after some snubbing, eventually reciprocates his feelings.

Linton Heathcliff. Heathcliff’s sickly son, he is a spoiled and pampered child and youth.

Catherine Linton. Cathy and Edgar’s daughter, she inherits personality traits from both of her parents. She has a willful temperament just like Cathy, while she takes after her father in terms of kindness.

Nelly Dean. Cathy’s former servant and Catherine’s nursemaid, she narrates the events unfolding at Wuthering Heights to Lockwood, who records them in his diary. Since she is too close to the events, and often participated in them, she is an unreliable narrator.

Lockwood. An effete gentleman, he is the frame narrator of the story. He is also an unreliable narrator, being too far removed from the events.

Major Themes

Love. A meditation on the nature of love is at the center Wuthering Heights. The relationship between Cathy and Heathcliff, which is all-consuming and brings Cathy to fully identify with Heathcliff, guides the novel, while the other types of love are portrayed as either ephemeral (Cathy and Edgar) or self-serving (Heathcliff and Isabella). 

Hate. Heathcliff’s hate parallels, in fierceness, his love for Cathy. When he finds out he can’t have her, he starts a revenge plan to settle the score with all of those who wronged him, and morphs from a Byronic hero into a Gothic villain.

Class. Wuthering Heights is fully immersed in the class-related issues of the Victorian era. The novel's tragic turn comes because of the class differences between Cathy (middle class) and Heathcliff (an orphan, the ultimate outcast), as she is bound to marry an equal. 

Nature as a stand-in for characters. The moody nature and climate of the moorlands portrays and mirrors the inner turmoils of the characters, who, in turn, are associated with elements of nature themselves: Cathy is a thorn, Heathcliff is like the rocks, and the Lintons are honeysuckles.

Literary Style

Wuthering Heights is written as a series of diary entries by Lockwood, who writes down what he learns from Nelly Dean. He also inserts several narrations within the main narrations, made of as-told-tos and letters. The characters in the novel speak according to their social class.

About the Author

The fifth of six siblings, Emily Brontë wrote only one novel, Wuthering Heights, before dying at age 30. Very little is known about her, and biographical facts are sparse due to her reclusive nature. She and her siblings used to create stories about the fictional land of Angria, and then she and her sister, Anne, also started writing stories about the fictional island of Gondal. 

• 'Wuthering Heights' Themes, Symbols, Literary Devices
• 'Wuthering Heights' Questions for Study and Discussion
• 'Wuthering Heights' Characters
• 'Wuthering Heights' Summary
• 'Wuthering Heights' Quiz
• What's Important About The Title of 'Wuthering Heights'?
• The Role of Women in "Wuthering Heights"
• Roman Authors Timeline
• '1984' Study Guide
• '1984' Summary
• '1984' Characters
• 'The Outsiders' Overview
• 'The Alchemist' Overview
• 'Macbeth' Overview
• The Crucible Overview
• 'The Tempest' Overview

Saturday, Sept. 28, 2024

IN THE NEWS:

Book review: ‘wuthering heights’.

(Signet Classic)

By Umbreen Ali

Jan. 4, 2016 12:05 a.m..

Young adult fantasy author Lena Coakley will release “Worlds of Ink and Shadow” Tuesday, a fictional novel with historical characters: the Brontё siblings, classic literature authors. In Coakley’s new book, Charlotte, Emily, Branwell and Anne dive into a fictional world they created. Daily Bruin senior staff Umbreen Ali reviews both Coakley’s meta book and Emily Brontё’s classic, dark novel “Wuthering Heights.”

Reading “Wuthering Heights” filled me with so many emotions that, upon finishing the novel, I was left somewhat baffled about what exactly I had just experienced.

Initially published in 1847, Emily Brontё’s “Wuthering Heights” is referenced in countless books, movies and even anime. As a self-proclaimed classics lover and avid reader, I found it a little embarrassing that I had not yet read it. What better opportunity to rectify this regrettable situation than by reading it alongside “Worlds of Ink and Shadow” by Lena Coakley, a novel about Emily Brontё and her siblings?

READ MORE: Book Review: Worlds of Ink and Shadow

“Wuthering Heights” tells of Heathcliff’s destructive love and passion for Catherine Earnshaw. Heathcliff was adopted by Catherine’s father as a child, but upon Mr. Earnshaw’s death, he is bullied by Catherine’s brother. Under the incorrect assumption that his love for Catherine is not returned, Heathcliff abruptly leaves the household only to return years later as a wealthy man, poised to exact his revenge for his previous suffering.

“Wuthering Heights” is a chaotic novel, beautiful in its complexity but terrible in its wickedness.

The novel is exceptional in that none of its characters are likable. From the narrator to the servants to the main characters, each is presented in a manner that highlights his or her faults. Somehow, the characters’ flaws draw the reader in. One cannot help but search for redemption to be found within the characters and, upon being disappointed, pity their existence.

By the end of the novel, I found myself wanting Heathcliff to die for all of the evils he had committed against those around him, like tricking a naïve girl into marrying him by pretending to care for her and then treating her cruelly after she has served her purpose. At the same time, the torment Heathcliff appears to suffer from is not pleasant to read about. Readers may wish the situation could be different, that Heathcliff could be kind and loved in return.

At first glance, “Wuthering Heights” appears to have no relatability to today’s UCLA student. It is set in late 18th century England and tells the story of a man who seems possessed. However, the story explores themes of revenge, obsession, passion and loneliness that are relevant to the experiences of college-aged students. Reading “Wuthering Heights” might be worthwhile to students who want a release for similar emotions of their own.

Reviewing “Wuthering Heights” with “Worlds of Ink and Shadow” in mind, the layered narration and alternating time frames of “Wuthering Heights” appear to have inspired the layered levels of reality found in “Worlds of Ink and Shadow.”

The chaotic nature of “Wuthering Heights” is reflected in Emily Brontë’s personality in “Worlds of Ink and Shadow.” In Coakley’s novel, Emily Brontё is portrayed as willful and passionate, just as “Wuthering Heights” could be described as a willful and passionate novel.

It is impossible to wholeheartedly say “Wuthering Heights” was an enjoyable read. The cruelty and lack of decorum displayed by many of the characters made the novel unlikable in retrospect, despite the characters’ allure as the story pans out.

“Wuthering Heights” is a brutish masterpiece that left me both impressed and appalled.

– Umbreen Ali

ROOMMATE NEEDED PVTROOM WESTLACONDO 1,100 UTILITIES, PARKING, WIFI INCLUDED..OHIO/FEDERAL NEIGHBORHOOD.FRIENDLY ROOMMATES.. GRAD PREFERRED. AVAILABLE NOW. 310-435-7140 [email protected] best is to come and see..call

Westhill Apts. 519 GLENROCK AVE. Only 3 left! 1Bd/1Ba+DEN $2995,1Bd/2Ba $2300 1 PARKING INCL, EV CHARGING, Controlled access, Laundry on-site, Pets OK. Call/text 310-467-0930.All September except for 9/30

Law Office Assistant, 20 hours per week/$20/hour; Word/scanning/calendar, filing, work on City forms. Respond to: [email protected]

Looking For After-School Kid Helper And Tutor In Mid City LA For 10 y/o Daughter We are seeking a caring and reliable part-time after-school helper/tutor for our 10-year-old daughter. The ideal candidate will have a strong foundation in basic math to confidently assist our 5th grader with her homework, particularly in areas like place value, decimals, and fractions. You should be patient, and supportive. Responsibilities include homework help, transportation to and from activities (She plays waterpolo at UCLA), and being a positive role model. If you are trustworthy, dynamic, and excited about making a meaningful impact in our child’s life, we would love to hear from you. References required. Background and DMV check will be run. Pay commensurate with experience ($30-$40 hr). Email at [email protected] or Text 415.786.4963

• Craft and Criticism
• Fiction and Poetry
• News and Culture
• Lit Hub Radio
• Reading Lists

• Literary Criticism
• Craft and Advice
• In Conversation
• On Translation
• Short Story
• From the Novel
• Bookstores and Libraries
• Film and TV
• Art and Photography
• Freeman’s
• The Virtual Book Channel
• The Lit Hub Podcast
• The Critic and Her Publics
• Fiction/Non/Fiction
• I’m a Writer But
• Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast
• Write-minded
• First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing
• Behind the Mic
• Lit Century
• Tor Presents: Voyage Into Genre
• Beyond the Page
• The Cosmic Library
• Emergence Magazine
• The History of Literature
• The Best of the Decade
• Best Reviewed Books
• BookMarks Daily Giveaway
• The Daily Thrill
• CrimeReads Daily Giveaway

Wuthering Heights  is a Virgin’s Story, and Other Opinions of Brontë’s Classic

200 years of writers weighing in on wuthering heights.

