Title: Wuthering Heights Author: Emily Brontë Creation Date: 1847 Location: England Collection: Women Who Wrote When They Weren't Supposed To
Brief
Emily Brontë published Wuthering Heights in December 1847 under the pseudonym Ellis Bell, in a three-volume edition shared with her sister Anne's Agnes Grey, through the London publisher Thomas Cautley Newby. She was twenty-nine years old. She would be dead within a year.
The novel bewildered its first reviewers. They recognised its power — the sheer force of the thing was undeniable — but they could not reconcile that force with what they expected from fiction. The structure confused them: two narrators, neither fully reliable, the story told at several removes from its own centre. The passions alarmed them: Heathcliff was not a figure the Victorian novel had prepared anyone for, and Catherine Earnshaw's declaration that she was Heathcliff operated in a register beyond what romance or even Gothic convention could contain. Critics assumed the author was male. The ferocity seemed to demand it.
Charlotte Brontë's 1850 edition — the first to carry Emily's real name — attempted to domesticate the novel through a prefatory note that framed it as the product of an isolated, untutored Yorkshire imagination. The framing was protective and diminishing in equal measure. It established the moors as the novel's atmosphere while obscuring the extraordinary formal sophistication that the double-narrator architecture plainly demonstrated. Wuthering Heights is not, at its core, a love story. It is a study in how violence and dispossession reproduce themselves across generations, how the language of passion becomes the language of annihilation, and how the structures a civilisation builds to contain human feeling — family, property, marriage — can become the instruments of its destruction. The novel has been in continuous print since 1850 and has generated an interpretive literature so vast it constitutes its own field. Emily wrote one novel, died at thirty, and left the rest to be argued over. The argument has not ended.
The Prohibition
Emily Brontë wrote in a mid-nineteenth-century England that did not technically forbid women from publishing novels but that constrained, in every practical and ideological dimension, the kind of novel a woman could write and the name under which she could publish it. No university admitted women in the 1840s. Emily's education was entirely domestic, shaped by her father's library at Haworth Parsonage and the elaborate imaginary worlds — Angria and Gondal — that the Brontë children created in minuscule hand-sewn booklets from childhood. The informality was the point: she had no credentials, no institutional authority, no letters after her name.
The prohibition was also economic. The Brontë sisters' viable options were marriage, governess work, or teaching. All three worked as governesses and found the experience wretched. Their plan to establish a school at the parsonage failed for want of pupils. Writing was not a vocation freely chosen; it was a bid for financial survival. When the three sisters published a joint volume of poetry in 1846, they paid for the printing themselves and sold two copies.
The pseudonym made the prohibition visible. Charlotte, Emily, and Anne published as Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell — names deliberately ambiguous in gender, chosen to avoid the automatic dismissal a woman's name invited. Charlotte later explained that "authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice." Reviewers praised Wuthering Heights's power while assuming Ellis Bell was male, calibrating their admiration to the masculine imagination they believed they were encountering. When Charlotte revealed the identities after Emily's death, her 1850 preface reframed the novel as the wild product of untutored genius — simultaneously shielding her sister's reputation and diminishing the deliberate technical control the double-narrator structure plainly demonstrated. The prohibition did not merely prevent women from writing; it ensured that when they wrote well, the achievement would be misattributed, and when the attribution was corrected, the achievement would be reframed as accident rather than art.
The Strategy
Emily Brontë's strategy was the pseudonym, the structure, and the absolute refusal to explain herself. The pseudonym — Ellis Bell — gave the novel a reception window in which its quality was assessed without the discount that gender imposed. Readers engaged with the work before they could dismiss the author. By the time anyone knew a woman had written it, the novel's ferocity was already on record.
The formal strategy was the double-narrator architecture. Wuthering Heights is told through Lockwood, the London gentleman whose incomprehension frames everything, and Nelly Dean, the housekeeper who tells most of the story from inside the household. The passions of Heathcliff and Catherine are held at one remove, filtered through Nelly's practical sensibility and Lockwood's genteel bewilderment. The effect is paradoxical: emotional intensity is increased by the mediation. The reader feels what Nelly cannot fully articulate and hears what Lockwood cannot understand. It was a structure of extraordinary sophistication — and it was the work of someone who had been practising exactly this kind of narrative for two decades.
