Wuthering Heights was released pseudonymously under the name Ellis Bell, published in an edition that included her sister Anne’s lesser known work, Agnes Grey. The Bronte sisters painted by their brother Branwell: from left to right, Anne, Emily, and Charlotte. The reader must give herself over to the horror of Brontë’s inverted world. Moral philosopher Martha Nussbaum claims, however, that “we must ourselves confront the shocking in Wuthering Heights, or we will have no chance of understanding what Emily Brontë is setting out to do”. One of its early reviewers wrote that the novel “strongly shows the brutalising influence of unchecked passion”. It is all rather like a relentless chess game in hell. The characters speak in tongues heavily inflected with expletives, hurling words like weapons of affliction, and indulging throughout in a gleeful schadenfreude as they attempt to exact revenge on each other. While contemporary critics often admitted its power, even unwillingly responding to the clarity of its psychological realism, the overwhelming response was one of disgust at its brutish and brooding Byronic hero, Heathcliff, and his beloved Catherine, whose rebellion against the norms of Victorian femininity neutered her of any claim to womanly attraction.

Nothing about the reception of Emily Brontë’s first and only published novel, Wuthering Heights, in 1847 suggested that it would grow to achieve its now-cult status. In our series, Guide to the classics, experts explain key works of literature.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë