Wuthering Heights

Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw on the Yorkshire moors, told at two removes — a tenant recording a housekeeper’s recollection — so that the reader never gets the story from anyone with a clean view of it. It is routinely shelved as a romance and is closer to a study of what a fixed obsession does to the generation that inherits it.

Reviewers in 1847 found it brutal and several said so plainly; Charlotte Brontë felt obliged to write a defence of her sister’s book for the 1850 edition.

Context: Emily Brontë (1818-1848) published one novel and died of tuberculosis the year after it appeared, at 30.

Connections

• Emily Brontë — the author.
• Charlotte Brontë — her sister, who wrote the preface defending the book.
• Jane Eyre — published the same year, also on this list.
• Literature