Books Like Wuthering Heights: Wild Love, Obsession, and the Gothic Moors

Emily Brontë published Wuthering Heights in 1847, the same year her sister Charlotte published Jane Eyre, and the two novels could not be more different. Where Jane Eyre disciplines her passion into moral principle, Catherine Earnshaw dissolves into it. Where Rochester reforms, Heathcliff does not. Wuthering Heights is the great English novel of love as catastrophe: a story that unfolds across two generations, destroying everyone it touches, with no redemption arc and no comfortable resolution. Brontë’s achievement is to make this catastrophe feel inevitable, even magnificent, without ever suggesting it was good.

The novel’s power comes partly from its landscape. The Yorkshire moors are not backdrop — they are character. The wind that rattles Lockwood’s window at the start of the novel, the howling darkness outside the Heights, Catherine’s ghost on the moors: Brontë uses landscape the way few novelists before or after her have, as the externalization of emotional states that would be too extreme to describe directly. Heathcliff is the moors. Catherine is the moors. Their love is the kind of weather you cannot shelter from.

The books below were chosen for readers who responded to something specific in Wuthering Heights: its Gothic atmosphere, its treatment of obsession as a form of identity, or its willingness to show love as a force that destroys rather than redeems. They are grouped by what they share most closely with Brontë’s novel, and they range from the Victorian Gothic tradition she helped establish to twentieth-century novels that carry the same darkness in new settings.

Gothic and Romantic British Fiction

#1 — Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

The other Brontë masterpiece, published the same year as Wuthering Heights, is almost its mirror image. Where Catherine Earnshaw surrenders herself to passion, Jane Eyre insists on the self that passion threatens to dissolve. Where Heathcliff is all storm, Rochester is storm with a lid on — a man whose secrets are eventually opened rather than used as weapons. Charlotte Brontë’s novel has the same dark house, the same claustrophobic intimacy, the same sense that desire is dangerous. But Jane survives, and survives intact, which is something Brontë’s moorland counterpart never allows. Reading the two together is one of the richest experiences Victorian fiction offers.

#2 — Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

A nameless young woman marries the wealthy, remote Maxim de Winter and goes to live at Manderley, his great house on the Cornish coast — where his first wife, Rebecca, is dead but everywhere. Du Maurier’s 1938 novel is the closest twentieth-century heir to Wuthering Heights in its treatment of obsession with an absent woman. Mrs. Danvers’s devotion to Rebecca’s memory is the novel’s emotional centre — a love that has curdled into something beyond grief. The house itself, like the Heights, becomes an extension of that obsession, beautiful and suffocating. Du Maurier is more controlled than Brontë, but no less dark in what she allows love to become.

#3 — The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

Wilde’s 1890 novel belongs to the Gothic tradition that Wuthering Heights helped define: the beautiful surface concealing corruption, the portrait as double, the sense that aesthetic intensity and moral decay are inseparable. Where Heathcliff’s obsession turns outward into revenge, Dorian’s turns inward into the hidden painting that bears the cost of his pleasures. The London drawing rooms Wilde sets his novel in could hardly be more different from the Yorkshire moors, but the emotional logic is the same — desire taken to its extreme reveals not beauty but destruction. Lord Henry Wotton, who corrupts Dorian with his aestheticism, is a Heathcliff with better manners.

Love as Destruction

#4 — The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Jay Gatsby’s love for Daisy Buchanan is not really about Daisy at all — it is about a version of her he invented five years ago, a past he is trying to recapture against the forward movement of time. Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel shares with Wuthering Heights the essential quality of love-as-obsession: the object of desire is less a person than a symbol of something the lover cannot have, and the pursuit of that symbol destroys everything real. Gatsby’s parties, his shirts, his green light across the water, are Heathcliff’s midnight wanderings in different costume. Both novels are elegies for a love that was never really about the person it claimed to be for.

#5 — Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

Tolstoy’s Anna falls in love with Vronsky and walks away from her marriage, her son, and her place in Russian society — and the novel follows the consequences with remorseless precision. Anna Karenina shares with Wuthering Heights the understanding that passion at its most intense is a social catastrophe, incompatible with the ordinary world that surrounds it. But where Brontë leaves the destruction abstract and mythic, Tolstoy anatomises it in sociological detail: the dinner parties, the horse races, the legal obstacles, the gossip. Anna’s fate is not Gothic. It is worse — it is entirely realistic, which makes it harder to aestheticize and harder to look away from.