The Gondal strategy preceded the novel. Emily and Anne had maintained an elaborate fantasy world since childhood, writing sustained narratives in multiple viewpoints and extreme emotional registers. The Gondal poems — which survive where the Gondal prose does not — show a writer already working with the materials of dispossession, exile, passion, and death that would become the novel's substance. Wuthering Heights was a culmination, not a beginning.
The final strategy was silence. Emily said nothing publicly about her novel. She wrote no preface, responded to no reviews, refused to explain or defend or contextualise. Charlotte noted that Emily guarded her privacy with a ferocity that matched anything in her fiction. The silence was not modesty. It was the refusal to participate in a critical conversation whose terms she did not accept. The novel would stand or fall on its own merits. It stood.
The Price and the Legacy
The price was death before vindication. Emily Brontë died on 19 December 1848, of tuberculosis, at thirty. She refused medical treatment with the same ferocious will she brought to everything else — would not see a doctor, would not go to bed until the morning of her death, and died on the sofa in the parsonage parlour with her dog Keeper at her feet. Her brother Branwell had died three months earlier; Anne would die five months later. Charlotte was left alone in the parsonage with their ageing father. We do not know what Emily would have written next. The silence after Wuthering Heights is the silence of a life cut short, not a career abandoned.
The critical price was Charlotte's well-intentioned damage. Her 1850 preface framed the novel as the product of an isolated, artless imagination — "Whether it is right or advisable to create beings like Heathcliff, I do not know." This reading persisted for nearly a century, obscuring the deliberate formal architecture and temporal sophistication that marked the novel as the work of complete technical control. Emily was cast as a literary natural force when she was, demonstrably, a deliberate artist.
The legacy is the novel itself — in continuous print since 1850, generating scholarship so extensive it constitutes its own academic field. Its vocabulary has entered the culture independently of the text: the moors, Heathcliff, Cathy's ghost at the window. Wuthering Heights proved that a woman could write fiction of absolute ferocity — fiction that refused consolation, refused moral tidiness, refused to perform the virtues expected of women's novels — and that such fiction would become one of the central texts of the English language. Emily Brontë wrote one novel, under a male pseudonym, and died at thirty. The novel outlasted everything that had been arranged to prevent it.
The Reading
The Outsider at the Window
A gentleman from London has rented a house in the Yorkshire valley for the winter, a man of fashionable sensibility who does not yet know what he has come to. He visits his landlord at the farmhouse on the ridge and is received with a hostility so comprehensive it barely qualifies as rudeness — it is simply the household's condition. The landlord is dark, powerful, and contemptuous. The young woman in the kitchen is bitter. The young man who might be a servant or might be a son is sullen and degraded. The visitor cannot parse the relationships. He tries pleasantries. They die on contact.
A snowstorm traps him overnight. He is put in a closet bedroom where a girl's diary has been scratched into the margins of old books — cramped, desperate handwriting that speaks of a childhood lived under tyranny. He reads it. He falls asleep. He dreams, or he encounters, a ghost: a child's hand reaching through the broken window, a voice crying Let me in — let me in! He seizes the wrist and drags it across the jagged glass to free himself, and the hand bleeds but does not release. He wakes screaming. The landlord is at the window within moments, in a grief so vast and so naked that the visitor cannot interpret it. The man leans into the darkness and calls the name of someone who has been dead for eighteen years.
The visitor's housekeeper knows the whole history. She was there. She tells it.
The Foundling
The old master of the farmhouse — Earnshaw — brings a dark foundling child home from Liverpool, filthy and starving, speaking a language no one can identify. He names the child after a dead son. No surname is given. The boy is a name without a family, a person without an origin or a status, and the master favours him above his own son Hindley and his daughter Catherine with a partiality that is both the household's first generosity and its original injury.
When the old man dies, Hindley inherits. He takes his revenge with the patience of someone who has waited years. The foundling is stripped of every mark of equality — no more lessons, no more sitting at table, no more status as companion. He is degraded to a servant, kept unwashed and uneducated, made the lowest member of the household. The degradation is systematic and deliberate, and what it produces in the child it is enacted upon is not submission but something harder and more dangerous: the slow, cold accumulation of a will that has decided to survive.
Catherine is twelve when her father dies and Hindley begins his campaign. She is not degraded with the foundling — her status rises as his falls, because she is useful as a daughter where he is not — but she chooses his company anyway, on the moors, in the cold, in the dark. The choice matters. It is the first of many decisions she will make that the world around her cannot understand, because it has already decided what a girl's preferences ought to be.
