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The Museum's LGBTQ Working Group unearths previously hidden or unknown LGBTQ histories in the collections and aims to facilitate understanding of LGBTQ identities and histories through research, events, discussion and debate.

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The Museum's LGBTQ Working Group unearths previously hidden or unknown LGBTQ histories in the collections and aims to facilitate understanding of LGBTQ identities and histories through research, events, discussion and debate.

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The clash of economic interests and social classes. The novel is set at a time when capitalism and industrialization are changing not only the economy but also the traditional social structure and the relationship of the classes. The yeoman or respectable farming class (Hareton) was being destroyed by the economic alliance of the newly-wealthy capitalists (Heathcliff) and the traditional power-holding gentry (the Lintons).

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Even before she started writing mature fiction, Emily Brontë composed poems of intensity and accomplishment. However, she is remembered today for Wuthering Heights. The circumstances of its appearance in December 1847 by a house of questionable reputation are a remarkable story in themselves. The novel came out under a pseudonym, Ellis Bell. If-as there is evidence to think-Emily Jane Brontë hoped that her pen name would prevent the world from knowing her real one, that hope was doomed, for the world was already enthralled with a novel by Currer Bell, Jane Eyre, the product of Emily's older sister Charlotte. It would be only time before publishers, reviewers, critics, and the curious would learn the identities of the Bells, Currer (Charlotte), Ellis (Emily), and Acton (Anne Brontë). The contrasting circumstances and reception of these first novels by Charlotte and Emily Brontë point to the nobler, less compromising, more intransigent spirit of Emily. Given this character, Emily's association with the greedy, ignoble publisher who delivered it to the alien world of Victorian England may seem as astonishing as the book itself.

Notwithstanding its high literary reputation today, the status and initial commercial success of Wuthering Heights did not match that of Jane Eyre, put out by the established firm of Smith, Elder and Company in October 1847. Reviewers were repelled by Ellis Bell's novel. A typical reaction is an unsigned review from The Atlas, which the author herself clipped, now preserved amongst the papers at the Brontë museum in Haworth. The third paragraph begins

Wuthering Heights is a strange, inartistic story. There are evidences in every chapter of a sort of rugged power-of unconscious strength-which the possessor seems never to think of turning to the best advantage. The general effect is inexpressibly painful. We know nothing in the whole range of our fictitious literature which presents such shocking pictures of the worst forms of humanity. Jane Eyre is a book which affects the reader to tears; it touches the most hidden sources of emotion. Wuthering Heights casts a gloom over the mind not easily to be dispelled. It does not soften; it harasses; it extenterates. ["extenterates"?]

It is still scandalous today to a certain mind. It says that human love can be of such intensity that it lasts beyond the grave, and that love and hatred are the products of disinterested passions working though humans, who may not be so "human" as they think. For all the religion and religious sentiments in her poetry, Emily Brontë's sensibility is pagan, not Christian; it is violent rather than informed by reason and sweetness. Is it any wonder that the book had a hard time finding a publisher? And that when it did find one, he was, if not one of "the worst forms of humanity," nonetheless a scoundrel?

Like other beginning novelists, Charlotte and her sisters sent their manuscripts out ("perseveringly obtruded upon various publishers for the space of a year and a half" writes Phyllis Bentley in The Brontës [London: Thames and Hudson, p. 93]) only to be spurned time after time. In early August 1847, Charlotte submitted three novels to the firm of Thomas Cautley Newby: The Professor, Wuthering Heights, and Agnes Grey. Newby rejected the first of these but agreed to publish the second and third. He agreed to print 300 copies but demanded his usual harsh terms for first time novelists: £50. This sum he promised to return to the authors once 250 of the 300 copies were sold.

Having obtained the money and set the book in type and sent proof sheets to the Bells, Newby then did nothing. The Bells (Brontës) wrote. Newby did not respond. He had his money. What further income could he expect from the venture?