#6 — Atonement by Ian McEwan

A thirteen-year-old girl misreads what she sees in her family’s country house one afternoon in 1935, makes an accusation, and destroys two lives. McEwan’s 2001 novel is about a different kind of obsession — the obsession of guilt, the love that persists through separation and war, and the terrible power of a story told with conviction. The English country house setting, the class tensions, the sense of a passion that society cannot accommodate: all of this connects to Wuthering Heights. But McEwan adds a final turn that transforms the novel into a meditation on narrative itself, on the stories we tell to make the unbearable bearable, that Brontë never needed.

#7 — The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje

In a bombed Italian villa at the end of the Second World War, a burned man whose identity is unknown tells the story of his love affair with a married woman in the North African desert. Ondaatje’s 1992 novel shares with Wuthering Heights the dissolution of identity that extreme passion produces — the sense that love at its most consuming erases the boundaries between self and other, between past and present. The landscape here is desert rather than moor, but the principle is the same: wild terrain as the externalization of emotional extremity. The prose is among the most beautiful in contemporary English fiction.

Wild Landscapes and Gothic Darkness

#8 — Jamaica Inn by Daphne du Maurier

Mary Yellan arrives at her aunt’s inn on the Cornish moors to find it controlled by a violent, mysterious man and used as a base for wrecking ships. Du Maurier’s 1936 novel uses the moors the way Brontë does — as a landscape of violence and isolation, where the rules of the social world do not reach and where a woman can be both trapped and, paradoxically, freed. Joss Merlyn is a lesser Heathcliff, cruder and more obviously dangerous, and the novel is more plot-driven than either Wuthering Heights or Rebecca. But the atmosphere — the fog, the violence, the sense of a world without redemption — is recognisably Brontë’s.

#9 — The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett

Frances Hodgson Burnett’s 1911 novel begins where Wuthering Heights ends: on the Yorkshire moors, with a child who has been damaged by grief and isolation. Mary Lennox arrives at Misselthwaite Manor and finds a locked garden that becomes the site of her transformation — and Colin Craven’s. The moors here are not threatening but therapeutic, and the Gothic mansion gradually becomes a place of recovery rather than destruction. The Secret Garden is in many ways Wuthering Heights rewritten for hope: the same landscape, the same locked spaces, the same sense that the land itself is alive — but used to heal rather than destroy.

#10 — Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

Jean Rhys’s 1966 novel gives voice to Bertha Mason — the woman Rochester imprisoned at Thornfield Hall in Jane Eyre, and the madwoman who stands in the shadow of both Brontë novels. Rhys names her Antoinette Cosway, gives her a Caribbean childhood, and shows the marriage to Rochester as a colonial act of possession that the novel renders with cold clarity. The passion here is Rochester’s, misapplied, and the destruction it causes is the destruction of a woman’s identity and sanity. Read alongside Wuthering Heights, Wide Sargasso Sea completes a gothic triptych — Brontë’s passion, Brontë’s madwoman, Rhys’s correction of what both concealed.

How to Choose Your Next Read

If you want the most direct companion piece: Jane Eyre — the same year, the same family, the opposite answer to what passion requires.

If you want the closest Gothic heir: Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier — the dark house, the obsession with an absent woman, the suffocating atmosphere.

If you want love taken to its social limits: Anna Karenina — passion anatomised in sociological detail, with no shelter of Gothic distance.

If you want the moors rewritten for hope: The Secret Garden — Burnett uses Brontë’s Yorkshire landscape to argue for recovery rather than destruction.

If you want the voice Brontë suppressed: Wide Sargasso Sea — Jean Rhys gives the madwoman her story.

For the Best Fiction Books

For the definitive guide to fiction — the greatest novels across literary fiction, classics, and contemporary writing — see our Best Fiction Books of All Time list.

More Classic Literature Reading Guides

• Books Like Middlemarch: Provincial Life and Moral Ambition
• Books Like The Picture of Dorian Gray: Corruption and Beauty

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