Wuthering Heights: passionate love affairs and dysfunctional families go together

A ghostly face in the dark, a child’s hand through the window, a doleful cry: “I’d lost my way on the moor! - I’ve been a waif for twenty years!” Are we talking about Kate Bush’s 1978 hit single “Wuthering Heights”? No! It’s Emily’s Bronte’s 1847 novel of the same name, back as never before. 

Heathcliff and Catherine are the doomed lovers in a novel that defied the rules of both realism and fantasy, and redefined the genre for post-Romantic readers.

An intergenerational love story of passion, trauma and violence, Wuthering Heights is one of the most famous tales about undying obsession of all time. Sophie and Jonty explain how this masterpiece came to be written by a young woman who barely left her family home in Yorkshire, living with her sisters and brother her whole life. Find out why Wuthering Heights a daring rewriting of the Bronte family’s own tragic secrets, and how a book set on a wild and windy moor, with no buildings or townships for miles on every side, came to be a novel not just about England, but a wider world of revolution and rebellion.

Content warning: some references to emotional and physical abuse, mental illness and suicide.

Further Reading: 

• Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights, Norton Critical Edition, ed. Alexandra Lewis (2019).
• (includes letters, diary-entries, Charlotte Bronte’s introduction to the 1850 edition, contemporary reviews and critical assessments.)
• Juliet Barker, The Brontes: Wild Genius on the Moors: The Story of a Literary Family (Pegasus, 2013).
• Catherine Reef, Bronte Sisters: The Brief Lives of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne (2015).
• Christine Alexander (ed.), The Oxford Companion to the Brontës. (Oxford University Press 2003).
• Deborah Denenholz Morse, 'The House of Trauma': The Influence of Frederick Douglass on Heathcliff in Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights. Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature, 12/2021, Volume 140, Issue 1.
•  Emma Soberano,“Heathcliff as Bog Creature: Racialized Ecologies in Wuthering Heights,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 03/2023, Volume 45, Issue 2.

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