Meanwhile, Charlotte pressed on. After Newby rejected The Professor, she sent the manuscript to Smith, Elder and Company. Like Newby they refused but in a thoughtful and courteous letter. The consequence was that later that same month the furiously writing Charlotte sent another manuscript, Jane Eyre. Its first reader, W. S. Williams, immediately saw its quality and passed it on to George Smith, who spent a Sunday ( ! ) reading it. This was late August 1847, as Charlotte's cover letter is dated 24 August. By October, Smith, Elder and Company had published it. By December it was the talk of literary London.

Newby in October 1847 was still dilly dallying on Wuthering Heights, hesitating at a dubious commercial undertaking. He did not so neglect all his authors. In the same year as Wuthering Heights appeared, Newby published Anthony Trollope's first novel, The Macdermots of Ballycloran, obligingly sent him by Trollope's mother, Frances, a successful novelist. Judging shrewdly that the Trollope name was worth something, he brought out Trollope's book at his own expense, suggesting when he could that it was the work of the then more famous mother. It was only when Jane Eyre proved that the Bell name might also be worth something that Newby resumed production on Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey. Even then he rushed the job, ignoring corrections Ellis and Acton Bell had made on the proofs he had supplied.

The three volume novel was, in mid-Victorian England, a standard format- Jane Eyre was so presented. Newby had no qualms about stretching what were really at most two volumes, Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey, into three by heavily leading the text-putting more white space between the lines. Volume I is 348 pages, Volume II 416-extended by today's standards but not obviously fattened. Like the First Folio of Shakespeare, his three volumes from two Brontës are superficially well produced. There were two bindings, a ribbed deep claret for private purchasers and a plain cloth with paper labels for circulating libraries such as Mudie's. Also like the First Folio, the text abounds in typographical errors, some obvious, some not. Charlotte noted to her publishers, "The books are not well got up-they abound in errors of the press." There is no record, however, of any such point's being mentioned in reviews, and such public as the book immediately had was too small to make much of an objection.

T. C. Newby was doing everything in his power to increase the size of that public. His deviousness extended to seizing upon a potentially lucrative confusion. He bought newspaper ads that implied that Currer , Ellis, and Acton Bell were the same person, an idea that persisted for some time at first independently and then because of Newby. The Athenaeum on Christmas day 1847 speculated that "all three [ Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Agnes Grey] might be the work of one hand." Even after Emily Brontë had been dead two years, Sydney Dobell, writing in The Palladium, attributed Wuthering Heights to a younger, less formed Currer Bell. Privately, to her own publishers, Charlotte Brontë protested Newby's behavior; publicly and commercially the consequence of it was just what Newby had hoped: Wuthering Heights started to move.

Newby was an incorrigible rogue. Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey did eventually sell the requisite number of copies for royalties to be paid to the Bells, but Newby never repaid any of the money he was advanced. Although he promised to print 300 copies, he printed 250, thus ensuring that only he would stand to gain. None of this was known to the few readers and critics of the novel; his dishonesty passed unnoticed.

Today we probably care less about Newby's unscrupulousness in business matters and more about his carelessness with Emily Brontë's text. It is easy in retrospect, now that we can see Wuthering Heights for the masterwork it is, to decry Newby's irresponsibility. It is worth noting that Charlotte's protest about Newby's editorial integrity is milder than her anger over his dishonest advertising. "The books are not well got up" is a soft enough objection. Victorian readers were much less fussy about textual matters than we are today. We don't know Emily Brontë's feelings, yet there is reason to think that she was less disturbed than might be expected, since, as we shall see, she wanted to continue publishing with Newby.

However inferior the rascal's edition may be, it is still the best text we have because it is the one closest to the author's manuscript, which has not survived. Until textual studies came into their own in the early twentieth century, authorial manuscripts were not deemed to possess value beyond the market price of the autograph. Once a book was in print, the handwritten pages were used as kindling; and thus were frustrated the hopes of later ages to see the original efforts that produced Leaves of Grass, The Scarlet Letter, Moby-Dick, and Wuthering Heights. Without Newby, we might not have Wuthering Heights at all.

What Emily Brontë did with her own copy of her book is, like much about her, unknown. Until the mid 1960's there were reports of a first edition that could be traced directly back to Arthur Bell Nichols, Charlotte's husband, who inherited all Charlotte's effects upon her death in 1855. It was thought to have alterations in Emily Brontë's hand; however, when the book was sold in 1969, Sotheby's reported that the writing was Charlotte's. This copy, bought for £700, has much associational interest but no special authority. Under the mistaken impression that the emendations were Emily's, the late William Sale was still chasing after it when he assembled the Norton Critical edition of Wuthering Heights in the 1980s.

