Emily Brontë published Wuthering Heights in December 1847, one year before her death at thirty. It remains her only novel. The story is delivered through nested narrators. Lockwood, a new tenant at Thrushcross Grange, records what his housekeeper Nelly Dean tells him about the history of the neighboring estate. At the center is Heathcliff, a dark-skinned foundling brought to the Heights as a child by old Mr. Earnshaw, who raised him alongside his own children Hindley and Catherine. Catherine and Heathcliff form an attachment of unusual intensity; when Catherine marries the more socially appropriate Edgar Linton, Heathcliff disappears for three years and returns wealthy, systematically destroying both families over two generations.
What makes Wuthering Heights structurally unusual is its refusal to provide a reliable moral framework. Nelly Dean is an interested party, she makes choices throughout the novel that contribute to several of its tragedies, and her self-exculpating account is not always trustworthy. Heathcliff's violence is genuinely frightening; his treatment of Isabella Linton, Hindley's son Hareton, and young Cathy over the novel's second half is not romanticized in the text even when readers have romanticized it in adaptation. The novel's final pages, where the second generation undoes some of what the first destroyed, do not redeem the history, they simply continue it in a less catastrophic register.
The cultural afterlife of Wuthering Heights, decades of romantic adaptation, has made it easy to misremember what the book actually does. The source novel is harder and stranger than most of its adaptations. The love between Catherine and Heathcliff is total and mutually destructive; when Catherine tells Nelly "I am Heathcliff," she is describing a merger of identity that leaves no room for ordinary human development, marriage, or anyone else. The novel asks what that kind of connection costs the people caught in its radius, and the answer it gives is thorough and unsentimental.
Jane Austen wrote all six major novels without a dedicated writing room, she hid her work under blotting paper whenever visitors arrived.
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