The Two Houses
Catherine Earnshaw and the foundling grow up together with an attachment the story refuses to classify. It is not, or not simply, desire — it precedes desire and also exceeds it. It is more like identity: each finds in the other the part of themselves they cannot otherwise reach. Catherine says, at the story's emotional centre, He's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same. This is not a statement about romantic feeling. It is a statement about the ground of being. He is not the person she loves most. He is the condition of her self.
One night they are caught in a rainstorm on the moors and take shelter at the great house in the valley — the Grange — peering through the windows at the children inside, who are quarrelling over a pet dog in a room full of light and carpets and warmth. The farmhouse on the ridge is stone and wind. The Grange is comfort and gentility. The two houses are the story's twin poles, and Catherine's eventual marriage to the Grange's heir — fair, temperate, entirely comprehensible Edgar Linton — is a choice between them. She chooses the Grange because it offers a version of life the farmhouse cannot: respectability, warmth, a world in which she can be a lady rather than a wild girl on the moors. She tells the housekeeper, in the scene everything is built around, that marrying the foundling would degrade her, that Edgar will be rich, that she loves Edgar, and then: Nelly, I am Heathcliff! He's always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being.
He overhears part of it. He hears her say it would degrade her to marry him, and he leaves before he hears the rest. He is gone for three years. What he does during those years is the story's great unanswered question.
The Return
He comes back wealthy, educated, and with a plan of destruction so comprehensive it can only be understood as the work of someone who has decided to let his injury become his definition. He has decided to become his dispossession.
He wins the farmhouse from Hindley through gambling, encouraging Hindley's alcoholic self-ruin with a cold attentiveness more frightening than any open violence. Hindley is already destroying himself; the foundling simply ensures the destruction is complete and profitable. He takes the mortgage. He takes the authority. He takes Hindley's son Hareton and raises the boy in deliberate degradation — kept uneducated, unwashed, uncouth — reproducing on Hindley's heir the exact dispossession that Hindley had inflicted on him. The symmetry is architectural. He is not merely cruel. He is building something.
He seduces and runs off with Edgar's sister Isabella, marrying her not from feeling but because the marriage makes him part of the Linton family and gives him leverage over their estate. Isabella discovers that his darkness is not romantic. It is the daily exercise of contempt by a man who married her as a means to an end. She writes the housekeeper a letter from the farmhouse that is among the most harrowing documents in the story: a woman describing her own domestic horror in the precise, bewildered prose of someone who still cannot believe what she has chosen.
Her bewilderment is real. She had been sheltered, educated, protected. She had believed, as sheltered girls are allowed to believe, that romantic feeling is sufficient preparation for marriage, that a dark and passionate man is a romantic one, that the farmhouse on the ridge was dramatic rather than dangerous. The story does not excuse her. It notes what she is, what she was trained to be, and what that training has cost her. She will leave. She will have his son — sickly, peevish, difficult, more afraid than cruel — and raise him in the south, away. The son will be brought back at fourteen, when she is dying, to serve his father's design.
The Death at the Centre
Catherine, meanwhile, is dying. The marriage to Edgar is not unhappy — he loves her genuinely and she is not incapable of recognising this — but it is a life lived at the wrong temperature, in the wrong company, beside a man who is entirely different from the missing thing. When the foundling returns and they meet again, what the story shows is not love's renewal but something more terrible: the return of a need that neither of them can govern. She stops eating. She has seizures. She becomes feverish and wild. His presence is simultaneously what she most wants and what is killing her.
The household around this private war continues its ordinary business. Edgar loves her with a quiet constancy she genuinely values and cannot fully inhabit. He does not understand what she is, what she contains, what the foundling's return has done to her internal weather. His love is human in the way the Grange is human — warm, furnished, comprehensible — and she is cold and stone and wind. She wants to be warm. She cannot stop being cold.
She dies after giving birth to a daughter, and the scene of her death — him holding her, raging at her for dying, for choosing to leave the world — is as close to unbearable as the story gets.
Why did you betray your own heart, Cathy? he says. And then: Be with me always — take any form — drive me mad! Only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh God! it is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!
This is not a romantic hero's grief. This is a man telling a dead woman that he cannot survive her departure, and being angry about it. The anger is the point. His love has always been indistinguishable from his need, and his need has always been indistinguishable from his violence. The story does not ask the reader to forgive him or to condemn him. It asks the reader to see him, and the seeing is harder than either forgiveness or condemnation because it requires holding the victim and the perpetrator inside the same figure and refusing to separate them.
