Gothic fiction · 1847
Wuthering Heights
by Emily Brontë
1847 novel by Emily Brontë
- 1847
- Gothic fiction
- Victorian literature
- romantic fiction
- cautionary tale
Summary
Wuthering Heights is the only novel by the English author Emily Brontë, initially published in 1847 under her pen name Ellis Bell. It concerns two extensive upland estates and their landowning families on the West Yorkshire moors, the Earnshaws and the Lintons; and their turbulent relationships with the Earnshaws' foster son, Heathcliff. Driven by themes of love, possession, revenge, and reconciliation, the novel is influenced by Romanticism and Gothic fiction. It is considered a classic of English literature.
Source: Wikipedia (CC BY-SA).
Historical Background
Emily Brontë wrote Wuthering Heights in the Haworth parsonage on the Yorkshire moors, where she lived with her father, siblings, and their shared fantasy worlds inherited from childhood imaginative play (the Gondal saga). The novel was published in December 1847 under the male pseudonym "Ellis Bell." Her sisters' novels appeared under similarly androgynous pen names — Charlotte's as Currer Bell, Anne's as Acton Bell — reflecting the era's prejudice against women writers, especially of unconventional material. It appeared bound with Anne Brontë's Agnes Grey. Emily died in 1848, less than a year after publication, having seen only one novel through print; she left no letters or notebooks explaining her intentions, making the book unusually resistant to biographical reading. Early reviewers were shocked by its violence, cruelty, and moral ambiguity, and it was initially considered coarse and savage compared to Charlotte's more palatable Jane Eyre. The isolated Yorkshire moorland landscape, the harsh climate, and the insular rural society of small farms and gentry households directly shaped the novel's setting and its preoccupation with confinement, nature, and social boundaries. Only with the twentieth century did critics recognize its structural sophistication and psychological depth, and it is now regarded as one of the most original and important works in English fiction.
The Story
The novel is narrated retrospectively, mainly through the outsider Lockwood, who leases Thrushcross Grange, and through Nelly Dean, the housekeeper who has known both families for decades. Heathcliff, a foundling of unknown origin, is brought to Wuthering Heights by Mr. Earnshaw and raised alongside his children Hindley and Catherine. Catherine and Heathcliff form an intense bond, but after Mr. Earnshaw's death, Hindley, now master, degrades Heathcliff to a servant. Catherine, drawn to the gentility of the neighboring Lintons, marries Edgar Linton instead of Heathcliff, despite declaring their souls are the same. Heathcliff disappears, returns wealthy, and pursues a calculated revenge: he ruins Hindley, marries Edgar's sister Isabella to torment her, and gradually gains control of both Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange. Catherine dies giving birth to a daughter, also named Catherine. The novel's second generation carries the story forward: Heathcliff manipulates the younger Catherine into marrying his sickly son Linton to seize the Grange, and subjects Hindley's son Hareton to the same brutalizing treatment he himself endured. Ultimately Heathcliff's obsession with the dead Catherine consumes him; he stops eating and dies, apparently reunited with her spirit. The younger Catherine and Hareton, breaking the cycle of cruelty, fall in love, promising reconciliation and renewal as the narrative closes.
