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Biography

Early Life and Loss

Emily Brontë was born on July 30, 1818 to Maria Branwell and an Irish father, Patrick Brontë, in England. Emily was the second youngest of six siblings, preceded by Maria, Elizabeth, Charlotte, and Branwell. In 1820, Emily's younger sister Anne, the last Brontë child, was born. Shortly thereafter, the family moved eight miles away to Haworth, where Patrick was employed as perpetual curate. When Emily was only three, and all six children under the age of eight, she and her siblings lost their mother, Maria, to cancer on 15. The younger children were to be cared for by Elizabeth Branwell, their aunt, and Maria's sister.

Emily's three elder sisters, Maria, Elizabeth, and Charlotte, were sent to the Clergy Daughters' School at Cowan Bridge. At the age of six Emily joined her sisters at school for a brief period. At school, however, the children suffered abuse and privations, and when a typhoid epidemic swept the school, Maria and Elizabeth became ill. Maria, who may actually have had tuberculosis, was sent home, where she died. Emily, Charlotte, and Elizabeth were subsequently removed from the school in June 1825. Elizabeth died soon after their return home. The four youngest Brontë children, all under ten years of age, had suffered the loss of the three eldest females in their immediate family.

After the deaths of his older daughters, Patrick removed Charlotte and Emily from the school. The three remaining sisters and their brother Branwell were thereafter educated at home by their father and aunt Elizabeth Branwell. A shy girl, Emily was very close to her siblings and was known as a great animal lover, especially for befriending stray dogs she found wandering around the countryside. Despite the lack of formal education, Emily and her siblings had access to a wide range of published material; favorites included Sir Walter Scott, Byron, Shelley, and Blackwood's Magazine.

Emily's Gondal Poems

Inspired by a box of toy soldiers Branwell had received as a gift, the children began to write stories which they set in a number of invented imaginary worlds peopled by their soldiers as well as their heroes the Duke of Wellington and his sons, Charles and Arthur Wellesley. Little of Emily's work from this period survives, except for poems spoken by characters. Initially, all four children shared in creating stories about a world called Angria.

However, when Emily was 13, she and Anne withdrew from participation in the Angria story and began a new one about Gondal, a fictional island whose myths and legends were to preoccupy the two sisters throughout their lives. With the exception of their Gondal poems and Anne's lists of Gondal's characters and place-names, Emily and Anne's Gondal writings were largely not preserved. Among those that did survive are some "diary papers," written by Emily in her twenties, which describe current events in Gondal. The heroes of Gondal tended to resemble the popular image of the Scottish Highlander, a sort of British version of the "noble savage": romantic outlaws capable of more nobility, passion, and bravery than the denizens of "civilization". Similar themes of romanticism and noble savagery are apparent across the Brontë's juvenilia, notably in Branwell's The Life of Alexander Percy, which tells the story of an all-consuming, death-defying, and ultimately self-destructive love and is generally considered an inspiration for Wuthering Heights.

At seventeen, Emily began to attend the Roe Head Girls' School, where Charlotte was a teacher, but suffered from extreme homesickness and left after only a few months. Charlotte wrote later that "Liberty was the breath of Emily's nostrils; without it, she perished. The change from her own home to a school and from her own very noiseless, very secluded but unrestricted and unartificial mode of life, to one of disciplined routine (though under the kindest auspices), was what she failed in enduring... I felt in my heart she would die if she did not go home, and with this conviction obtained her recall." Emily returned home and Anne took her place. At this time, the girls' objective was to obtain sufficient education to open a small school of their own.

Adulthood

Emily became a teacher at Law Hill School in Halifax beginning in September 1838, when she was twenty. Her always fragile health soon broke under the stress of the 17-hour workday and she returned home in April 1839. Thereafter she remained at home, doing most of the cooking, ironing, and cleaning at Haworth. She taught herself German out of books and also practiced the piano.