Two hundred years ago today, Emily Brontë was born. She died only 30 years later, of tuberculosis. Her coffin was only 16 inches wide (though this may not mean what we think it means). She wrote one complete novel, which has become an enduring classic of English literature. Ernest Hemingway, Joan Didion, and Henry Miller recommended it . Sylvia Plath  and  Ted Hughes borrowed its title for poems. Others, some of them right here in the Literary Hub office , don’t care for it quite so much. For Brontë’s birthday, I offer to you a selection of literary opinions on her one hit wonder, which was polarizing at the time of its publication and remains so 171 years later.

Virginia Woolf:

Wuthering Heights is a more difficult book to understand than Jane Eyre , because Emily was a greater poet than Charlotte. When Charlotte wrote she said with eloquence and splendour and passion “I love”, “I hate”, “I suffer”. Her experience, though more intense, is on a level with our own. But there is no “I” in Wuthering Heights . There are no governesses. There are no employers. There is love, but it is not the love of men and women. Emily was inspired by some more general conception. The impulse which urged her to create was not her own suffering or her own injuries. She looked out upon a world cleft into gigantic disorder and felt within her the power to unite it in a book. That gigantic ambition is to be felt throughout the novel — a struggle, half thwarted but of superb conviction, to say something through the mouths of her characters which is not merely “I love” or “I hate”, but “we, the whole human race” and “you, the eternal powers . . . ” the sentence remains unfinished. It is not strange that it should be so; rather it is astonishing that she can make us feel what she had it in her to say at all.

–from her 1916 essay “ Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights ,” as published in The Common Reader

Alice Hoffman:

[My favorite novelist of all time is] Emily Brontë, author of the greatest psychological novel ever written, with the most complex character ever conceived. Read “Wuthering Heights” when you’re 18 and you think Heathcliff is a romantic hero; when you’re 30, he’s a monster; at 50 you see he’s just human.

–in her 2014 “By the Book” interview with  The New York Times

Is there anybody out there who hasn’t heard of Heathcliff, the dark villian/hero of this high pitched and utterly committed work of madness? Oh, I love it. It was difficult for me at first. I’m a writer, but not a natural reader. But once I was into this book, once I stopped asking questions of the narrative and just entered the shadowy world of Catherine and her doomed household, I was quite literally spellbound. Bronte died believing this book was a failure. What a dreadful irony that this quiet, disciplined woman who lived out her life in a cold parsons’ house with her brilliant sisters, her drunken brother and her eccentric father (The man memorized Paradise Lost: imagine. And outlived all his children!) never even had an inkling that this outpouring of her heart and soul would become a classic, overshadowing even her sister’s highly successful Jane Eyre. Both Bronte sisters had the capacity to create archetypes—to imprint upon the culture seminal patterns that endure to the present time. One last point: the father was Irish. Madness and genius in the blood, indeed. Enjoy it. I read it over every year or so, sometimes twice in a row. I study it; I watch all the film versions. I just love it, the way it works, its strange cruelty and enchantment.

–as reviewed on Amazon in 2004 (oh yes, Anne Rice writes Amazon reviews )

Elizabeth Hardwick:

Wuthering Heights  has a sustained brilliance and originality we hardly know how to account for. It is on a different level of inspiration from [Brontë’s] poetry; the grandeur and complication of it always remind one of the leap she might have taken had she lived.

Catherine, in  Wuthering Heights , is nihilistic, self-indulgent, bored, restless, nostalgic for childhood, unmanageable. She has the charm of a wayward, schizophrenic girl, but she has little to give, since she is self-absorbed, haughty, destructive. What is interesting and contemporary for us is that Emily Brontë should have given Catherine the center of the stage, to share it along with the rough, brutal Heathcliff. In a novel by Charlotte or Anne, Cathy would be a shallow beauty, analyzed and despaired of by a reasonable, clever and deprived heroine. She would be fit only for the subplot. There is also an unromantic driven egotism in the characters, a lack of moral longings, odd in the work of a daughter of a clergyman.

The plot of  Wuthering Heights  is immensely complicated and yet there is the most felicitous union of author and subject. There is nothing quite like this novel with its rage and ragings, its discontent and angry restlessness.

Wuthering Heights  is a virgin’s story. The peculiarity of it lies in the harshness of the characters. Cathy is as hard, careless, and destructive as Heathcliff. She too has a sadistic nature. The love the two feel for each other is a longing for an impossible completion. Consolations do not appear; nothing in the domestic or even in the sexual life seems to the point in this book. Emily Brontë appears in every way indifferent to the need for love and companionship that tortured the lives of her sisters. We do not, in her biography, even look for a lover as we do with Emily Dickinson because it is impossible to join her with a man, with a secret, aching passion for a young curate or a schoolmaster. There is a spare, inviolate center, a harder resignation amounting finally to withdrawal.

–in her essay on the Brontës in her 1974 collection  Seduction and Betrayal: Women in Literature

Anne Tyler:

I have tried several times to read Wuthering Heights but it just strikes me as silly, so I always quit it. I don’t tell any of my friends this because women have very fond memories of reading it when they’re young and I don’t want to hurt their feelings.

–in a 2018 interview with  The Guardian

I somehow made it to adulthood without ever reading Wuthering Heights , but then I found out that several of my women friends considered Heathcliff their all-time favorite romantic hero. So I read about three-quarters of it as a grown-up, and immediately developed some serious concerns about the mental health of my friends.

–in her 2015 “By the Book” interview with  The New York Times

Maryse Condé:

When I read  Wuthering Heights , I was 14. It was given to me at a prize ceremony for being good in writing. I read the book in September, which is rainy season in the Caribbean. I was lying on my bed in my bedroom, and for me it was an enchantment. I really was transported to wherever Emily Brontë wanted to transport me … and then I forgot all about it. I saw it at the cinema after that, by chance—the version with Laurence Olivier. It revived memories of my adolescence, so I read it again and discovered it had a meaning beyond the actual meaning, beyond the meanings the author wanted to give. It was a story you could transplant into any society. I was teaching a few years later and I discovered Jean Rhys, who wrote  Wide Sargasso Sea , a rewriting of  Jane Eyre . I thought, It’s not so bizarre that I’m attracted to Emily Brontë. Because, in fact, there is something about the Brontë sisters that speaks to Caribbean women, regardless of their color, regardless of their age, regardless of the time they live in. So I decided I was going to rewrite it. But it was at least another five years for me before I really started. Because my husband, who is English, was shocked when I was telling him my vague intention. He did not see the connection between the Caribbean and Brontë’s work. It seemed blasphemy to him to rewrite Brontë’s masterpiece. So I took another five years to decide—and when I could not help it, I started to write.

It is such a masterpiece, such a beloved work in England. For example, when we promoted the book in England we went to the Museum at Haworth, where Emily Brontë was born. People came to listen to me but I could see when they were sitting down looking at me, there was a kind of … I wouldn’t say fear, but a kind of shock. What is she doing to the text? How can she dare touch that text?! I really had to convince them that I did not do any disrespect to Brontë; on the contrary, I was paying homage to her. It seems to me the greatest homage that I pay is to her artistry.

And it is another way of telling people that you should not draw barriers between colors, ideas, et-cetera. Everybody says: But why an English novel? Why not a French one? Why not an African one? You see—it’s as if you should never cross a barrier, when, in fact, to live is to cross barriers.

–in a 1999 interview with  BOMB  about her novel  Windward Heights , a re-interpretation of Brontë’s classic

Katherine Anne Porter:

And of course we read all the eighteenth-century novelists, though Jane Austen, like Turgenev, didn’t really engage me until I was quite mature. I read them both when I was very young, but I was grown up before I really took them in. And I discovered for myself Wuthering Heights; I think I read that book every year of my life for fifteen years. I simply adored it.

–in a 1963 interview with  The Paris Review

Joyce Carol Oates:

This great novel, though not inordinately long, and, contrary to general assumption, not inordinately complicated, manages to be a number of things: a romance that brilliantly challenges the basic presumptions of the “romantic”; a “gothic” that evolves—with an absolutely inevitable grace—into its temperamental opposite; a parable of innocence and loss, and childhood’s necessary defeat; and a work of consummate skill on its primary level, that is, the level of language. Above all, it is a history: its first statement is the date 1801; and one of its final statements involves New Year’s Day (of 1803). It seeks both to dramatize and to explain how the ancient stock of the Earnshaws are restored to their rights (the somber house of Wuthering Heights, built in 1500), and, at the same time, how and why the last of the Earnshaws, Hareton, will be leaving the Heights to live, with his cousin-bride, at Thrushcross Grange. One generation has given way to the next: the primitive energies of childhood have given way to the intelligent compromises of adulthood. The history of the Earnshaws and the Lintons begins to seem a history, writ small, albeit with exquisite detail, of civilization itself.