Themes
- Passion versus social convention
- Revenge and its generational transmission
- Nature versus culture (Heights vs. Grange)
- Class mobility and social status
- Doubling and the instability of self and other
- Death, haunting, and the afterlife of love
- Cruelty, power, and domestic tyranny
- Cyclical repetition across two generations
Literary Devices
- Frame narrative — Lockwood's outer narration encases Nelly Dean's told story, distancing and complicating reliability
- Multiple/unreliable narrators — Lockwood and Nelly both filter events through limited understanding and bias
- Symbolic setting — Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange embody opposing values of wildness and civility
- Gothic atmosphere — storms, ghosts, moors, and the supernatural pervade the narrative
- Non-linear, layered chronology — the story unfolds through nested retrospective narration and time-shifts
- Doubling of characters and generations — parallel names (Catherine/Cathy, Linton/Hareton) mirror the first generation's conflicts
- Pathetic fallacy — the wild moorland weather reflects characters' turbulent emotional states
Symbolism
- The moors — untamed passion, freedom, and the wild, elemental force outside social order
- Wuthering Heights — instinct, storm, and violent, ungoverned nature
- Thrushcross Grange — civility, restraint, social respectability, and material comfort
- Ghosts/Catherine's spirit — the persistence of the past and the refusal of desire to be extinguished by death
- Windows — thresholds between confinement and the wild world beyond, crossed repeatedly at crucial moments
Critical Interpretation
Wuthering Heights has generated widely divergent critical readings. Early Victorian reviewers, including some contemporaries, condemned it as coarse, savage, and morally troubling, unable to reconcile its brutality with acceptable domestic fiction. Twentieth-century critics rehabilitated the novel, reading it through Romantic and metaphysical lenses that treat Heathcliff and Catherine's bond as a transcendent, almost mystical union beyond social morality. Marxist and social-historical critics, including work associated with the Marxist critic Arnold Kettle, have examined the novel's engagement with class tension, property, and the rise of a mercantile gentry encroaching on older landed forms of power. Feminist critics have explored the constrained choices available to Catherine and the younger Catherine within patriarchal inheritance structures, and have debated whether the novel critiques or reproduces the violence of its male protagonist. Psychoanalytic critics have read Heathcliff and Catherine as expressions of a single divided psyche, drawing on the novel's own language of souls being "the same." Structuralist and narratological critics have focused on the novel's complex frame narration and its effect on reader certainty. The novel resists any single interpretive frame, which is often cited as evidence of its enduring critical richness.
Quotations
Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.
Catherine Earnshaw, describing her bond with Heathcliff to Nelly Dean
I am Heathcliff!
Catherine, asserting the identity between herself and Heathcliff
If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger.
Catherine on Heathcliff, contrasted with her more conventional feelings for Edgar Linton
I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!
Heathcliff's anguished cry after Catherine's death
Influence
Wuthering Heights profoundly shaped later fiction's treatment of passionate, morally ambiguous protagonists and its fusion of Gothic and Romantic modes with psychological realism. Its influence is visible in the development of the Byronic anti-hero figure in later nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, and in later novelists' experiments with unreliable and layered narration. The novel helped establish the moor and remote rural landscape as a charged psychological space in English fiction, an approach later echoed by writers associated with regional and rural settings. Its unflinching treatment of cruelty and obsession also anticipated modern fiction's interest in morally complex, unsympathetic protagonists rather than conventional heroes and heroines, expanding what the domestic novel could depict.
Adaptations
- Wuthering Heights (1939 film, directed by William Wyler, starring Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon)
- Wuthering Heights (1992 film, directed by Peter Kosminsky, starring Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche)
- Kate Bush's song "Wuthering Heights" (1978), inspired by the novel
Related Works
- Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
- Agnes Grey by Anne Brontë
- The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë
- Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
- Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Curator's Notes
- 1Wuthering Heights was Emily Brontë's only novel; she died in 1848, less than a year after its publication.
- 2It was first published under the male pseudonym 'Ellis Bell,' as were her sisters' novels under their own pseudonyms.
- 3The word 'wuthering' is a Yorkshire dialect term describing the turbulent weather to which the Heights' location is exposed.
- 4The novel was initially published in three volumes, with the third volume containing Anne Brontë's Agnes Grey.
For the Exam
UGC NET English commonly tests Wuthering Heights on its narrative structure (Lockwood and Nelly Dean as frame narrators), its place within Victorian and Gothic/Romantic traditions, the Heathcliff-Catherine relationship as a study in passion versus social convention, and thematic contrasts between Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange. Questions may also cover the Brontë sisters' shared publishing history under pseudonyms, the novel's 1847 publication date, and its critical reception history from Victorian condemnation to twentieth-century canonical status.