In 1842, Emily accompanied Charlotte to the Héger Pensionnat in Brussels, Belgium, where they attended the girls' academy run by Constantin Héger in the hope of perfecting their French and German before opening their school. Unlike Charlotte, Emily was uncomfortable in Brussels and refused to adopt Belgian fashions, saying "I wish to be as God made me", which rendered her something of an outcast. Nine of Emily's French essays survive from this period. Héger seems to have been impressed with the strength of Emily's character, writing that, "She should have been a man – a great navigator. Her powerful reason would have deduced new spheres of discovery from the knowledge of the old; and her strong imperious will would never have been daunted by opposition or difficulty, never have given way but with life. She had a head for logic, and a capability of argument unusual in a man and rarer indeed in a woman... impairing this gift was her stubborn tenacity of will which rendered her obtuse to all reasoning where her own wishes, or her own sense of right, was concerned."

The two sisters were committed to their studies and by the end of the term had become so competent in French that Madame Héger proposed that they both stay another half-year, even, according to Charlotte, offering to dismiss the English master so that she could take his place. Emily had, by this time, become a competent pianist and teacher and it was suggested that she might stay on to teach music. However, the illness and death of their aunt drove them to return to their father and Haworth. In 1844, the sisters attempted to open a school in their house, but their plans were stymied by an inability to attract students to the remote area.

In 1844, Emily began going through all the poems she had written, recopying them neatly into two notebooks. One was labeled "Gondal Poems"; the other was unlabelled. Scholars such as Fannie Ratchford and Derek Roper have attempted to piece together a Gondal storyline and chronology from these poems. In the autumn of 1845, Charlotte discovered the notebooks and insisted that the poems be published. Emily, furious at the invasion of her privacy, at first refused but relented when Anne brought out her own manuscripts and revealed to Charlotte that she had been writing poems in secret as well. As co-authors of Gondal stories, Anne and Emily were accustomed to reading their Gondal stories and poems to each other, while Charlotte was excluded from their privacy. Around this time Emily had written one of her most famous poems "No coward soul is mine", probably as an answer to the violation of her privacy and her own transformation into a published writer. Despite Charlotte's later claim, it was not her last poem.

In 1846, the sisters' poems were published in one volume as Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. The Brontë sisters had adopted pseudonyms for publication, preserving their initials: Charlotte was "Currer Bell", Emily was "Ellis Bell" and Anne was "Acton Bell". Charlotte wrote in the 'Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell' that their "ambiguous choice" was "dictated by a sort of conscientious scruple at assuming Christian names positively masculine, while we did not like to declare ourselves women, because... we had a vague impression that authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice". Charlotte contributed 19 poems, and Emily and Anne each contributed 21. Although the sisters were told several months after publication that only two copies had sold, they were not discouraged (of their two readers, one was impressed enough to request their autographs). The Athenaeum reviewer praised Ellis Bell's work for its music and power, singling out his poems as the best: "Ellis possesses a fine, quaint spirit and an evident power of wing that may reach heights not here attempted," and The Critic reviewer recognized "the presence of more genius than it was supposed this utilitarian age had devoted to the loftier exercises of the intellect."

Personality and Character

Emily Brontë's solitary and reclusive nature has made her a mysterious figure and a challenge for biographers to assess. Except for Ellen Nussey and Louise de Bassompierre, Emily's fellow student in Brussels, she does not seem to have made any friends outside her family. Her closest friend was her sister Anne. Together they shared their own fantasy world, Gondal, and, according to Ellen Nussey, in childhood they were "like twins", "inseparable companions" and "in the very closest sympathy which never had any interruption". In 1845 Anne took Emily to visit some of the places she had come to know and love in the five years she spent as a governess. A plan to visit Scarborough fell through and instead the sisters went to York where Anne showed Emily York Minster. During the trip, the sisters acted out some of their Gondal characters.

