Wuthering Heights

Emily Brontë (1818-1848) was an English novelist and poet who lived most of her brief life in the isolated parsonage at Haworth on the Yorkshire moors. The fifth of six children, Emily was intensely private, rarely leaving home and forming few relationships outside her family. She found her truest companions in the wild moors surrounding Haworth, walking for hours in all weather, and in the imaginary world of Gondal she created with her sister Anne.

Wuthering Heights, published in 1847 under the masculine pseudonym Ellis Bell, was Emily's only novel. It was published alongside Anne's Agnes Grey, one year after their sister Charlotte's Jane Eyre. While Jane Eyre was immediately successful, Wuthering Heights baffled and horrified reviewers. They found it too violent, too strange, too morally ambiguous. Some critics assumed the "Ellis Bell" author was an inexperienced writer who didn't understand proper literary conventions or morality. They had no idea they were encountering one of literature's most original and uncompromising visions.

Emily never knew her novel would become a masterpiece. She died of tuberculosis in December 1848, just one year after Wuthering Heights was published, at only 30 years old. She refused medical help and continued her daily routine until the very end, finally collapsing while feeding her dogs. Her sister Charlotte later tried to "explain" and soften Emily's harsh novel in a preface to the 1850 edition, suggesting Emily didn't understand what she was writing about. Charlotte was wrong. Emily understood exactly what she was doing: creating a novel that refused to prettify human nature or offer easy moral comfort.

Today, Wuthering Heights is recognized as one of the greatest novels in English literature, a work of startling psychological insight, gothic power, and unflinching honesty about human capacity for both love and cruelty.