Wuthering Heights

Wuthering Heights is the only novel by the English writer Emily Brontë, published in 1847 under the pseudonym Ellis Bell and set on the Yorkshire moors across two generations. It tells the turbulent story of Heathcliff, an orphan taken in by the Earnshaw family, and his all-consuming, ultimately destructive love for Catherine Earnshaw, whose marriage to the genteel Edgar Linton sets off a cycle of cruelty and revenge that Heathcliff extends into the following generation. Narrated through the layered testimony of the servant Nelly Dean and the outsider Lockwood, the novel combines Gothic atmosphere, wild natural imagery and an unusually unsentimental view of love and cruelty with a formally daring structure unusual for its period. Poorly received on first publication and overshadowed by the more immediately popular work of Emily's sister Charlotte, Wuthering Heights was gradually recognized as one of the major achievements of English fiction, and Heathcliff and Catherine's relationship remains one of the most discussed in the language for its refusal to resolve into either romance or morality tale.