Charlotte Brontë remains the primary source of information about Emily, although as an elder sister, writing publicly about her only shortly after her death, she is considered by certain scholars not to be a neutral witness. Stevie Davies believes that there is what might be called Charlotte's smoke-screen and argues that Emily evidently shocked her, to the point where she may even have doubted her sister's sanity. After Emily's death, Charlotte rewrote her character, history, and even poems on a more acceptable (to her and the bourgeois reading public) model. Biographer Claire O'Callaghan suggests that the trajectory of Brontë’s legacy was altered significantly by Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography of Charlotte, concerning not only because Gaskell did not visit Haworth until after Emily’s death, but also because Gaskell admits to disliking what she did know of Emily in her biography of Charlotte. As O'Callaghan and others have noted, Charlotte was Gaskell's primary source of information on Emily's life and may have exaggerated or fabricated Emily’s frailty and shyness to cast herself in the role of maternal savior.

Charlotte presented Emily as someone whose "natural" love of the beauties of nature had become somewhat exaggerated owing to her shy nature, portraying her as too fond of the Yorkshire moors, and homesick whenever she was away. According to Lucasta Miller, in her analysis of Brontë biographies, "Charlotte took on the role of Emily's first mythographer." In the Preface to the Second Edition of Wuthering Heights, in 1850, Charlotte wrote, "My sister's disposition was not naturally gregarious; circumstances favoured and fostered her tendency to seclusion; except to go to church or take a walk on the hills, she rarely crossed the threshold of home. Though her feeling for the people round was benevolent, intercourse with them she never sought; nor, with very few exceptions, ever experienced. And yet she knew them: knew their ways, their language, their family histories; she could hear of them with interest, and talk of them with detail, minute, graphic, and accurate; but WITH them, she rarely exchanged a word."

Biographical Information continued

Emily's unsociability and extremely shy nature have subsequently been reported many times. According to Norma Crandall, her "warm, human aspect" was "usually revealed only in her love of nature and of animals." In a similar description, Literary news (1883) states: "[Emily] loved the solemn moors, she loved all wild, free creatures and things," and critics attest that her love of the moors is manifest in Wuthering Heights. Over the years, Emily's love of nature has been the subject of many anecdotes. A newspaper dated December 31, 1899, gives the folksy account that "with bird and beast [Emily] had the most intimate relations, and from her walks she often came with fledgling or young rabbit in hand, talking softly to it, quite sure, too, that it understood."

In Queens of Literature of the Victorian Era (1886), Eva Hope summarises Emily's character as "a peculiar mixture of timidity and Spartan-like courage," and goes on to say, "She was painfully shy, but physically she was brave to a surprising degree. She loved few persons, but those few with a passion of self-sacrificing tenderness and devotion. To other people's failings, she was understanding and forgiving, but over herself she kept a continual and most austere watch, never allowing herself to deviate for one instant from what she considered her duty."

Death
Emily's health was probably weakened by the harsh local climate and by unsanitary conditions at home, where water was contaminated by runoff from the church's graveyard. Branwell died suddenly, on Sunday, September 24, 1848. At his funeral service, a week later, Emily caught a severe cold which quickly developed into inflammation of the lungs and led to tuberculosis. Though her condition worsened steadily, she rejected medical help and all offered remedies, saying that she would have "no poisoning doctor" near her. On the morning of December 19, 1848, Charlotte, fearing for her sister, wrote:

She grows daily weaker. The physician's opinion was expressed too obscurely to be of use – he sent some medicine which she would not take. Moments so dark as these I have never known – I pray for God's support to us all.

At noon, Emily was worse; she could only whisper in gasps. With her last audible words she said to Charlotte, "If you will send for a doctor, I will see him now," but it was too late. She died that same day at about two in the afternoon. According to Mary Robinson, an early biographer of Emily, it happened while she was sitting on the sofa. However, Charlotte's letter to William Smith Williams where she mentions Emily's dog, Keeper, lying at the side of her death bed, makes this statement seem unlikely.