Heathcliff’s enduring appeal is approximately that of Edmund, Iago, Richard III, the intermittent Macbeth: the villain who impresses by way of his energy, his cleverness, his peculiar sort of courage; and by his asides, inviting, as they do, the audience’s or reader’s collaboration in wickedness. Brontë is perfectly accurate in having her villain tell us, by way of Mrs. Dean and Lockwood, that brutality does not always disgust; and that there are those persons— often of weak, cringing, undeveloped character—who “innately admire” it, provided they themselves are not injured. (Though, in Isabella’s case, it would seem that she has enjoyed, and even provoked, her husband’s “experimental” sadism.) Heathcliff presides over a veritable cornucopia of darksome episodes: he beats and kicks the fallen Hindley, he throws a knife at Isabella, he savagely slaps young Catherine, he doesn’t trouble to summon a doctor for his dying son, as he no longer has any use for him. Unfailingly cruel, yet sly enough to appear exasperated with his victims’ testing of his cruelty, Heathcliff arouses the reader to this peculiar collaborative bond by the sheer force of his language, and his wit: for is he not, with his beloved gone, the lifeforce gone wild? He has no opposition worthy of him; he has no natural mate remaining; he is characterless and depersonalized will—a masklike grimace that can never relax into a smile. (Significantly, Heathcliff is grinning as a corpse—”grinning at death” as old Joseph notes.) Very few readers of  Wuthering Heights  have cared to observe that there is no necessary or even probable connection between the devoted lover of Catherine, and the devoted hater of all the remaining world (including—and this most improbably—Catherine’s own daughter Catherine, who resembles her): for certain stereotypes persist so stubbornly they may very well be archetypes, evoking, as they do, an involuntary identification with energy, evil, will,  action . The mass murderer who is really tenderhearted, the rapist whose victims provoke him, the Fuhrer who is a vegetarian and in any case loves dogs. . . Our anxieties, which may well spring from childhood experiences, have much to do with denying the  actual  physicality of the outrages, whether those of Heathcliff or any villain, literary or historic, and supplanting for them, however magically, however pitiably, “spiritual” values. If Heathcliff grinds his victims beneath his feet like worms, is it not natural to imagine that they  are  worms, and deserve their suffering, is it not natural to imagine that they are not us? We feel only contempt for the potential sadist Linton, who sucks on sugar candy, and whose relationship with his child-wife parodies a normal love relationship (he asks her not to kiss him, because it makes him breathless). Consequently our temptation is to align ourselves with Heathcliff, as Brontë shrewdly understands.

–from “ The Magnanimity of  Wuthering Heights ,” originally published in  Critical Inquiry , Winter 1983

Caryl Phillips:

I read it growing up but to me, as a young man, the most interesting aspect of the novel (because I was a boy) wasn’t the romance. Oh Heathcliff! Oh Cathy! I wasn’t interested in any of that stuff. It was the moors, the sort of bleak desolate nature of this place which was just on the periphery of Leeds. I was growing up in Leeds, a place where if you saw a blade of grass, you immediately ran out and kicked a football on it. We didn’t have gardens, certainly not in the place I was growing up in, in council houses. We went to the park to kick a ball, we didn’t go to learn the names of the trees. We didn’t go on expeditions to flora and fauna.

But as I was getting older, I was aware that right on the edge of Leeds, there was this wild strange place that, as an urban kid, meant nothing to me. So there were two books that I was reading at that time that introduced me to the idea that there’s another kind of life to England—not just a natural life, but a literary life too—that is rooted in nature. One book was Wuthering Heights and the other was The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy, whose opening section is just about Egdon Heath. There aren’t any characters in it: the heath is the character. That was the prism through which I looked at Wuthering Heights , and I had no fascination with the origins of Heathcliff or the romance at the center of it. I didn’t even have any fascination with the Yorkshire dialect they’re speaking. It was just these brooding descriptions of this place that was slightly out of reach to me. When I reread the Brontës later on, again it wasn’t Cathy and Heathcliff’s romance or the Yorkshire dialect, it was more the isolation of Healthcliff. Why did he become so malevolent? Why did he become so cruel? Why was he so angry? Why was he so prey to these spasms of bitterness? There’s another element that completely fascinated me by that stage and that’s Emily Brontë herself, because I just loved the strange ethereal nature of the woman. And so I was as much fascinated with what kind of sensibility had written this as I was with what was in the book. And I think many years ago, when I wrote the novel Cambridge , I called the central character Emily because of Emily Brontë. In the novel she was about 30 or so—the age Brontë was when she died—and slightly strange, singular, willful. All the things I imagined Brontë might be. Obviously she’s not Emily Brontë, but there was a slight private doffing of the cap to this fascination with the creator of Wuthering Heights .

–in a 2015 interview with Public Books about  The Lost Child , “an oblique, intricate re-writing” of  Wuthering Heights

Philip Larkin:

It’s some time since I read [ Wuthering Heights ]. I never know what to think of it. In a way I don’t appreciate the emotion of Heathcliff’s love, or his hatreds—it doesn’t ‘come over’ to me: I think the novel splendidly constructed and written, but the central emotion doesn’t quite touch me, not like the emotion of, say,  Lady Chatterley or  Mr. Weston’s Good Wine  or  Tess  or  Jude , to name a few well worn okay works—only at the very end, when H. isn’t eating anything and doesn’t know if he’s coming or going, that part I like. Are people ‘moved’ by it, as by  Lear  or  Othello ? I don’t think I am. And Gothic—yes, but not Italian: German, isn’t it? Heathcliff to me is a sort of sprite of the bergs, a cousin to Mary Shelley’s monster, a creature of the northern mists, a gnome.

–in a letter to Monica Jones, August 19th, 1955

Charlotte Brontë:

I have just read over Wuthering Heights , and, for the first time, have obtained a clear glimpse of what are termed (and, perhaps, really are) its faults; have gained a definite notion of how it appears to other people — to strangers who knew nothing of the author; who are unacquainted with the locality where the scenes of the story are laid; to whom the inhabitants, the customs, the natural characteristics of the outlying hills and hamlets in the West Riding of Yorkshire are things alien and unfamiliar.

To all such Wuthering Heights must appear a rude and strange production. The wild moors of the North of England can for them have no interest: the language, the manners, the very dwellings and household customs of the scattered inhabitants of those districts must be to such readers in a great measure unintelligible, and—where intelligible—repulsive.

With regard to the rusticity of Wuthering Heights , I admit the charge, for I feel the quality. It is rustic all through. It is moorish, and wild, and knotty as a root of heath.  Nor was it natural that it should be otherwise; the author being herself a native and nursling of the moors. Doubtless, had her lot been cast in a town, her writings, if she had written at all, would have possessed another character.  Even had chance or taste led her to choose a similar subject, she would have treated it otherwise.

Whether it is right or advisable to create beings like Heathcliff, I do not know: I scarcely think it is. But this I know: the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master—something that, at times, strangely wills and works for itself.

Wuthering Heights was hewn in a wild workshop, with simple tools, out of homely materials. The statuary found a granite block on a solitary moor; gazing thereon, he saw how from the crag might be elicited a head, savage, swart, sinister; a form moulded with at least one element of grandeur—power. He wrought with a rude chisel, and from no model but the vision of his meditations. With time and labour, the crag took human shape; and there it stands colossal, dark, and frowning, half statue, half rock: in the former sense, terrible and goblin—like; in the latter, almost beautiful, for its colouring is of mellow grey, and moorland moss clothes it; and heath, with its blooming bells and balmy fragrance, grows faithfully close to the giant’s foot.

–from the preface to an 1850 edition of  Wuthering Heights

Thomas Bradshaw:

Wuthering Heights  is told so brilliantly. . . .  Heart of Darkness  also blew me away when I first read it. That,  Wuthering Heights , and Hemingway showed me what literature could be; I could do whatever I wanted! . . . Heathcliff embodies the idea of acting on pure id. This guy is just doing what he wants; he isn’t adhering to any conventions of the day. And yet he is acting this way with this suit and tie—he becomes this refined individual on the outside, but inside he’s still totally brutal. The lengths that Heathcliff goes: he digs up Catherine’s body and hugs it, knocks out the side of her coffin so he can be buried next to her in the dirt and have their bones be together! It gets to an essence of truth that is more truthful than reality, and that’s what I’m talking about.