We have evidence that Charlotte complained to her own publishers about Thomas Cautley Newby. She also did so to her sisters. They, with an inflexibility or a perversity worthy of Heathcliff, ignored her. An 1848 letter from Newby to Emily Brontë indicates that she was dealing with the villain: "Dear Sir [i. e., Ellis Bell, a man]-I am much obliged by your kind note and shall have much pleasure in making arrangements for your next novel." She died before any such novel was written, but in 1848 Anne Brontë, shortly before her own death and the death of her sister Emily, published her next novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall under Newby's imprint.

Newby continued to attempt to capitalize shamelessly on the confusion about the three Bells, as he was to do throughout his career (the firm ceased operations in 1874). He offered The Tenant of Wildfell Hall to the American firm of Harper Brothers as a work by Currer Bell. Unfortunately for Newby, Charlotte Brontë's own publishers, Smith, Elder and Company, were at that point engaged in offering Currer Bell's Shirley to the same firm. When news of this situation reached Smith, Elder and Company in the summer of 1848, George Smith wrote anxiously to the Bells in Haworth. The consequence was a trip by Charlotte and Anne to London to meet Smith, where she confessed, "We are three sisters."

Charlotte's revelation infuriated the independent and reclusive Emily Brontë, who already in 1846 had quarreled violently with Charlotte when the latter published her-Emily's-poems, under the name Ellis Bell, without permission. A letter after the fateful London visit written by Charlotte to Smith, Elder and Company cautioned these worthies not to mention "sisters." The warning points to Emily's Brontë's abiding displeasure. Charlotte's actions may have done as much as Emily's natural contrariness to push her into continued negotiations with Newby; the woman who makes Heathcliff say, when his beloved has died, "May she wake in torment! ...And I pray one prayer-I repeat it till my tongue stiffens-Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest, as long as I am living! You said I killed you-haunt me then!" is a vengeful soul. Could any ordinary publisher, any respectful businessman, have been a kindred spirit of such a person? The harshness of Newby's treatment may have struck a sympathetic chord; his shady opportunism may have done more to keep Emily in his stable of authors than gentlemanly conduct could have, for in his own way he was as uncompromising and true-though to different values, to be sure-as Emily.

The more tractable Charlotte was probably not getting her pound of flesh back when, in 1850, after Emily's death she edited a second edition of Wuthering Heights for Smith, Elder and Company. She did repair many of the obvious errors of Newby: (e. g., "journies" in place of "journeys"), but her text is as troubled in its own ways as that of 1847. She simplified Joseph's Yorkshire dialect. She changed Emily's short paragraphs, in order to make Wuthering Heights into one volume. It may not be too much of an exaggeration to compare the first two incarnations of Wuthering Heights to a sponge, expanding and contracting according to circumstances.

Contemporary lack of interest in Charlotte's changes matched its lack of interest in Newby's sloppiness. The question 19th century critics and readers asked was not What did the author write? but Which text reads better? For roughly a hundred years reprints followed Charlotte's emendations. The first scholarly edition of the novel did not appear until 1976, edited by Ian Jack for the Oxford University Press. (The Oxford World Classics edition of the 1920's was an imperfect effort in the same direction.) Jack restored many original readings and dutifully listed the variants and changes. There is still a need for a reprint of the Newby first edition. Orchises Press is planning to produce one in 2004.

With the passage of time and the growing reputation of the Brontës, the machinations of Newby take their place in the myth of the Brontës. Upon his death in 1882 he joined the pantheon of rogue publishers that now includes Leonard Smithers ( The Ballad of Reading Gaol, The Importance of Being Earnest, An Ideal Husband), Reginald Stanley Caton with The Fortune Press (books by Dylan Thomas, Philip Larkin, and Kingsley Amis-Caton himself satirized as L. S. Caton in Lucky Jim and other Amis novels), and Maurice Girodias of the Olympia Press in Paris ( Lolita). All these helped deliver literary work of a quality beyond their understanding.