It was less than three months since Branwell's death, which led Martha Brown, a housemaid, to declare that "Miss Emily died of a broken heart for love of her brother." Emily had grown so thin that her coffin measured only 16 inches wide. The carpenter said he had never made a narrower one for an adult. Her mortal remains were interred in the family vault in St Michael and All Angels' Church, Haworth.

Wuthering Heights General Overview

Wuthering Heights is an 1847 novel by Emily Brontë, published under the pseudonym Ellis Bell. It concerns two families of the landed gentry living on the West Yorkshire moors, the Earnshaws and the Lintons, and their turbulent relationships with Earnshaw's adopted son, Heathcliff. It was influenced by Romanticism and Gothic fiction.

Wuthering Heights is now considered a classic of English literature, but contemporaneous reviews were polarised. It was controversial for its depictions of mental and physical cruelty, and for its challenges to Victorian morality, and religious and societal values.

Wuthering Heights was accepted by publisher Thomas Newby along with Anne Brontë's Agnes Grey before the success of their sister Charlotte's novel Jane Eyre, but they were published later. Charlotte edited the second edition of Wuthering Heights after Emily's death which was published in 1850. It has inspired an array of adaptations across several media, including a hit song.

Major Themes

While readers tend to see love as the novel's central concern there are other important themes, including, "The clash of economic interests and social classes"; race; "Childhood and the family"; The patriarchal family; Morality; Religion; "Striving for transcendence"; "Clash of elemental forces."

Morality
Some early Victorian reviewers complained about how Wuthering Heights dealt with violence and immorality. One called it "a compound of vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors."

Emily Brontë was supposedly unaware of"the limits on polite expression" expected of Victorian novelists. Brontë's characters use vulgar language, "cursing and swearing." And though a daughter of a curate, Brontë showed little respect for religion. The only strongly religious character in Wuthering Heights is Joseph. Joseph is usually seen as satirizing "the joyless version of Methodism that the Brontë children were exposed to through their Aunt Branwell." A major influence on how Brontë depicts amoral characters were the stories her father Patrick Brontë told, about " 'the doings' " of people around Haworth that his parishioners told him, "stories which 'made one shiver and shrink from hearing' (Charlotte's friend Ellen Nussey reported)," which were "full of grim humor" and violence. Stories Emily Brontë took "as a truth."

Shortly after Emily Brontë's death, G.H. Lewes wrote in Leader Magazine:
Curious enough is to read Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and remember that the writers were two retiring, solitary, consumptive girls! Books, coarse even for men, coarse in language and coarse in conception, the coarseness apparently of violence and uncultivated men – turn out to be the productions of two girls living almost alone, filling their loneliness with quiet studies, and writing their books from a sense of duty, hating the pictures they drew, yet drawing them with austere conscientiousness! There is matter here for the moralist or critic to speculate on.

Religion
Emily Brontë attended church regularly "and never as far as we know, wrote anything which overtly criticized conventional religion. But she also has the reputation of being a rebel and iconoclast, driven by a spirit more pagan than orthodox Christian." Derek Traversi, for example. sees in Wuthering Heights "a thirst for religious experience, which is not Christian. It is this spirit that moves Catherine to exclaim, "surely you and everybody have a notion that there is, or should be, an existence of yours beyond you. What were the use of my creation if I were entirely contained here?' (Ch. IX)".

Thomas John Winnifrith, author of The Brontes and Their Background: Romance and Reality (Macmillan, 1977), argues that the allusions to heaven and hell are more than metaphors, and have a religious significance, because "for Heathcliff, the loss of Catherine is literally hell ... existence after losing her would be hell' (Ch. xiv, p. 117)." Likewise, in the final scene between them, Heathcliff writhes "in the torments of hell" (XV).

Daemonic
The eminent German Lutheran theologian and philosopher Rudolph Otto, author ofThe Idea of the Holy, saw in Wuthering Heights "a supreme example of 'the daemonic' in literature." Otto links the "daemonic"with "a genuine religious experience." Lisa Wang argues that in both Wuthering Heights, and in her poetry, Emily Brontë concentrates on "the non-conceptual, or what Rudolf Otto has called 'the non-rational' aspect of religion ... the primal nature of religious experience over and above its doctrinal formulations." This corresponds with the dictionary meaning: "of or relating to an inner or attendant spirit, esp. as a source of creative inspiration or genius." This meaning was important to the Romantic movement.