–in a 2009 interview with  BOMB

Jeanette Winterson:

I read Wuthering Heights when I was sixteen and had just left home. I did not read it as a love story. I thought it was a loss story. Heathcliff loses Cathy. Cathy loses Heathcliff. Edgar Linton loses Cathy, their daughter, his life, and Thrushcross Grange. Hindley loses Wuthering Heights. His son Hareton is dispossessed, Heathcliff’s revenge on everyone, including himself, is matched by Cathy’s death-wish (Why did you betray your own heart?).

Heathcliff is a foundling. As an adopted child I understood his humiliations, his ardour, and his capacity to injure. I also learned the lesson of the novel that property is power. It seemed to me that if you want to fall in love you had better have a house. Whatever Emily Bronte was doing, it was not the sentimental interpretation of this novel of all for love and the world well lost.

Cathy is a woman and can’t own property in her own right. Therefore she can’t rescue Heathcliff unless she marries Edgar (and that is part of her plan but Heathcliff has already misunderstood and disappeared). Much later when her daughter marries Heathcliff’s horrible son Linton he gleefully claims that all her property is now his – and when he usefully dies, all that was hers passes to Heathcliff.

Heathcliff himself starts with nothing—and so can’t marry Cathy. His gradual gain of every house, horse and heirloom belonging to the Earnshaws and the Lintons is his revenge and his ruin.

What’s love got to do with it?

(All right, quite a lot, but this is not a love story)

–from Winterson’s  website , 2011

Joan Didion:

It was once suggested to me that, as an antidote to crying, I put my head in a paper bag. As it happens, there is a sound physiological reason, something to do with oxygen, for doing exactly that, but the psychological effect alone is incalculable: it is difficult in the extreme to continue fancying oneself Cathy in Wuthering Heights with one’s head in a Food Fair bag.

–from her 1961 essay “On Self-Respect” (and yes, I know this isn’t really  about  the book, but I couldn’t help myself)

• Share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Google+ (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window)

Emily Temple

Previous article, next article, support lit hub..

Join our community of readers.

to the Lithub Daily

Popular posts.

The Legendary Iranian Poet Who Gives Me Hope

• RSS - Posts

Literary Hub

Created by Grove Atlantic and Electric Literature

Sign Up For Our Newsletters

How to Pitch Lit Hub

Advertisers: Contact Us

Privacy Policy

Support Lit Hub - Become A Member

Become a Lit Hub Supporting Member : Because Books Matter

For the past decade, Literary Hub has brought you the best of the book world for free—no paywall. But our future relies on you. In return for a donation, you’ll get an ad-free reading experience , exclusive editors’ picks, book giveaways, and our coveted Joan Didion Lit Hub tote bag . Most importantly, you’ll keep independent book coverage alive and thriving on the internet.

Become a member for as low as $5/month

A critical analysis on the “Wuthering Heights” by Emily Brontë

“Wuthering Heights” is a novel by the author Emily Bronte. She wrote it through 1845 and 1846 and then first published in 1847. Many people have not only read the book but have also liked it. This is due to the contradicting ideas that are also entertaining in the book such as love, classism, and revenge, just to name a few. These are ideas that everyone reading the novel can relate to because they are part of our reality as a people. These and many other truths are greatly represented throughout Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. Realistic representation of ideas is a very good aspect of any novel. Thus, more and more people should yearn to readers of this wonderful book.

Main Ideas in Wuthering Heights

• Love This is one of the most dominant ideas in the novel. Two main characters in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights were so in love it drove them crazy. The two lovers were Catherine from the Linton family, and Heathcliff from the Earnshaw family. Catherine possesses a hostile character but due to her love for Heathcliff, she dramatically changes into this orderly, happy and friendly lady when the latter is around. Heathcliff on the other hand, is so madly in love with Catherine that he gets so angry at anyone who opposes his love for her.
• Vengeance This idea has been presented as going hand in hand with love in the novel. Heathcliff loathes his step-brother Hindley for being given authority over the house, leaving him out of the cake of power. Adding salt to an injury, Catherine rejects him regarding his social status. He feels belittled and this creates a need for revenge in him. He therefore decides and purposes to revenge on Hindley.
• Classism Classism is also known as social class war between the poor and the rich. It still exists today in our society and it has gotten even worse. Classism has been represented by how Catherine, who is so wealthy, treats Heathcliff with intimidation due to his humble background. Catherine refers to Heathcliff as a low class gypsy. This prompted Heathcliff to go missing in action for 3 years after which he returned a changed person. Not wealthier but better in manners and dressing code.

The History of Wuthering Heights

Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights is a complex love story involving a male orphan and a rich female. The novel was first published in December 1847 and has been one of the best-selling novels. It is also one of the most read novels since it combines more than one genres in the most creative of ways. Genres including gothic fiction, fiction classics, literary fiction, romance, ghost stories, tragedy, and poetic allegory has spiced up the story which is based on a true setting – the wind-swept moorlands of Northern England. Up to date, readers still find the story very disturbing and has continued to attract a lot of readership and also a lot of critique.

Problems in The Novel

Some of the problems presented in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights are those that any author would face in the whole process starting from writing, editing, all the way to publishing. The novel received a lot of critique from publishers citing various issues such as repetition due to much dualism and structural differences. The version that the author Emily Bronte had in mind is not the same version as the final. The main problem, therefore, is that the novel did not actually put out to the world all that was meant to be. As a result of rejection of the original version of the novel, some parts of the novel still remain disturbingly confusing to the readers. Not to forget that the story is not chronologically consistent at some points.

The plot of the novel

The novel revolves around how Catherine and Heathcliff grew crazily in love with each other. Unfortunately, the love turns into betrayal and vengeance by both parties. Catherine rejects Heathcliff and gets married to a rich man, Edgar, while still being in love with Heathcliff. It becomes a love triangle. Heathcliff finds another suitor, Isabella, with whom they run away together. On realizing this, Catherine gets brain fever and dies and young Catherine is born. Isabella escapes to London and Hindley dies of alcohol addiction leaving Heathcliff as the master of Wuthering Heights. Young Catherine grows old enough and gets romantically attracted to Linton and both lovers stage their romance in winter of 1800. This leads to Heathcliff detaining her so she could marry his son, Linton, by force. Unfortunately, both Edgar Linton and Linton Heathcliff die the same year and Heathcliff is left to be the master of Thrushcross Grange, where Lockwood starts living in as a tenant. After sometime, Lockwood’s tenancy terminates and he goes back to London leaving Young Catherine and a guy called Hareton to start dating. Heathcliff also dies and Young Catherine gets married to Hareton.

Characters in the novel

• Heathcliff Vengeful and unfriendly – He vows to take revenge on Catherine and Edgar. Due to bitterness from childhood mistreatment, he treats everybody else poorly Sadistic – he maliciously finds joy in confining Isabella. He also inflicts pain on Hindley and Catherine for small mistakes. He also forcefully confines young Catherine so that he could marry Linton.
• Catherine Understanding – she understands the reason underlying Heathcliff’s behavior. Cruel – she rejected Heathcliff based on his humble background. Kind – she finally learnt to like Heathcliff despite his flaws.
• Edgar Loyal – after marrying Catherine, he stays loyal to her for life. Responsible – keeps his daughter away from any possible threats from Heathcliff.
• Hareton Loving – he finally gets along with Catherine after all the brutality he imposed on her.
• Linton Heathcliff Emasculated – He keeps whimpering all the time and is generally weak. He is easily exploited and manipulated by his father to marry Catherine by force and keep the authority over Thrushcross Grange in the family. He can hardly make a firm decision by himself. Innocent – he saves his life from being poisoned with jealousy by his father.
• Isabella Delusional – she thought that romance talked about in novels is real. Naïve – she is unable to realize she is Mr. Heathcliff’s pawn of revenge and even goes ahead to marry him.
• Earnshaw Caring – He gave Heathcliff a home when he was an orphaned street urchin. He also treated Heathcliff as an equal to the family.

Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights is a great reflection of our society today. The book is therefore worth readers’ attention as it has untold potential to enhance our understanding and transformation of society.