The Second Generation
The destruction continues into the next generation. Young Cathy — beautiful, spirited, educated at the Grange — is drawn into the foundling's design. Hareton, Hindley's son, has been kept degraded at the farmhouse as the foundling himself was once kept. And Linton, the foundling's own sickly, peevish son by Isabella, is his instrument.
Linton is fourteen and already dying when the foundling retrieves him. The boy has his mother's fear and none of her capacity for life — he is peevish, self-pitying, small in the worst sense, a child whose every comfort becomes a demand. The foundling treats him with contempt modified only by utility. He needs Linton alive long enough to marry young Cathy and transfer the Grange's inheritance. The boy knows this and is afraid of his father and ashamed of his fear and ashamed of his complicity in the trap. He is a victim too, though the story has no particular sympathy for him.
He arranges the marriage of young Cathy and Linton through manipulation and imprisonment. He locks young Cathy at the farmhouse on her wedding day, preventing her from returning to her dying father. The cruelty is systematic and administrative — he is not raging; he is managing property. Young Cathy discovers what her father is dying of — isolation, grief, the knowledge that she cannot come to him — only after it is too late. She nurses Linton at the farmhouse while Edgar lies dying at the Grange, and the days pass, and Linton dies within weeks of the marriage, and Edgar dies, and she is left at the farmhouse at nineteen, widowed, dispossessed, with Hareton for company. Through the marriage the foundling gains control of the Grange. When Edgar dies and Linton dies within months, the foundling owns both houses and both names. He has completed what he set out to do.
And then he stops. The completion is not satisfaction. It is emptiness.
He does not know how to stop. He has spent three decades building toward this moment, and when it arrives it has the quality of a hollow place, a room entered at last that turns out to have no floor. The having of the thing was the whole content of the wanting; the thing itself is nothing.
The Moors and the Quiet Earth
Young Cathy and Hareton, thrown together at the farmhouse, begin to teach each other. She cannot bear his ignorance and teaches him to read. He cannot bear her contempt and receives the teaching with a patience that transforms them both. They begin to care for each other. The foundling watches this and sees, in their faces, the faces of Catherine and himself reproduced — but in a form that can be tender, that does not destroy what it touches.
He begins to lose interest in his revenge. He stops eating. He wanders the moors at night and returns with the expression of someone who has seen something they have waited a long time to see. He tells the housekeeper, near the end: I have nearly attained my heaven; and that of others is altogether unvalued and uncoveted by me. What his heaven is, the story does not say with certainty. It appears to be the presence of Catherine — not remembered but actual, not metaphorical but there, in the room, at the window, on the moors. He has been seeing her, or feeling her, or something he cannot put into language the housekeeper can understand and the story will not reduce to language the reader can fully close around.
He dies — apparently of starvation, apparently of choice — with the window of his room open and the curtains blowing in and rain on his face and an expression the housekeeper cannot interpret. The servants report afterwards that they see a man and a woman walking on the moors in wet weather, up on the ridge near the farmhouse. Some of them believe it.
The visitor comes back to the valley in summer and finds three graves side by side on the slope of the kirkyard. He looks at them and wonders how anyone could imagine troubled sleep for the sleepers in that quiet earth. The serenity is real. The hawthorn that Earnshaw planted bends in a soft breeze. Heather and bilberry grow along the slope where the ground rises toward the moors. The earth is quiet, and what lies beneath it is anything but.
Young Cathy and Hareton will marry, will inherit both houses, will move to the Grange and leave the farmhouse on the ridge to the wind. Their tenderness is real, given without sentiment, in the same plain prose that gives everything else. But it does not cancel what came before. It coexists with it. The ghosts on the moors and the couple at the Grange are simultaneous, and the story holds both without choosing between them.
The contradictions are the subject. A man simultaneously victim and perpetrator. A love simultaneously the most vital force in the story and the thing that ruins everything it touches. A second generation's gentleness that is simultaneously redemption and repetition. The moors are the deepest character — not backdrop but condition, the ground on which human feeling registers as weather. The wind that blows through the farmhouse is the same wind that blows through the passions of the people who live there. One novel. One life. The argument has not ended and will not end, because the story meets every reader differently and does not care which reading wins.
This post is part of Women Who Wrote When They Weren't Supposed To, a series on women writing against the constraints of their time. See the full collection →
Editions
Penguin Classics — ed. Pauline Nestor (2003)
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