However, the word daemon can also mean "a demon or devil," and that is equally relevant to Heathcliff, whom Peter McInerney describes as "a Satanic Don Juan." Heathcliff is also "dark-skinned", "as dark almost as if it came from the devil." Likewise, Charlotte Brontë described him as "a man's shape animated by demon life - a Ghoul - an Afreet." In Arabian mythology, an "afreet" is a powerful jinn or demon. However, John Bowen, believes that "this is too simple a view," because the novel presents an alternative explanation of Heathcliff's cruel and sadistic behavior; that is, that he has suffered terribly: "is an orphan; ... is brutalized by Hindley; ... relegated to the status of a servant; Catherine marries Edgar".

Love

One 2007 British poll presented Wuthering Heights as the greatest love story of all time. However, "some of the novel's admirers consider it not a love story at all but an exploration of evil and abuse." Helen Small sees Wuthering Heights as being, both "one of the greatest love stories in the English language," while at the same time a "most brutal revenge narratives." Some critics suggest that reading Wuthering Heights as a love story not only "romanticizes abusive men and toxic relationships but goes against Brontë's clear intent." Moreover, while a "passionate, doomed, death-transcending relationship between Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw Linton forms the core of the nove Wuthering Heights consistently subverts the romantic narrative. Our first encounter with Heathcliff shows him to be a nasty bully. Later, Brontë puts in Heathcliff's mouth an explicit warning not to turn him into a Byronic hero: After ... Isabella elopes with him, he sneers that she did so "under a delusion ... picturing in me a hero of romance".

"I am Heathcliff" is a frequently quoted phrase from the novel, and "the idea of ... perfect unity between the self and the other is age-old," so that Catherine says that she loves Heathcliff "because he's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same." (Chapter IX) Likewise Lord David Cecil suggests that "the deepest attachments are based on characters' similarity or affinity." However Simone De Beauvoir, in her famous feminist work The Second Sex (1949), suggests that when Catherine says "I am Heathcliff": "her own world collapse(s) in contingence, for she really lives in his." (Beauvoir, 1952, p. 725). Beauvoir sees this as "the fatal mirage of the ideal of romantic love ... transcendence .. in the superior male who is perceived as free."

Despite all the passion between Catherine and Heathcliff, critics have from early on drawn attention to the absence of sex. In 1850 the poet and critic Sydney Dobell suggests that "we dare not doubt [Catherine's] purity," and the Victorian poet Swinburne concurs, referring to their "passionate and ardent chastity."

Major Themes Continued

Childhood

Childhood is a central theme of Wuthering Heights. Emily Bronte "understands that 'The Child is 'Father of the Man.' " Wordsworth, following philosophers of education, such as Rousseau, explored ideas about the way childhood shaped personality. One outcome of this was the German bildungsroman, or "novel of education," such as Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre (1847), Eliot's The Mill on the Floss (1860), and Dickens's Great Expectations (1861). Bronte's characters "are heavily influenced by their childhood experiences," though she is less optimistic than her contemporaries that suffering can lead to "change and renewal."

Class and Money

Lockwood arrives at Thrushcross Grange in 1801, a time when according to Q.D. Leavis, "the old rough farming culture, based on a naturally patriarchal family life, was to be challenged, tamed and routed by social and cultural changes." At this date the Industrial Revolution was well underway and was by 1847 a dominant force in much of England and especially in West Yorkshire. This caused a disruption in "the traditional relationship of social classes" with an expanding upwardly mobile middle-class, which created "a new standard for defining a gentleman and challenged the traditional criteria of breeding and family and the more recent criterion of character."