Recent Posts

• Literary analysis of “A Retrieved Reformation” by O. Henry
• Literary analysis of “The Cop and the Anthem” by O. Henry
• Literary analysis of “The Ransom of Red Chief” by O. Henry
• Literary analysis of “The Gift of the Magi” by O. Henry
• Literary analysis of “The Picture of Dorian Gray” by Oscar Wilde
• Albert Camus
• Arthur Rimbaud
• Bertolt Brecht
• Charles Baudelaire
• Charles Dickens
• Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
• Chinua Achebe
• Daniel Defoe
• Emily Brontë
• Ernest Hemingway
• Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann
• Francis Scott Fitzgerald
• Franz Kafka
• Frederic Stendhal
• Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• Gustave Flaubert
• Guy de Maupassant
• Hans Christian Andersen
• Henry Fielding
• Honore de Balzac
• Jane Austen
• Jean-Paul Sartre
• John Collier
• John Steinbeck
• Jonathan Swift
• Kurt Vonnegut
• Leo Tolstoy
• Oliver Goldsmith
• Oscar Wilde
• Paul Verlaine
• Prosper Mérimée
• Rainer Maria Rilke
• Ralph Ellison
• Ray Bradbury
• Richard Bach
• Richard Wright
• Robert Burns
• Samuel Richardson
• Sylvia Plath
• Theodore Dreiser
• Thomas Mann
• Toni Morrison
• Victor Hugo
• Virginia Woolf
• Walt Whitman
• William Golding
• William Shakespeare

Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer.

To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to  upgrade your browser .

Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link.

• We're Hiring!
• Help Center

An Analysis of Wuthering Heights from the Gothic Traditional Perspective

Emily Bronte, the 19th-century British writer, occupies an important and unique position in British literary history and though she only had one novel-Wuthering Heights, she was still one of the most influential writers in the world literature. The paper will analyze the gothic style in Wuthering Heights mainly from four aspects, including the theme selection, characterization, depiction of the environment and the use of supernatural factors.

Related Papers

DIANA EUGENIA IONCICA

Dr. Gazi Abdulla hel Baqui

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte (1818-1848) is a novel which is windswept and weatherbeaten both in the world outside and in the world inside of human emotion. The total book leaves a deep impression of an intense but dreary romantic view of life and of an unusual mystery and conflict. None of the Victorian novelists has been able to create these traits. Some of Emily's characters appear like creatures of their autonomous, unreal world. This paper shows that the novel is an expression of Emily's rare sense of imagination that is absent in many other contemporary novelists. It also shows that Emily paints an unusual love before which the demonic passion melts. So, this novel stands far apart from other Victorian masterpieces. Not only this, Wuthering Heights does not portray Victorian realism which is the focal point of most of the Victorian great novels.

JETIR International Journal

Himanshi Chaturvedi

In English literature, there is a fairly broad classification of the gothic genre. The study delves into the consequences of Julia Kristeva's 'Power of Horror' theory in order to gain a deeper comprehension of the Gothic genre. The present research compares the themes of historical and contemporary Gothic literature, showing how gothic genres thematically vary with time. The initial gothic novels were mostly concerned with exaggerated thriller and horror themes, such as monsters, demons, and supernatural evils. The emphasis of the current gothic novels is primarily based on social issues of exploitation, subjection, and suffering for weaker groups of people. The contemporary gothic novels began to shape from real criminal cases or actual life events, compared to the superstitious and convictions in traditional ones. The criticism of local social views, race, politics, gender, and religion that characterizes contemporary Gothic literature is combined with aspects of the paranormal, magic realism, and satire. The writers and artists of Gothic literature altered the Gothic subgenre by including certain characteristics like mystery, darkness, and obscured areas. The exaggerated romances of the traditional gothic novels were given less emphasis in their contemporaneity while seeking to examine psychological insights. Gothic writers began to develop their emotional impacts through the gothic aspects, which allowed gothic literature to offer a fitting atmosphere that corresponded within the genre. This article attempts to present an overview of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights (1847) from past gothic novels and Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987) as contemporary classic gothic novels, contrasting thematically how they developed.

Dr. Lata Marina

Rahat Nadeem

European Scientific Journal ESJ

Muhammad Hussein Oroskhan

This article examines the application of Edmund Burke’s aesthetic concept of the beauty in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful is a theoretical work which study the human passions at the most basic level. Furthermore, it distinguishes the difference between the sublime and the beauty. The beauty is a passion which arouses love and pleasure. In the same respect, Wuthering Heights is a story full of human passions and it talks about human sufferings and pleasures. The sources of pleasure are expressed variously in Wuthering Heights, for example through lights, colors, smallness, etc. These different elements which are the sources of pleasure in Wuthering Heights make it an appropriate novel for the application of the aesthetic concept of the beauty. Thus, this study aims at exploring the different ways on which the Burke's theory of beauty is expressed in Wuthering Heights.

Edupedia Publications

Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights (1847) is considered one of the most enigmatic novels of the Nineteenth century. Despite its centrality to the canon of Victorian literature and women’s writing in the nineteenth century, it paradoxically embodies both an anti-Victorian universe in its refusal to adhere to the moral and sexual codes of the time as well as upholds some of its major traits, especially with regard to the disappearance of the sexual body while violence keeps on reappearing. Despite this dearth of a moral universe was criticized by its earliest commentators, there was a predominantly patriarchal logic at work which led them to simultaneously grudgingly appreciate the male author, since Bronte was using a male pseudonym, who had, 'at once gone fearlessly into the moors and desolate places for his heroes' and discovered the deeper recesses of the mind.

Ronan Johnson

Using various theories of monstrosity, degeneration, and the morphic figure in Gothic studies, this essay explores explicitly the manifestation of Gothic archetypes and tropes in Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights. The essay further explores figures of the werewolf, the vampire, and the revenant in the general sense, deconstructing the romance of Heathcliff and Cathy, and the interplay of masculinity and femininity, along with a 'natural', atavistic horror, at work in the text.

Pavithra Sn

Loading Preview

Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.

RELATED PAPERS

Langlit: An international peer reviewed open access journal (ISSN-2349-5189, Impact factor-5.61) UGC APPROVED

Asish K R . Charan

Natka J A N K O V A Alagjozovska

The Romantic and Victorian in a state of Violent Clashes or Confrontation The Female Gothic and the Monstrous

AGUSTINA X SOSA REVOL

ES: Revista de Filología Inglesa 31

Leticia Perez Alonso

Amy Falcon Almeida

jamiel ahmad

NOTES ON WUTHERING HEIGHTS by EMILY BRONTE FOLLOWED BY ESSAYS AND KEY THEMES

Academia Letters

Brontë Schiltz

Yorkshire History Quarterly Vol. 14. Issue No. 3.

Raymond Varley

Advances in Language and Literary Studies

Sara Saei Dibavar

ferzana cocker

ايناس حسونه

Pier Paolo Piciucco

Bronte Society Transactions

Simon Avery

jordan cymrot

Conor O'Loughlin

Dolores Herrero Granado

International Journal of Social and Educational Innovation

Maria Emandi

Mohaddeseh Kharazmi , Sohrab Mosahebi

Ishanthi Dissanayake

Women Empowerment through Emily Brontë's "Wuthering Heights"

Rebeca Perdones Cañas

International Journal of Comparative Literature and Translation Studies [IJCLTS]

AbdulMahmoud Ibrahim

•   We're Hiring!
•   Help Center
• Find new research papers in:
• Health Sciences
• Earth Sciences
• Cognitive Science
• Mathematics
• Computer Science
• Academia ©2024

• History & Society
• Science & Tech
• Biographies
• Animals & Nature
• Geography & Travel
• Arts & Culture
• Games & Quizzes
• On This Day
• One Good Fact
• New Articles
• Lifestyles & Social Issues
• Philosophy & Religion
• Politics, Law & Government
• World History
• Health & Medicine
• Browse Biographies
• Birds, Reptiles & Other Vertebrates
• Bugs, Mollusks & Other Invertebrates
• Environment
• Fossils & Geologic Time
• Entertainment & Pop Culture
• Sports & Recreation
• Visual Arts
• Demystified
• Image Galleries
• Infographics
• Top Questions
• Britannica Kids
• Saving Earth
• Space Next 50
• Student Center

• What was Emily Brontë famous for?
• What was Emily Brontë’s childhood like?

Wuthering Heights

Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.

• Naxos AudioBooks - Wuthering Heights
• Wuthering Heights - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up)

Recent News

Wuthering Heights , novel by Emily Brontë , published in 1847 under the pseudonym Ellis Bell. This intense, solidly imagined novel is distinguished from other novels of the period by its dramatic and poetic presentation, its abstention from authorial intrusion, and its unusual structure.

The story is recounted by Lockwood, a disinterested party, whose narrative serves as the frame for a series of retrospective shorter narratives by Ellen Dean, a housekeeper. All concern the impact of the foundling Heathcliff on the two families of Earnshaw and Linton in a remote Yorkshire district at the end of the 18th century. Embittered by abuse and by the marriage of Cathy Earnshaw—who shares his stormy nature and whom he loves—to the gentle and prosperous Edgar Linton, Heathcliff plans a revenge on both families, extending into the second generation. Cathy’s death in childbirth fails to set him free from his obsession with her, which persists until his death. The marriage of the surviving heirs of Earnshaw and Linton restores peace.

