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Wuthering Heights
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| Title page of original edition of Wuthering Heights (1847) |
Wuthering Heights is the only novel
Emily Brontë wrote and she never saw her name in print because the book - about
a doomed love affair between Cathy and Heathcliff - was first published under a
male pseudonym, Ellis Bell, due to fears she would face prejudice as a female
writer. It was only after her death from consumption in 1848, aged 30, that the
novel's brilliance was recognised and it went on to become an English literary
classic.- theguardian.com
A brooding tale of passion and revenge
set in the Yorkshire moors, the novel has inspired no fewer than four film
versions in modern times. Early critics did not like the work, citing its
excess of passion and its coarseness. A second edition was published in 1850,
two years after the author’s death. Sympathetically prefaced by her sister
Charlotte, it met with greater success, and the novel has continued to grow in
stature ever since.
In the novel a pair of narrators,
Mr. Lockwood and Nelly Dean, relate the story of the foundling Heathcliff’s
arrival at Wuthering Heights, and the close-knit bond he forms with his
benefactor’s daughter, Catherine Earnshaw. One in spirit, they are nonetheless
social unequals, and the saga of frustrated yearning and destruction that
follows Catherine’s refusal to marry Heathcliff is unique in the English
canon.
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| The_Climb_to_Top_Withens._-_geograph.org.uk_-_393405 |
The novel is admired not least for the
power of its imagery, its complex structure, and its ambiguity, the very
elements that confounded its first critics. Emily Brontë spent her short life
mostly at home, and apart from her own fertile imagination, she drew her
inspiration from the local landscape—the surrounding moorlands and the regional
architecture of the Yorkshire area—as well as her personal experience of
religion, of folklore, and of illness and death. Dealing with themes of nature,
cruelty, social position, and indestructibility of the spirit, Wuthering
Heights has surpassed the more successful Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre in
academic and popular circles.