Opportunistic, mercenary, crass, sly, suave, Newby treated many of his authors as badly as he did the Brontës, but had that been all he did he would be remembered by only a few antiquarians. However, Newby also dealt with one of the rarest spirits of his age. In an ironic twist, his limitations ensured that Wuthering Heights arrived in Victorian England in a way that now seems to add to its legend and that have helped add to what little we know about its author.

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Even before she started writing mature fiction, Emily Brontë composed poems of intensity and accomplishment. However, she is remembered today for Wuthering Heights. The circumstances of its appearance in December 1847 by a house of questionable reputation are a remarkable story in themselves. The novel came out under a pseudonym, Ellis Bell.

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General outline

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From marriage and sexuality to education and rights, Professor Kathryn Hughes looks at attitudes towards gender in 19th-century Britain.

During the Victorian period men and women's roles became more sharply defined than at any time in history. In earlier centuries it had been usual for women to work alongside husbands and brothers in the family business. Living 'over the shop' made it easy for women to help out by serving customers or keeping accounts while also attending to their domestic duties. As the 19th century progressed men increasingly commuted to their place of work - the factory, shop or office. Wives, daughters and sisters were left at home all day to oversee the domestic duties that were increasingly carried out by servants. From the 1830s, women started to adopt the crinoline, a huge bell-shaped skirt that made it virtually impossible to clean a grate or sweep the stairs without tumbling over.

'Separate spheres'

The two sexes now inhabited what Victorians thought of as 'separate spheres', only coming together at breakfast and again at dinner.

The ideology of Separate Spheres rested on a definition of the 'natural' characteristics of women and men. Women were considered physically weaker yet morally superior to men, which meant that they were best suited to the domestic sphere. Not only was it their job to counterbalance the moral taint of the public sphere in which their husbands laboured all day, they were also preparing the next generation to carry on this way of life. The fact that women had such great influence at home was used as an argument against giving them the vote.

Educating women

Women did, though, require a new kind of education to prepare them for this role of 'Angel in the House'. Rather than attracting a husband through their domestic abilities, middle-class girls were coached in what were known as 'accomplishments'. These would be learned either at boarding school or from a resident governess. In Jane Austen's Pride & Prejudice the snobbish Caroline Bingley lists the skills required by any young lady who considers herself accomplished:

A woman must have a thorough knowledge of music, singing, drawing, dancing, and the modern languages ... ; and besides all this, she must possess a certain something in her air and manner of walking, the tone of her voice, her address and expressions ... (ch. 8)

As Miss Bingley emphasizes, it was important for a well-educated girl to soften her erudition with a graceful and feminine manner. No-one wanted to be called a 'blue-stocking', the name given to women who had devoted themselves too enthusiastically to intellectual pursuits. Blue-stockings were considered unfeminine and off-putting in the way that they attempted to usurp men's 'natural' intellectual superiority. Some doctors reported that too much study actually had a damaging effect on the ovaries, turning attractive young women into dried-up prunes. Later in the century, when Oxford and Cambridge opened their doors to women, many families refused to let their clever daughters attend for fear that they would make themselves unmarriageable.

Bowles's Drawing Book for Ladies

Bowles's Drawing Book for Ladies is a manual for drawing or embroidering flowers. Drawing and embroidery were part of a conventional female education in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Marriage and sexuality

At the same time, a young girl was not expected to focus too obviously on finding a husband. Being 'forward' in the company of men suggested a worrying sexual appetite. Women were assumed to desire marriage because it allowed them to become mothers rather than to pursue sexual or emotional satisfaction. One doctor, William Acton, famously declared that 'The majority of women (happily for them) are not very much troubled with sexual feeling of any kind'.

Girls usually married in their early to mid-20s. Typically, the groom would be five years older. Not only did this reinforce the 'natural' hierarchy between the sexes, but it also made sound financial sense. A young man needed to be able to show that he earned enough money to support a wife and any future children before the girl's father would give his permission. Some unfortunate couples were obliged to endure an engagement lasting decades before they could afford to marry.