Contemporary Reviews of “Wuthering Heights”

Notes: Wuthering Heights was initially published under the ambiguous pseudonym of "Ellis Bell" so many early reviewers believed it to be written by a man. Some also believed that Currer Bell (Charlotte) and Ellis Bell (Emily) were the same.

The book was first published in December 1847.

Reviews marked with * were found in Emily's desk after her death.

Publication: Spectator Date: 18 December 1847 Reviewer: Unknown

An attempt to give novelty and interest to fiction, by resorting to those singular 'characters' that used to exist everywhere, but especially in retired and remote places. The success is not equal to the abilities of the writer; chiefly because the incidents are too coarse and disagreeable to be attractive, the very best being improbable, with a moral taint about them, and the villainy not leading to results sufficient to justify the elaborate pains taken in depicting it. The execution, however, is good: grant the writer all that is requisite as regards matter, and the delineation is forcible and truthful.

Original source

Publication: Athenaeum Date: 25 December 1847 Reviewer: H F Chorley

In spite of much power and cleverness; in spite of its truth to life in the remote nooks and corners of England, 'Wuthering Heights' is a disagreeable story. The Bells seem to affect painful and exceptional subjects: – the misdeeds and oppressions of tyranny – the eccentricities of "woman's fantasy". They do not turn away from dwelling upon those physical acts of cruelty which we know to have their warrant in the real annals of crime and suffering, – but the contemplation of which true taste rejects. The brutal master of the lonely house on "Wuthering Heights" – a prison which might be pictured from life – has doubtless had his prototype in those ungenial and remote districts where human beings, like the trees, grow gnarled and dwarfed and distorted by inclement climate; but he might have been indicated with far fewer touches, in place of so entirely filling the canvas that there is hardly a scene untainted by his presence.

Original source: Wuthering Heights (Barnes and Noble)

Publication: North British Review Date: about 1847 Reviewer: James Lorimer

Here all the faults of Jane Eyre (by Charlotte Brontë) are magnified a thousand fold, and the only consolation which we have in reflecting upon it is that it will never be generally read.

*Publication: Unknown Date: about 1847 Reviewer: Unknown

This is a work of great ability, and contains many chapters, to the production of which talent of no common order has contributed. At the same time, the materials which the author has placed at his own disposal have been but few. In the resources of his own mind, and in his own manifestly vivid perceptions of the peculiarities of character in short, in his knowledge of human nature—has he found them all. An antiquated farm-house, a neighbouring residence of a somewhat more pretending description, together with their respective inmates, amounting to some half a dozen souls in each, constitute the material and the personal components of one of the most interesting stories we have read for many a long day. The comfortable cheerfulness of the one abode, and the cheerless discomfort of the other—the latter being less the result of a cold and bleak situation, old and damp rooms, and (if we may use the term) of a sort of 'haunted house' appearance, than of the strange and mysterious character of its inhabitants—the loves and marriages, separations and hatreds, hopes and disappointments, of two or three generations of the gentle occupants of the one establishment, and the ruder tenants of the other, are brought before us at a moment with a tenderness, at another with a fearfulness, which appeals to our sympathies with the truest tones of the voice of nature; and it is quite impossible to read the book—and this is no slight testimony to the merits of a work of the kind—without feeling that, if placed in the same position as any one of the characters in any page of it, the chances would be twenty to one in favour of our conduct in that position being precisely such as the author has assigned to the personages he has introduced into his domestic drama. But we must at once impose upon ourselves a task—and we confess it is a hard one—we must abstain (from a regard to the space at our disposal) from yielding to the temptation by which we are beset to enter into that minute description of the plot of this very dramatic production to which such a work has an undoubted claim. It is not every day that so good a novel makes its appearance; and to give its contents in detail would be depriving many a reader of half the delight he would experience from the perusal of the work itself. To its pages we must refer him, then; there will he have ample opportunity of sympathising,—if he has one touch of nature that 'makes the whole world kin'—with the feelings of childhood, youth, manhood, and age, and all the emotions and passions which agitate the restless bosom of humanity. May he derive from it the delight we have ourselves experienced, and be equally grateful to its author for the genuine pleasure he has afforded him.

*Publication: Examiner Date: 8 January 1848 Reviewer: Anonymous

This is a strange book. It is not without evidences of considerable power: but, as a whole, it is wild, confused, disjointed, and improbable; and the people who make up the drama, which is tragic enough in its consequences, are savages ruder than those who lived before the days of Homer. With the exception of Heathcliff, the story is confined to the family of Earnshaw, who intermarry with the Lintons; and the scene of their exploits is a rude old-fashioned house, at the top of one of the high moors or fells in the north of England. Whoever has traversed the bleak heights of Hartside or Cross Fell, on his road from Westmoreland to the dales of Yorkshire, and has been welcomed there by the winds and rain on a 'gusty day', will know how to estimate the comforts of Wuthering Heights in wintry weather….

If this book be, as we apprehend it is, the first work of the author, we hope that he will produce a second,—giving himself more time in its composition than in the present case, developing his incidents more carefully, eschewing exaggeration and obscurity, and looking steadily at human life, under all its moods, for those pictures of the passions that he may desire to sketch for our public benefit. It may be well also to be sparing of certain oaths and phrases, which do not materially contribute to any character, and are by no means to be reckoned among the evidences of a writer's genius. We detest the affectation and effeminate frippery which is but too frequent in the modern novel, and willingly trust ourselves with an author who goes at once fearlessly into the moors and desolate places, for his heroes; but we must at the same time stipulate with him that he shall not drag into light all that he discovers, of coarse and loathsome, in his wanderings, but simply so much good and ill as he may find necessary to elucidate his history—so much only as may be interwoven inextricably with the persons whom he professes to paint. It is the province of an artist to modify and in some cases refine what he beholds in the ordinary world. There never was a man whose daily life (that is to say, all his deeds and sayings, entire and without exception) constituted fit materials for a book of fiction.

*Publication: Douglas Jerrold’s Weekly Newspaper Date:  15 January 1848 Reviewer: Anonymous

Wuthering Heights is a strange sort of book,—baffling all regular criticism; yet, it is impossible to begin and not finish it; and quite as impossible to lay it aside afterwards and say nothing about it. In the midst of the reader's perplexity the ideas predominant in his mind concerning this book are likely to be—brutal cruelty, and semi-savage love. What may be the moral which the author wishes the reader to deduce from his work, it is difficult to say; and we refrain from assigning any, because to speak honestly, we have discovered none but mere glimpses of hidden morals or secondary meanings. There seems to us great power in this book but a purposeless power, which we feel a great desire to see turned to better account. We are quite confident that the writer of Wuthering Heights wants but the practised skill to make a great artist; perhaps, a great dramatic artist. His qualities are, at present, excessive; a far more promising fault, let it be remembered, than if they were deficient. He may tone down, whereas the weak and inefficient writer, however carefully he may write by rule and line, will never work up his productions to the point of beauty in art. In Wuthering Heights the reader is shocked, disgusted, almost sickened by details of cruelty, inhumanity, and the most diabolical hate and vengeance, and anon come passages of powerful testimony to the supreme power of love—even over demons in the human form. The women in the book are of a strange fiendish-angelic nature, tantalising, and terrible, and the men are indescribable out of the book itself. Yet, towards the close of the story occurs the following pretty, soft picture, which comes like the rainbow after a storm….

We strongly recommend all our readers who love novelty to get this story, for we can promise them that they never have read anything like it before. It is very puzzling and very interesting, and if we had space we would willingly devote a little more time to the analysis of this remarkable story, but we must leave it to our readers to decide what sort of book it is.

*Publication: Atlas Date: 22 January 1848 Reviewer: Anonymous

Wuthering Heights is a strange, inartistic story. There are evidences in every chapter of a sort of rugged power—an unconscious strength—which the possessor seems never to think of turning to the best advantage. The general effect is inexpressibly painful. We know nothing in the whole range of our fictitious literature which presents such shocking pictures of the worst forms of humanity. Jane Eyre is a book which affects the reader to tears; it touches the most hidden sources of emotion. Wuthering Heights casts a gloom over the mind not easily to be dispelled. It does not soften; it harasses, it extenterates…. There are passages in it which remind us of the Nowlans of the late John Banim but of all pre-existent works the one which it most recalls to our memory is the History of Mathew Wald . It has not, however, the unity and concentration of that fiction; but is a sprawling story, carrying us, with no mitigation of anguish, through two generations of sufferers—though one presiding evil genius sheds a grim shadow over the whole, and imparts a singleness of malignity to the somewhat disjointed tale. A more natural story we do not remember to have read. Inconceivable as are the combinations of human degradation which are here to be found moving within the circle of a few miles, the vraisemblance is so admirably preserved; there is so much truth in what we may call the costumery (not applying the word in its narrow acceptation)—the general mounting of the entire piece—that we readily identify the scenes and personages of the fiction; and when we lay aside the book it is some time before we can persuade ourselves that we have held nothing more than imaginary intercourse with the ideal creations of the brain. The reality of unreality has never been so aptly illustrated as in the scenes of almost savage life which Ellis Bell has brought so vividly before us.

