Charlotte wrote later: 'Stronger than a man, simpler than a child, her nature stood alone.' A note on the text

A year later, Emily was dead, from consumption, aged just 30. Wuthering Heights was published three months after Jane Eyre in December 1847. 'I lingered round them, under that benign sky watched the moths fluttering among the heath, and hare-bells listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers, for the sleepers in that quiet earth.' When Lockwood visits Heathcliff's and Cathy's graves at the end of the novel, the poetry in the voice is Brontë's: Like Hardy and Lawrence, Emily Brontë has an uncanny eye and ear for the natural world. No wonder film-makers, song writers, actors and literary critics have been drawn to reinterpret its story.Īnd then there are its quieter pleasures. There is also something operatic about its audacity and ambition. As a portrait of 'star-cross'd lovers' it rivals Romeo and Juliet.

To look forward, I think we can say that the work as we know it of Thomas Hardy, DH Lawrence, and even Rosamond Lehmann would have been impossible without it. This is great English literature, the fruit of a quite extraordinary childhood. 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. Looking back, it's clear that where Jane Eyre comes out of a recognisable tradition, and is conscious of that affiliation, Wuthering Heights releases extraordinary new energies in the novel, renews its potential, and almost reinvents the genre. I've included both in my list because their influence on the English imagination, and on subsequent English-language fiction, has been incalculable. Readers who love Jane Eyre are sometimes less enthusiastic about Wuthering Heights. For a long time it was judged to be inferior. Critics who had been swept away by Jane Eyre did not know what to make of it. The first reviews of Wuthering Heights were mixed.

However, it is Emily who takes the bigger creative risks. Where Charlotte comes from the puritan tradition of John Bunyan (no 1 in this series), Emily is the child of the Romantic movement, and both sisters are steeped in the gothic. Brontë's narrative – fragmented, discordant and tortuous – revolves obsessively around a single, explosive transgression, and the theme of jealousy in the lives of Heathcliff and Catherine, before making a calmer return to the theme in the often neglected second half.

Wuthering heights author emily