If a young man was particularly pious he might manage to stay chaste until he married. Many respectable young men, however, resorted to using prostitutes. All the major cities had red light districts where it was easy to find a woman whom you could pay for sex. Out-of-towners could consult such volumes as Roger Funnyman's The Swell's Night Guide through the Metropolis. Unfortunately syphilis and other sexual diseases were rife, and many young men unwittingly passed on the infection to their wives. For those unlucky enough to develop full-blown tertiary syphilis, the result was a painful and lingering death, usually in the mid-40s.

The New Swell's Night Guide

The New Swell's Night Guide, a guide to finding and approaching actresses and prostitutes, estimated 1840.

19th century medical views on female sexuality

'the majority of women (happily for them) are not very much troubled by sexual feelings of any kind': from William Acton's medical text, The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs, 1857.

Young and not-so-young women had no choice but to stay chaste until marriage. They were not even allowed to speak to men unless there was a married woman present as a chaperone. Higher education or professional work was also out of the question. These emotional frustrations could lead to all sorts of covert rebellion. Young Florence Nightingale longed to be able to do something useful in the world, but was expected to stay with her mother and sister, helping supervise the servants. She suffered from hysterical outbursts as a teenager, and could not bear to eat with the rest of the family. Elizabeth Barrett, meanwhile, used illness as an excuse to retreat to a room at the top of her father's house and write poetry. In 1847 Charlotte Brontë put strong feelings about women's limited role into the mouth of her heroine Jane Eyre:

women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. (ch. 12)

This passage was considered so shocking that conservative commentators such as Lady (Elizabeth) Eastlake in a famously scathing review of Jane Eyre likened its tone to Chartism, the popular labour movement that advocated universal suffrage.

In her review - which also covered William Thackeray's Vanity Fair - Lady Eastlake took a strong dislike to the sexual ambition of Jane Eyre and Becky Sharp, both of whom end up marrying into the households by which they are employed. The figure of the governess was unsettling, especially in literature, because it drew attention to the fact that not all Victorian women were as sexless as Dr Acton had suggested.

Review of Jane Eyre by Elizabeth Rigby

The conservative 'Lady Eastlake', real name Elizabeth Rigby, harshly criticises Jane Eyre as dangerously immoral in this review, here reprinted in Littell's Living Age, 1849.

Prostitution

The prostitute was the shadow that haunted the well-run middle-class home. She serviced the needs of the men of the house, not just before marriage but sometimes during it too. Just like the men she slept with, but unlike their wives, the prostitute was a worker in the economic market place, exchanging services for cash. Doctors such as Acton were extremely worried by the 'problem' the prostitute presented, in particular the way she spread sexual disease amongst the male population. For this reason Contagious Diseases Act were instituted from 1860 which allowed, in certain towns, for the forced medical examination of any woman who was suspected of being a sex worker. If she was found to be infected she was placed in a 'Lock Hospital' until she was cured. A reform movement led by Josephine Butler vigorously campaigned for a repeal of the acts, arguing that it was male clients, as much as the prostitutes, who were responsible for the 'problems' associated with prostitution.

Many charities were instituted to help reform prostitutes. Charles Dickens even collaborated with the philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts to set up a 'Magdalen House' which would prepare girls for a new life in Australia. Despite these efforts, prostitution continued to flourish for as long as there were bachelors who were prevented by economy from marrying until their late 20s, and working-class women who desperately needed to make money to raise their own children.

Kathryn Hughes is Professor of Lifewriting and Convenor of the MA in Lifewriting at the University of East Anglia. Her first book The Victorian Governess was based on her PhD in Victorian History. Kathryn is also editor of George Eliot: A Family History and has won many national prizes for her journalism and historical writing. She is a contributing editor to Prospect magazine as well as a book reviewer and commentator for the Guardian and BBC Radio.

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From marriage and sexuality to education and rights, Professor Kathryn Hughes looks at attitudes towards gender in 19th-century Britain. During the Victorian period men and women's roles became more sharply defined than at any time in history. In earlier centuries it had been usual for women to work alongside husbands and brothers in the family business.