The book sadly wants relief. A few glimpses of sunshine would have increased the reality of the picture and given strength rather than weakness to the whole. There is not in the entire dramatis persona , a single character which is not utterly hateful or thoroughly contemptible. If you do not detest the person, you despise him; and if you do not despise him, you detest him with your whole heart. Hindley, the brutal, degraded sot, strong in the desire to work all mischief, but impotent in his degradation; Linton Heathcliff, the miserable, drivelling coward, in whom we see selfishness in its most abject form; and Heathcliff himself, the presiding evil genius of the piece, the tyrant father of an imbecile son, a creature in whom every evil passion seems to have reached a gigantic excess—form a group of deformities such as we have rarely seen gathered together on the same canvas. The author seems to have designed to throw some redeeming touches into the character of the brutal Heathcliff, by portraying him as one faithful to the idol of his boyhood—loving to the very last—long, long after death had divided them, the unhappy girl who had cheered and brightened up the early days of his wretched life. Here is the touch of nature which makes the whole world kin—but it fails of the intended effect. There is a selfishness—a ferocity in the love of Heathcliff, which scarcely suffer it, in spite of its rugged constancy, to relieve the darker parts of his nature. Even the female characters excite something of loathing and much of contempt. Beautiful and loveable in their childhood, they all, to use a vulgar expression, 'turn out badly'. Catherine the elder—wayward, impatient, impulsive—sacrifices herself and her lover to the pitiful ambition of becoming the wife of a gentleman of station. Hence her own misery—her early death—and something of the brutal wickedness of Heathcliff's character and conduct; though we cannot persuade ourselves that even a happy love would have tamed down the natural ferocity of the tiger. Catherine the younger is more sinned against than sinning, and in spite of her grave moral defects, we have some hope of her at the last….

…We are not quite sure that the next new novel will not efface it, but Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights are not things to be forgotten. The work of Currer Bell is a great performance; that of Ellis Bell is only a promise, but it is a colossal one.

Publication: New Monthly Magazine Date:  January 1848 Reviewer: Anonymous

Wuthering Heights , by Ellis Bell, is a terrific story, associated with an equally fearful and repulsive spot. It should have been called Withering Heights , for any thing from which the mind and body would more instinctively shrink, than the mansion and its tenants, cannot be imagined. …Our novel reading experience does not enable us to refer to anything to be compared with the personages we are introduced to at this desolate spot – a perfect misanthropist's heaven.

Publication: Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine Date:  February 1848 Reviewer: Anonymous

This novel contains undoubtedly powerful writing, and yet it seems to be thrown away. We want to know the object of a fiction. Once people were contented with a crude collection of mysteries. Now they desire to know why the mysteries are revealed. Do they teach mankind to avoid one course and to take another? Do they dissect any portion of existing society, exhibiting together its weak and its strong points? If these questions were asked regarding Wuthering Heights , there could not be an affirmative answer given…

Mr Ellis Bell, before constructing the novel, should have known that forced marriages, under threats and in confinement are illegal, and parties instrumental thereto can be punished [ see FAQ ]. And second, that wills made by young ladies' minors are invalid [ see Legal Aspects ].

The volumes are powerfully written records of wickedness and they have a moral – they show what Satan could do with the law of Entail.

Publication: Paterson’s Magazine (USA) Date:  March 1848 Reviewer: Anonymous

We rise from the perusal of Wuthering Heights as if we had come fresh from a pest-house. Read Jane Eyre is our advice, but burn Wuthering Heights ….

Publication: Graham’s Lady’s Magazine (USA) Date:  July 1848 Reviewer: Anonymous

How a human being could have attempted such a book as the present without committing suicide before he had finished a dozen chapters, is a mystery. It is a compound of vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors….

Publication: North American Review Date: October 1848 Reviewer: Edwin P Whipple

The truth is, that the whole firm of Bell & Co. seem to have a sense of the depravity of human nature peculiarly their own. It is the yahoo, not the demon, that they select for representation; their Pandemonium is of mud rather than fire. This is especially the case with Acton Bell, the author of Wuthering Heights , The Tenant of Wildfell Hall , and, if we mistake not, of certain offensive but powerful portions of Jane Eyre . Acton, when left altogether to his own imaginations, seems to take a morose satisfaction in developing a full and complete science of human brutality. In Wuthering Heights he has succeeded in reaching the summit of this laudable ambition. He appears to think that spiritual wickedness is a combination of animal ferocities, and has accordingly made a compendium of the most striking qualities of tiger, wolf, cur, and wild-cat, in the hope of framing out of such elements a suitable brute-demon to serve as the hero of his novel. [Heathcliff] is a deformed monster, whom the Mephistopheles of Goethe would have nothing to say to, whom the Satan of Milton would consider as an object of simple disgust, and to whom Dante would hesitate in awarding the honour of a place among those whom he has consigned to the burning pitch. This epitome of brutality, disavowed by man and devil, Mr. Acton Bell attempts in two whole volumes to delineate, and certainly he is to be congratulated on his success. As he is a man of uncommon talents, it is needless to say that it is to his subject and his dogged manner of handling it that we are to refer the burst of dislike with which the novel was received. His mode of delineating a bad character is to narrate every offensive act and repeat every vile expression which are characteristic. Hence, in Wuthering Heights , he details all the ingenuities of animal malignity, and exhausts the whole rhetoric of stupid blasphemy, in order that there may be no mistake as to the kind of person he intends to hold up to the popular gaze. Like all spendthrifts of malice and profanity, however, he overdoes the business. Though he scatters oaths as plentifully as sentimental writers do interjections, the comparative parsimony of the great novelists in this respect is productive of infinitely more effect. It must be confessed that this coarseness, though the prominent, is not the only characteristic of the writer. His attempt at originality does not stop with the conception of [Heathcliff], but he aims further to exhibit the action of the sentiment of love on the nature of the being whom his morbid imagination has created. This is by far the ablest and most subtile portion of his labours, and indicates that strong hold upon the elements of character, and that decision of touch in the delineation of the most evanescent qualities of emotion, which distinguish the mind of the whole family. For all practical purposes, however, the power evinced in Wuthering Heights is power thrown away. Nightmares and dreams, through which devils dance and wolves howl, make bad novels.

*These reviews were found in Emily's desk after her death.

• Today's news
• Reviews and deals
• Climate change
• 2024 election
• Newsletters
• Fall allergies
• Health news
• Mental health
• Sexual health
• Family health
• So mini ways
• Unapologetically
• Buying guides

Entertainment

• How to Watch
• My watchlist
• Stock market
• Biden economy
• Personal finance
• Stocks: most active
• Stocks: gainers
• Stocks: losers
• Trending tickers
• World indices
• US Treasury bonds
• Top mutual funds
• Highest open interest
• Highest implied volatility
• Currency converter
• Basic materials
• Communication services
• Consumer cyclical
• Consumer defensive
• Financial services
• Industrials
• Real estate
• Mutual funds
• Credit cards
• Balance transfer cards
• Cash back cards
• Rewards cards
• Travel cards
• Online checking
• High-yield savings
• Money market
• Home equity loan
• Personal loans
• Student loans
• Options pit
• Fantasy football
• Pro Pick 'Em
• College Pick 'Em
• Fantasy baseball
• Fantasy hockey
• Fantasy basketball
• Download the app
• Daily fantasy
• Scores and schedules
• GameChannel
• World Baseball Classic
• Premier League
• CONCACAF League
• Champions League
• Motorsports
• Horse racing

New on Yahoo

• Privacy Dashboard

Emerald Fennell’s ‘Wuthering Heights’ Movie Sparks Backlash Over Casting Of Jacob Elordi As “Dark-Skinned” Heathcliff

Emerald Fennell’s decision to cast Jacob Elordi in Wuthering Heights has raised eyebrows in the UK.

Deadline revealed on Monday that Elordi and Margot Robbie will star in the Emily Brontë adaptation as Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw. Saltburn director Fennell is set to write, direct, and produce, with filming taking place in the UK next year.