Marxist critic Arnold Kettle sees Wuthering Heights "as a symbolic representation of the class system of nineteenth-century England," with its concerns "with property-ownership, the attraction of social comforts," marriage, education, religion, and social status. Driven by a pathological hatred Heathcliff uses against his enemies "their own weapons of money and arranged marriages," as well as " the classic methods of the ruling class, expropriation and property deals."

Later, another Marxist Terry Eagleton, in Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Brontes (1975), further explores the power relationships between "the landed gentry and aristocracy, the traditional power-holders, and the capitalist, industrial middle classes." Haworth in the West Riding of Yorkshire was especially affected by changes to society and its class structure "because of the concentration of large estates and industrial centers" there.

Race

This is much debate about the race of Heathcliff. He is described as a "dark-skinned gypsy" and "a little Lascar" – a 19th-century term for Indian sailors, and Earnshaw calls him "as dark almost as if it came from the devil," and Nelly Dean speculating fancifully regarding his origins thus: "Who knows but your father was Emperor of China, and your mother an Indian queen?" Caryl Phillips suggests Heathcliff may have been an escaped slave, noting the similarities between the way Heathcliff is treated and the way slaves were treated at the time: he is referred to as "it," his name "served him" as both his "Christian and surname," and Mr. Earnshaw is referred to as "his owner." Maja-Lisa von Sneidern states that "Heathcliff's racial otherness cannot be a matter of dispute; Brontë, makes that explicit," further noting that "by 1804 Liverpool merchants were responsible for more than eighty-four percent of the British transatlantic slave trade." Meantime, Michael Stewart sees Heathcliff's race as "ambiguous," saying "[Brontë] deliberately gives us this missing hole in the narrative."

Storm and Calm

Various critics have explored the various contrast between Thrushcross Grange and the Wuthering Heights farmhouse and their inhabitants. Lord David Cecil argued that "cosmic forces as the central impetus and controlling force in the novel." That there is unifying structure underlying Wuthering Heights: "two spiritual principles: the principle of the storm, ... and the principle of calm," which he further argued were not, "in spite of their apparent opposition,"in conflict. Dorothy van Ghent, however, refers to "a tension between two kinds of reality" in the novel, "civilized manners" and "natural energies."

Critical Response

Contemporary Reviews

Early reviews of Wuthering Heights were mixed in their assessment. Most critics recognized the power and imagination of the novel, but were baffled by the storyline, and objected to the savagery and selfishness. Published in 1847 when the background of an author was thought important, many critics were intrigued by the authorship of the Bell novels.

The Atlas review called it a "strange, inartistic story," but commented that every chapter seems to contain a "sort of rugged power."

Graham's Lady Magazine wrote: "How a human being could have attempted such a book as the present without committing suicide before he had finished a dozen chapters, is a mystery. It is a compound of vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors".

The American Whig Review wrote: Respecting a book so original as this, and written with so much power of imagination, it is natural that there should be many opinions. Indeed, its power is so predominant that it is not easy after a hasty reading to analyze one's impressions so as to speak of its merits and demerits with confidence. We have been taken and carried through a new region, a melancholy waste, with here and there patches of beauty; have been brought in contact with fierce passions, with extremes of love and hate, and with sorrow that none but those who have suffered can understand. This has not been accomplished with ease, but with an ill-mannered contempt for the decencies of language, and in a style which might resemble that of a Yorkshire farmer who should have endeavored to eradicate his provincialism by taking lessons of a London footman. We have had many sad bruises and tumbles in our journey, yet it was interesting, and at length we are safely arrived at a happy conclusion."

Douglas Jerrold's Weekly Newspaper wrote: Wuthering Heights is a strange sort of book,—baffling all regular criticism; yet, it is impossible to begin and not finish it; and quite as impossible to lay it aside afterwards and say nothing about. In Wuthering Heights the reader is shocked, disgusted, almost sickened by details of cruelty, inhumanity, and the most diabolical hate and vengeance, and anon come passages of powerful testimony to the supreme power of love – even over demons in the human form. The women in the book are of a strange fiendish-angelic nature, tantalising, and terrible, and the men are indescribable out of the book itself. ... We strongly recommend all our readers who love novelty to get this story, for we can promise them that they never have read anything like it before. It is very puzzling and very interesting ...

