Wuthering Heights ranks among the masterpieces of romantic fiction in English literature. The novel was written by Emily Brontë and published in 1847 under the name of Ellis Bell. It was Emily Brontë’s only novel.
Wuthering Heights is an intense love story about the romance between the passionate Heathcliff and the young woman with whom he had been brought up, Catherine Earnshaw. Heathcliff had been taken into the Earnshaw home, Wuthering Heights, as an orphan boy. He forms a turbulent attachment to Catherine, but flees the home after overhearing Catherine say that it would be degrading for her to marry him.
Catherine marries the wealthy Edgar Linton. Heathcliff then returns to Wuthering Heights, having become a rich and sophisticated man. He elopes with Linton’s sister to punish Catherine and her husband. Catherine eventually dies in childbirth. Heathcliff nurses a sense of injury against both the Earnshaws and the Lintons that carries to the second generation of each family. After Heathcliff’s death, a marriage between the surviving Earnshaw and Linton heirs reconciles the two families.
The story is told by the various characters in the novel and moves back and forth in time. The work was condemned when it first appeared for its brutality, its lack of conventional morality, and its glorification of romantic passion. Not all readers find the supernatural elements, or Heathcliff’s pitiless cruelty, wholly believable. However, the author’s vivid descriptions and her understanding of social class and individual temperament give even the exaggerated elements of her story impact. Her portrait of the isolated Yorkshire moors reveals Brontë as a poet of enduring power.
Wuthering Heights was adapted into a popular motion picture in 1939, starring Laurence Olivier as Heathcliff and Merle Oberon as Catherine. The novel was filmed again, less successfully, in 1970 and 1992.
