Where to Start with Emily Brontë: A Reading Guide
Where to start with Emily Brontë — how to approach Wuthering Heights, her essential and only novel. A complete reading guide to the Victorian author.
Emily Brontë (1818–1848) was the middle of the three Brontë sisters who published fiction under male pseudonyms in the 1840s — Emily writing as Ellis Bell. Wuthering Heights (1847) was her only novel; she died of tuberculosis the following year at thirty. The novel was initially received with confusion — critics were uncertain whether it was a work of genius or a work of uncontrolled power, a distinction that remains productively blurred. By the early twentieth century it had been recognised as one of the essential works of English literature; it has never left that position since.
Where to Start: Wuthering Heights (1847)
The essential and only Emily Brontë — and one of the most elemental novels in the English language. Wuthering Heights is told through nested narrators: Lockwood, a tenant at Thrushcross Grange, records what Nelly Dean, his housekeeper and a native of the moors, tells him about the history of the families of Wuthering Heights and the Grange. The framing is formal but not academic: Nelly’s account has the authority of close witness and the partiality of a character with her own interests in how the story is told.
Heathcliff arrives at Wuthering Heights as a dark foundling, age approximately eight, brought from Liverpool by the well-meaning Mr Earnshaw. From the moment of his arrival he is resented by Earnshaw’s son Hindley and drawn to Earnshaw’s daughter Catherine. The bond that develops between Heathcliff and Catherine is the novel’s central mystery: it is presented less as romantic love than as something more fundamental and less classifiable, a mutual recognition that operates at a level below choice or social convention. “I am Heathcliff,” Catherine says, and means it metaphysically rather than rhetorically.
The catastrophe is Catherine’s choice to marry Edgar Linton — the gentle, prosperous, socially appropriate alternative. The choice makes rational sense and destroys her. Heathcliff disappears, returns years later as a wealthy man without explanation, and begins a systematic campaign of revenge against both families that extends to the second generation.
Brontë’s achievement is to render this destructive compulsion without sentimentalising it. Heathcliff is genuinely frightening — brutal, calculating, capable of cruelty to children and animals — and also genuinely fascinating. The novel does not ask you to excuse him; it asks you to understand that Catherine and Heathcliff are not conventional figures in a conventional love story but something stranger and more disturbing. The Yorkshire moors — rendered with a landscape intensity unmatched in the Victorian novel — are not backdrop but correlative: the wild, undomesticatable environment that produced these people and which they reflect.
Reading Emily Brontë
Wuthering Heights is Emily’s only novel. Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre make essential companions.
For the full Emily Brontë bibliography, reviews, and biography, visit the Emily Brontë author page on Editors Reads.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Where should I start with Emily Brontë?
Wuthering Heights (1847) is Emily Brontë's only novel — the tempestuous, obsessive story of Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw across two generations on the Yorkshire moors. One of the strangest and most powerful novels in the English language; a gothic romance that refuses the consolations of romance and a love story populated by characters almost entirely incapable of love in any conventional sense.
What is Wuthering Heights about?
Wuthering Heights tells the story of Heathcliff, a dark foundling brought to Wuthering Heights by Mr Earnshaw, and his consuming, destructive relationship with Earnshaw's daughter Catherine. The novel follows two generations: first, Catherine's choice of the respectable Edgar Linton over Heathcliff, and Heathcliff's disappearance and return as a wealthy man determined on revenge; then, in the second generation, Heathcliff's systematic destruction of the Earnshaw and Linton families. The narrative is filtered through Nelly Dean's account to the outsider Lockwood — an unreliable frame for an unreliable story.
Is Wuthering Heights a love story?
Wuthering Heights is frequently described as a love story, but this description is misleading — the relationship at its centre is consuming, obsessive, and destructive in ways that have more in common with myth than with romance. Heathcliff and Catherine are incapable of making each other or anyone else happy; their bond is less love in any nurturing sense than a mutual compulsion that damages everyone it touches. The novel presents this with unflinching directness rather than sentimentalising it. Whether this constitutes love, or what kind of love it is, is one of the questions the novel leaves productively unresolved.
What should I read after Wuthering Heights?
After Wuthering Heights, Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre is the natural companion — the same period, the same family, a very different sensibility (more conventional romantic resolution, more explicitly moral framework). Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is the most radical of the three Brontë sisters' novels, with a feminist directness that Emily's mythic mode does not share. Thomas Hardy's novels — particularly The Return of the Native and Jude the Obscure — share Wuthering Heights's landscape intensity and tragic drive.