The Examiner wrote: This is a strange book. It is not without evidences of considerable power: but, as a whole, it is wild, confused, disjointed, and improbable; and the people who make up the drama, which is tragic enough in its consequences, are savages ruder than those who lived before the days of Homer.

The Literary World wrote: In the whole story not a single trait of character is elicited which can command our admiration, not one of the fine feelings of our nature seems to have formed a part in the composition of its principal actors. In spite of the disgusting coarsness of much of the dialogue, and the improbabilities of much of the plot, we are spellbound.

The English poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti admired the book, writing in 1854 that it was "the first novel I've read for an age, and the best (as regards power and sound style) for two ages, except Sidonia," but, in the same letter, he also referred to it as "a fiend of a book – an incredible monster [...] The action is laid in hell, – only it seeems places and people have English names there."

Twentieth Century

Until late in the 19th century Jane Eyre was regarded as the best of the Brontë sisters' novels. This view began to change in the 1880s with the publication of Mary Robinson's biography of Emily in 1883.

Modernist novelist Virginia Woolf affirmed the greatness of Wuthering Heights in 1925: "Wuthering Heights is a more difficult book to understand than Jane Eyre, because Emily was a greater poet than Charlotte. ... She looked out upon a world cleft into gigantic disorder and felt within her the power to unite it in a book. That gigantic ambition is to be felt throughout the novel ... It is this suggestion of power underlying the apparitions of human nature and lifting them up into the presence of greatness that gives the book its huge stature among other novels."

Similarly, Woolf's contemporary John Cowper Powys referred in 1916 to Emily Brontë's "tremendous vision."

In 1926 Charles Percy Sanger's work on the chronology of Wuthering Heights "affirmed Emily's literary craft and meticulous planning of the novel and disproved Charlotte's presentation of her sister as an unconscious artist who did not know what she had done." However, for a later critic Albert J. Guerard: "it is a splendid, imperfect novel which Brontë loses control over occasionally."

Still, in 1934, Lord David Cecil, writing in Early Victorian Novelists, commented "that Emily Brontë was not properly appreciated; even her admirers saw her as an unequal genius" and in 1948 F.R. Leavis excluded Wuthering Heights from the great tradition of the English novel because it was "a kind of sport–an anomaly with 'some influence of an essentially undetectable kind."

Twenty-First Century
Writing in The Guardian in 2003 writer and editor Robert McCrum placed Wuthering Heights at number 17 in his list of 100 greatest novels of all time. And in 2015 he placed it at number 13 in his list of 100 best novels written in English. He said that Wuthering Heights releases extraordinary new energies in the novel, renews its potential, and almost reinvents the genre. The scope and drift of its imagination, its passionate exploration of a fatal yet regenerative love affair, and its brilliant manipulation of time and space put it in a league of its own.

Writing for BBC Culture in 2015 author and book reviewer Jane Ciabattari polled 82 book critics from outside the UK and presented Wuthering Heights as number 7 in the resulting list of 100 greatest British novels.

In 2018 Penguin presented a list of 100 must-read classic books and placed Wuthering Heights at number 71, saying: "Widely considered a staple of Gothic fiction and the English literary canon, this book has gone on to inspire many generations of writers – and will continue to do so."

Writing in The Independent journalist and author Ceri Radford and news presenter, journalist, and TV producer Chris Harvey included Wuthering Heights in a list of the 40 best books to read during lockdown. Harvey said that "It's impossible to imagine this novel ever provoking quiet slumbers; Emily Brontë's vision of nature blazes with poetry."

Futher Reading

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography - Brontë, Emily Jane [pseud. Ellis Bell]
Poetry Foundaton - Emily Brontë 1818–1848