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"Wuthering Heights" has a reputation that arrives before the book does. People call it the great romance of the Yorkshire moors. Then new readers open it and meet, of all people, a newly arrived tenant paying a polite call on his landlord, and getting nothing but cold looks for his trouble. That gap between the reputation and the first page is one of the best things about the novel. It does not hand you a love story. It makes you piece one together from the outside.
Who wrote it, and when
Emily Brontë was born on 30 July 1818 in Thornton, Yorkshire, the fifth of six children. Her older sister was Charlotte, and the youngest of the family was Anne. Emily spent most of her life at home in Haworth, on the edge of the West Yorkshire moors, and she died there on 19 December 1848, aged just 30.
In 1846 the three sisters published a joint collection, "Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell," at their own expense. The masculine-sounding pseudonyms stuck. "Wuthering Heights" appeared under the name Ellis Bell on 24 November 1847, published by Thomas Cautley Newby in a three-volume set: Emily's novel filled the first two volumes, and Anne's "Agnes Grey" the third. A month earlier, Charlotte's "Jane Eyre" had been an immediate success. Emily's book had a harder time. Reviewers acknowledged its power and imagination, but many found the plot confusing and the characters savage and selfish. One called it simply "a strange book."
Emily died the following year. A letter from her publisher suggests she had begun a second novel, but no manuscript has ever been found.
The title itself is a clue to the book's mood. "Wuthering" is a Yorkshire word for the roar and tumult of the air in stormy weather, and the house of that name stands exposed high on the moor.
Where the story begins
The year is 1801. Mr Lockwood has just rented Thrushcross Grange, a house in a sheltered valley. He goes up to call on his landlord, Mr Heathcliff, who lives at the farmhouse called Wuthering Heights.
The welcome is chilly in every sense. Heathcliff is curt. A reserved young woman barely speaks to him. There is a servant named Joseph and a young man called Hareton, and Lockwood cannot work out how any of these people are related, or why they all seem so unhappy. When he returns a second time, snow traps him there overnight. In the room where he is put to sleep, he finds diary entries written by someone called Catherine Earnshaw, and the night that follows is not a restful one.
Back at the Grange, curious and a little shaken, Lockwood asks the housekeeper, Nelly Dean, what she knows. She knows a great deal. Her story begins years earlier, when Mr Earnshaw of Wuthering Heights came home from Liverpool with an orphan boy and named him Heathcliff. What grew from that moment is for you to discover.
What makes it worth reading
The first thing to notice is the structure. Almost everything you learn comes secondhand: Lockwood is told the story by Nelly, who tells it from her own point of view, and the narrative also folds in a diary, letters, and sections told by other characters. None of these narrators is neutral. Asking yourself who is speaking, and what they might not be saying, turns the reading into something closer to detective work, and gives you plenty to think about.
The second is the intensity of the characters. The Victorian critics were not wrong that these people are fierce. They love and resent without restraint, and they rarely behave the way a well-mannered novel would want. If you go in expecting someone easy to root for, you may be frustrated. If you go in prepared to watch a storm, you will find it hard to look away.
The third is the landscape. The exposed house on the heights and the sheltered Grange in the valley are almost characters in their own right, and the moor between them shapes how people live and what they feel. Emily herself spent most of her life in Haworth, surrounded by that same kind of moorland.
A practical tip: several characters share the same or similar names across the two families. Jotting down a simple family tree as you go will save you a lot of flipping back.
Who will enjoy it
This is a book for readers who enjoyed "Jane Eyre" and want to see how differently another Brontë sister could write. It suits anyone curious about unreliable or partial narrators, and anyone who prefers a love story with real darkness and weather in it to a comfortable one. It also rewards readers who know the adaptations but have never read the original, since the novel is stranger than its reputation suggests.
Let Lockwood knock on that unwelcoming door, sit with him through one snowbound night, and you will want to hear everything Nelly has to tell.
Sources
- Wikipedia, "Wuthering Heights" (first publication date and publisher, the pseudonym Ellis Bell, the three-volume set with Agnes Grey, first American edition, the frame narration by Lockwood and Nelly Dean, the opening in 1801, the West Yorkshire moorland setting, early reviews, the meaning of "wuthering") https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuthering_Heights
- Wikipedia, "Emily Brontë" (birth and death dates and places, birth order among the Brontë siblings, the 1846 joint volume of poems, the unfound second novel, the October 1847 success of Jane Eyre) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Bront%C3%AB