Wuthering Heights

Lockwood, a new tenant in the Yorkshire moors, visits his landlord Heathcliff at the farmhouse called Wuthering Heights, and on a stormy night is terrified by a ghostly child at the window. The housekeeper, Nelly Dean, tells him the story: how old Mr Earnshaw brought home a dark, ragged foundling from the streets of Liverpool; how Heathcliff and Earnshaw's daughter Catherine grew up wild and inseparable ('I am Heathcliff,' she says); how she married the gentle, wealthy Edgar Linton instead; and how Heathcliff returned rich and hard, to take revenge on both families and on their children.

Emily Brontë published her only novel in 1847 under the name Ellis Bell and died the following year at thirty. Early reviewers found it savage; it is now one of the most admired novels in English, for its stormy passion and its complex structure of stories within stories. It appeared alongside her sister Anne's Agnes Grey.

Emily Brontë (1818–1848) spent almost her whole life at Haworth parsonage on the Yorkshire moors, which she loved and could hardly bear to leave. With her sister Anne she invented the imaginary world of Gondal and wrote poems about it, which Charlotte discovered in 1845 and persuaded her to publish.

Her only novel, Wuthering Heights, appeared in 1847 under the name Ellis Bell and puzzled its first readers. She died of tuberculosis a year later, at thirty, refusing a doctor until her last day. Her poems and her novel have made her one of the most original voices in English literature.