More from Deadline

Margot Robbie And Jacob Elordi To Star In Emerald Fennell's Adaptation Of 'Wuthering Heights' From MRC And LuckyChap

'Euphoria' Stars Jacob Elordi & Sydney Sweeney Take Over TIFF With Dueling Saturday Night Premieres Of 'On Swift Horses' & 'Eden'

'On Swift Horses' Review: Jacob Elordi & Daisy Edgar-Jones In Star-Crossed Noir-ish Queer Love Story - Toronto Film Festival

Heathcliff’s ethnicity is famously ambiguous in Brontë’s 1847 novel, but there is some consensus that his description as a “dark-skinned gipsy” — as well as his abandonment as a baby at the slave port of Liverpool — likely means he was not white.

Commenting on Elordi’s casting, Michael Stewart, director of the Brontë Writing Centre, told The Daily Telegraph newspaper: “With Wuthering Heights , you’ve had many years of white actors playing the more ambiguous ethnic character… But things are different now, the way we represent certain people in art and culture comes with a responsibility now that wasn’t there 20 years ago.”

Heathcliff was played by Tom Hardy, for example, in a 2009 television adaptation of Wuthering Heights for UK broadcaster ITV. Andrea Arnold’s 2011 movie, however, cast James Howson in the role.

Dr Claire O’Callaghan, editor-in-chief of the official journal of the Brontë Society, told the Telegraph : “I guess the danger of this – of casting a white actor – particularly in the cultural climate, is that it overlooks the ambiguity that’s there.”

The comments of Stewart and O’Callaghan followed criticism on social media. In a post that has been viewed more than 7.5M times , one user of X (once Twitter) wrote: “Heathcliff is described as a dark-skinned brown man in the book and a major plot point is that he was subjected to racist abuse by his adopted family. But yeah sure Jacob Elordi is perfect!”

Clarisse Loughrey, The Independent film critic, asked: “Did anyone actually read the book before deciding this?” Gavia Baker-Whitelaw, another critic, added: “White Heathcliff and 34-year-old Cathy, and they both look like they belong on Instagram. I’m obsessed.”

The original novel by Brontë is considered by many to be one of the great pieces of literature. The original story follows two families, the Earnshaws and the Lintons, and the turbulent relationship they have with the Earnshaws’ foster son, Heathcliff.

Fennell’s reps have been contacted for comment.

Best of Deadline

Which Emily Henry Books Are Becoming Movies? ‘Happy Place,’ ‘Book Lovers,’ Among Others 

Step & Repeat Gallery: The Best Red Carpet & Party Photos Of 2024

The 10 Best SNL Political Skits...And Counting

Sign up for Deadline's Newsletter . For the latest news, follow us on Facebook , Twitter , and Instagram .

• Reading Lists
• New Nonfiction
• Awards/Festivals
• Daily Thrill
• Noir/Hardboiled
• Espionage/Thriller
• Legal/Procedural
• Literary Hub

What is going on with the new Wuthering Heights Adaptation?

Emerald fennell's new adaptation promises a fundamental misreading of the novel..

I think everyone is on the same page—which is to say, angry. The internet is angry, my friends are angry, and I am angry, and here’s why (though if you are reading this website, you probably already know this news): Emerald Fennell, the writer-director of Promising Young Woman and Saltburn , is adapting Emily Brontë’s novel Wuthering Heights , and it has been announced that the two impassioned, absolutely unhinged leads Cathy and Heathcliff will be played by Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi.

Yes! Yes. Obviously, there’s there’s a lot to unpack here!

First of all, Margot Robbie is a very good actress, but I personally don’t buy her as the very young, self-directed, ghostly-tortured Cathy. We need a young, pale little freak to play Cathy. End of story.

Second of all, Fennell does not seem to be the right director for this project. Now, the few dissenters might say, “but what do you mean? Fennell is the least subtle filmmaker out there, and Wuthering Heights is the least subtle book out there, so shouldn’t it be a good match?” No! The answer is no!

The lack of subtlety in Wuthering Heights is highly calibrated and effective; it acts as an enveloping thematic device to corral the wild, almost fauvistic, and borderline psychopathic urges of its characters with the abstractness of their yearning and connection, and the ethereality of their later existences. Wuthering Heights is a masterpiece of stark contrasts and impulsive movements.

Contrarily, as evidenced by her last two films, Fennell’s directorial hand forgoes subtlety without swapping it for any richer devices to augment the reading. Her films are sparse in subtext and therefore in their interpretive potential; she seems to point directly to things not to map out a complicated web of behaviors or feelings, but to explain things to an audience she seems to fear will not understand what she is trying to say. This makes various elements in both of these films both highly redundant and reductive.

Thirdly, and many on Twitter have said this, including Joyce Carol Oates, but Robbie and Elordi don’t promise to capture the absolutely deranged, fully batshit essences of both Cathy and Heathcliff. Wuthering Heights is more than a story of yearning, it’s a story about madness and manipulation and an absolutely twisted, messed-up love with racism-related abuse and trauma baked into it. As my friend Emily said in our long, very pissed off text chain, you either need two unknown actors or a pair of well-known weirdo actors. I fully agree with this tweet from @ timewrinkles .

no hate to margot robbie and jacob elordi but neither of them have enough Psychologically Tortured vibes to play cathy and heathcliff. like a wuthering heights adaptation simply needs actors who are weirder — 🔪 (@timewrinkles) September 23, 2024

Here’s what Joyce Carol Oates had to say, just for the record.

this Heathcliff isn’t looking like he’s been prowling o’er the moors for quite a few generations. https://t.co/eYnQmjg5ee — Joyce Carol Oates (@JoyceCarolOates) September 24, 2024

Fourthly, and this is the big one: why are we, in the year of our lord 2024, casting Heathcliff with a white actor???? Heathcliff is explicitly nonwhite, described as having “gipsy” (Romani) origins! When he is a child, he is described as a “gipsy brat,” “as dark almost as if it came from the devil.” It’s unclear if he is actually, technically of Romani ancestry or if “gipsy” is a catchall term for a Black or Brown identity. But he is not white!!! He’s referred to as a “gipsy” six times in the novel! I CRTL + F’ed it! The first time we get a description of him, at the very start of the novel, he is described in the following terms.

But Mr. Heathcliff forms a singular contrast to his abode and style of living. He is a dark-skinned gipsy in aspect, in dress and manners a gentleman: that is, as much a gentleman as many a country squire: rather slovenly, perhaps, yet not looking amiss with his negligence, because he has an erect and handsome figure; and rather morose.

See, Heathcliff is a foundling, discovered as a homeless and sickly baby by Cathy Earnshaw’s father. He’s taken in and included in the Earnshaw family, named “Heathcliff” after the Earnshaw’s deceased firstborn son. But when Cathy’s father dies and her racist, jealous brother Hindley becomes head of the household, Hindley rejects Heathcliff, as both a brother and as a man. He calls him “imp of Satan,” a “beggarly interloper” trying to “wheedle [his] father out of all he has,” and forces him to become a ploughboy on their estate.

The point of Wuthering Heights is that Heathcliff is ultimately cast out from the Earnshaw family and demoted to the rank of servant because he is nonwhite and low-class. He isn’t just some brooding, earthy moor-man; he’s a nonwhite person in an exclusively white environment, subjected to racist and demeaning treatment… and this fuels the very, very complicated dynamics between Cathy and Heathcliff that snowball as the novel goes on. There can’t be a love story without the story of Heathcliff’s “otherness.”

This tweet, from @ceokimjisoos , is absolutely correct about who could be cast and do a great job.

it is not too late to yeet margot and jacob out of wuthering heights and cast #REAL talent as cathy and heathcliff! pic.twitter.com/9jYaETMNl4 — n (@ceokimjisoos) September 23, 2024

Honestly, though, in our current era of Bridgerton and My Lady Jane and inclusive casting practices that allow the reimagining of history to include BIPOC characters in traditionally white roles, why are we erasing actual representations and discussions from historical texts that communicate how race was handled , in those historical contexts? We can’t make up a nicer-seeming history to replace our real one with, in the popular imagination!!!!

Finally, anyone who wants to watch this movie should go see Andrea Arnold’s extraordinary 2011 version. It features a Black actor, James Howson, as Heathcliff. Now that’s a movie that has actually READ its source material.

• Share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Google+ (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window)

Olivia Rutigliano

Previous article, next article, get the crime reads brief, get our “here’s to crime” tote.

Popular Posts

CrimeReads on Twitter

The Many Faces of Nigel Morland, King of the Crime Fiction Fabulists

Advertisers: Contact Us

Privacy Policy

• RSS - Posts

Support CrimeReads - Become a Member

CrimeReads needs your help. The mystery world is vast, and we need your support to cover it the way it deserves. With your contribution, you'll gain access to exclusive newsletters, editors' recommendations, early book giveaways, and our new "Well, Here's to Crime" tote bag.

Become a member for as low as $5/month