Wuthering Heights

Wuthering Heights was written by Emily Bronte and published in 1847 under the pseudonym Ellis Bell, a year before her death. It was the only novel she finished. Bronte grew up on the edge of the Yorkshire moors at Haworth, where her father was the parish priest, and the landscape, the weather and the isolation of the place are load-bearing in the book rather than decoration. The first readers who discovered the name Ellis Bell assumed they were dealing with a man, and the novel's violence and its refusal to make its central pair likeable puzzled reviewers who expected a moral tale.

The story reaches us through two narrators rather than one. Lockwood, a polite outsider who has rented a nearby house, records his visit to the Heights and then hands the history over to Nelly Dean, the housekeeper who worked in both households and watched the whole thing unfold. Nelly is not a neutral witness, and the novel is built so that the reader has to weigh her account. At the centre are Catherine Earnshaw, the daughter of the family that owns the Heights, and Heathcliff, the child her father brought home from Liverpool, whose position in the household is never secure and whose resentment hardens into a plan that outlives both of them.

The book's second half follows the children of the first generation, and the moors, the two houses and the family names keep repeating themselves with new people attached. Emily Bronte's sister Charlotte edited the novel after her death and wrote a preface defending it, and the text that most readers encounter now is that edited version. Wuthering Heights has been adapted for film, television and the stage many times, and its title has become shorthand for a love story that damages everyone standing near it.