Wuthering Heights

Literary fiction · Gothic · Tragedy

First published: 1847
Print length: 364 pagesSterling, 2012

Description

In 1801, tenant Mr Lockwood visits his forbidding landlord, Heathcliff, at Wuthering Heights, a remote farmhouse on the West Yorkshire moors. While recovering from illness, Lockwood asks his housekeeper, Nelly Dean, to explain the strange household he has encountered. Her account reaches back to Heathcliff’s arrival as an orphan taken in by the Earnshaw family. He forms an intense bond with Catherine Earnshaw, but her brother degrades him into servitude, and Catherine’s refusal to marry beneath her social position drives him away. The consequences spread across the Earnshaw and Linton families and their neighboring estates, turning thwarted love into a multigenerational Gothic struggle over possession, revenge, and the possibility of reconciliation.

Reading profile

About this profile

Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).

Writing: How much attention the sentences and language require.
Ideas: How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
Structure: How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
Background knowledge: Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
Emotional intensity: Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.

Writing style

Atmospheric · Descriptive · Ornate

Pace

Variable

Tone

Atmospheric · Bleak · Dark · Unsettling

Structure

Framed · Nonlinear

Focus

Atmosphere · Character · Relationships

Emotional intensity

5 / 5

Reading complexity

1–5 · higher means more demanding

Writing: 4 / 5
Ideas: 3 / 5
Structure: 4 / 5
Background knowledge: 2 / 5

Themes

ClassFamilyLoveObsessionRedemptionRevenge

About Emily Brontë

Emily Brontë was an English novelist and poet whose concentrated body of work examines attachment, power, and social rank. Her fiction proceeds through indirection. In Wuthering Heights, the outsider Lockwood encounters a baffling household, then Nelly Dean’s retrospective account opens the story across two generations and two neighboring families. This layered narration makes knowledge partial and contested, while the remote Yorkshire moors and enclosed estates give emotional conflict a physical geography. Brontë’s dense, atmospheric prose moves between close domestic observation and Gothic extremity. The bond between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff is inseparable from property, status, humiliation, and inheritance, so thwarted intimacy develops into a prolonged struggle over possession and revenge. Brontë also wrote poetry, published with her sisters Charlotte and Anne in Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. That work emerged from a shared imaginative practice: Emily and Anne wrote books and journals about the invented world of Gondal.

Book details

For the print edition listed above.

Publisher: Sterling
Language: English
ISBN: 9781402787362

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