Wuthering Heights

Heathcliff arrives at Wuthering Heights as a foundling taken in by the Earnshaw family and grows up alongside Catherine Earnshaw in a bond so total that she later says, famously, "I am Heathcliff." Catherine marries the genteel, comfortable Edgar Linton at Thrushcross Grange instead, telling herself it would degrade her to marry Heathcliff even as she admits she loves him more; Heathcliff leaves, returns wealthy and transformed, and spends the rest of his life exacting a cold, patient revenge on both families, marrying Edgar's sister Isabella to torment her and, after Catherine's death in childbirth, extending his cruelty into the next generation, controlling and abusing Catherine's daughter, also named Cathy, and Hareton Earnshaw, whom he deliberately keeps ignorant and degraded, exactly as Hareton's father Hindley once treated Heathcliff. Only after Heathcliff's death do Cathy and Hareton, the second generation, find their way to something like the tenderness their parents' generation destroyed itself trying to reach.

The story reaches the reader secondhand, through the housekeeper Nelly Dean's long account to the outsider Mr Lockwood, who has just rented Thrushcross Grange and finds himself unsettled by strange noises and a ghost at the window on his first night. That framing device keeps Heathcliff and Catherine at a remove even as their passions dominate every page, and the effect is a novel that feels both wild and tightly controlled, brutal in its violence and yet written with real formal discipline. It is not a comfortable read, and modern readers sometimes arrive expecting a love story and find something closer to a study of obsession and cruelty passed down like an inheritance.

Emily Bronte published it under the pseudonym Ellis Bell in 1847 and died the following year, having written no other novel.