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Historical Analysis

Women as "the Sex" During the Victorian Era

The most common way to characterize a society at a given time is to divide it into social classes and evaluate the differences between each group. However, the period known as the Victorian era in England, from 1837 to 1901, witnessed such polarized gender roles that it can also be analyzed according to the different functions assigned to men and women, more commonly known as the ideology of separate spheres. The separate spheres framework holds that "men possessed the capacity for reason, action, aggression, independence, and self-interest [thus belonging to the public sphere]. Women inhabited a separate, private sphere, one suitable for the so called inherent qualities of femininity: emotion, passivity, submission, dependence, and selflessness, all derived, it was claimed insistently, form women's sexual and reproductive organization" (Kent 30). Following such principles allowed men, allegedly controlled by their mind or intellectual strength, to dominate society, to be the governing sex, given that they were viewed as rational, brave, and independent. Women, on the other hand, were dominated by their sexuality, and were expected to fall silently into the social mold crafted by men, since they were regarded as irrational, sensitive, and dutiful. As Susan Kent observes: "Women were so exclusively identified by their sexual functions that nineteenth-century society came to regard them as 'the Sex'" (32). This essay will examine the Victorian social institutions of marriage, motherhood, law, prostitution, and conventional sexual values, from a bourgeois woman's point of view, all of which played roles in hindering women in day-to-day life, and furthered the notion of women as beings governed solely by their reproductive systems.

In this period, marriage was possibly one of the most significant points in a woman's life. The majority of women did not have the option not to marry: it was simply a necessity for survival. Because society prevented women from making their own living, there was an inescapable dependence upon men's income: "Barred by law and custom from entering trades and professions by which they could support themselves, and restricted in the possession of property, woman had only one means of livelihood, that of marriage" (Kent 86). Therefore, no matter what the women desired, most were predestined to become wives due to their economic reliance on men. Secondly, to be even considered as a potential wife, women had to be not only virgins, but were expected to remain innocent and "free from any thought of love or sexuality" until after they had received a proposal (Kane 97). This requirement of chastity and absolute purity was not expected of men, as the potential husband had the freedom to participate in premarital and extramarital sexual relationships. Such a biased idea was one of many double standards in Victorian society, which demanded unquestionable compliance from women and none from men, since the women were thought to be controlled by their sexuality and were thus in need of regulation.

After a woman married, her rights, her property, and even her identity almost ceased to exist. By law she was under the complete and total supervision of her husband: thus through marriage, husband and wife became one person; whatever view he presented was the unquestionable truth (Perkin 73). Not only did the husband have almost complete control over his wife's body, since beatings and marital rape were legal, their children also belonged to him, as did any property and money that the wife brought into the house. Indeed it is understandable to see why many women saw marriage as falling little short of slavery. Victorian society viewed marriage as women's natural and best position in life, and men agreed, seeing marriage as an expected duty of women. One Victorian male contemporary writing in a letter to a friend described the perfect wife as nothing more than an extension of his household surroundings: "of course at a certain age, when you have a house and so on, you get a wife as part of its furniture" (Kent 91). In reality women held an important position as wives since they took care of the household, any servants, helped with their husband's work, and managed the finances, however from the male's point of view, women were nothing more than overly emotional and mindless creatures ruled by their sexuality, or simply "the Sex" (Vickery 389).

Motherhood, unfortunately, in reality was not any more respected than marriage. Formally it was a sacred and honored position, as a mother was viewed as "an angel in the house," and motherhood was "the crowning achievement of a woman's life" (Kent 33). Such was the overall view. However, as with marriage, there were unjust requirements and unfair expectations. Firstly, motherhood was almost always separated from anything sexual. Sex for any other reason than creating children was viewed as dirty and scandalous, quite separate from the revered sexless image of motherhood. Purity was an expectation and a necessity in order for motherhood to be truly appreciated: "Victorians considered purity a crucial component in ideal maternity. Although mothers were necessarily women of some sexual experience, they were nonetheless often canonized as essentially virginal" (Holmes and Nelson 2). This meant that mothers also had to be religious, since religion supported the view of women as free of sexual passion and gratification. Such beliefs were required in order to properly bring up children, because "a mother who lacked religious faith could not instill sexual propriety in her daughter, and thus was

unfit to be a mother at all" (Holmes and Nelson 21). Furthermore, women's compliance with the accepted social maternal values (being pure, religious) was more important than their roles as mothers. For example, in 1878, Annie Besant was denied the custody of her daughter because she had written in a magazine promoting birth control, sex for pleasure, and was an admitted atheist. As Holmes and Nelson relate:

Mothers were valued socially only if they were 'good' mothers, good according to rigid moral standards of propriety not only in behavior but also in opinion...When Besant was judged 'not a fit and proper person' to have a custody ofher child, not because of her mothering but because of her opinions, the courts and the public ruled unequivocally that social conformity was more important than maternal love (13).

Thus mothers were viewed by men as angelic only if they seemed to eschew sex, were meek, submissive, and conforming. Mothers, men kept in mind, were also women controlled by their emotions, and were socially accepted as long as they stayed in their sphere of submissiveness and passivity. One early twentieth century Protestant reformer wrote "If a woman becomes weary of bearing children, that matters not: let her only die from bearing, she is there to do it" (Kent 95). Motherhood, socially restricted and defined by women's sexual abilities, was, like marriage, an institution to limit women's roles in society. In order to be as sexually free as men in the Victorian era, women had to avoid motherhood and stand against society's conventions and the rules set up by men.

Therefore it seemed that despite the superficially elevated positions of wives and mothers, women were alone in a world ruled by men. This could not have been more clearly evident than when women came into contact with law: "Justice was administered according to a male view of her rights, and of how she ought to behave. It seemed appropriate that justice was portrayed as a blindfolded woman, since her scales were so tilted in favor of men" (Perkin 113). Laws designed to benefit men over women were hard to overlook. Besides the legality of marital rape and wife-battery, the husband also had complete say in sexual intercourse. Refusal of sex was grounds for annulment of marriage (Perkin 64).

The issue of adultery was also skewed to favor men. "While a wife's adultery was sufficient cause to end a marriage, a woman could divorce her husband only if his adultery had been compounded by another matrimonial offense, such as cruelty or desertion," wrote Holmes and Nelson (40). The reasoning was that wives and mothers served as moral guides to children, so adultery committed by a woman was considered perverted and unnatural. Also, it called the paternity of the children (the heirs to the husband's property) into question. And thus men believed that unless there was an explicit rule against it, men were free to treat women any way they wanted without any shame. Men justified their actions with their supremacy and expected women to tolerate the abuse without demur.

The extreme polarization of roles based on gender resulted in a world ruled solely by male discretion, which almost never took into consideration the women's viewpoint. Emmeline Lawrence of WSPU , an organization that fought for women's emancipation, challenged the patriarchal power of society: "The concentration of power in the hands of men, the containing of women to the private sphere...had resulted in a society in which 'there is nothing that expresses the woman's point of view. There is nothing that tallies with the woman's soul...everything is arranged upon a plan different from their own'" (Kent 149). Kent goes on to argue that not only had men failed to protect the interests of women; they were almost incapable of it. Their lives, their laws, and the administration of justice reflected men's deep-seated desire to debase women sexually (149). If women were looked upon as ruled by their sexual reproductive systems in the institutions of marriage and motherhood, they could not expect any more protection or understanding from the legal system.

Prostitution, legal during the Victorian era, seemed to embody the second of the two categories of women present in Victorian society: the first was the pure wife and mother, "the angel in the house"; the other was the depraved and sexually-crazed prostitute. However because wives and mothers were not truly respected, my belief is that prostitution reflected what men really considered all women to be: whores for the gratification of their sexual desires. And indeed in Victorian England a large number of women were prostitutes: "In a society that forced women into a position of economic dependence upon men, only an accident of birth prevented women of the middle classes from resorting to prostitution to support themselves and their children" (Kent 68). Men said they were revolted by prostitutes, that they were the "fallen women" who deserved the shame and disrespect, yet made no effort to make prostitution illegal since they believed prostitutes provided a basic service of satisfying men's uncontrollable needs. Ironically, in a society that was not open to women working outside the home, prostitution seemed to be the only profession protected by law. Many men regarded prostitutes as "the necessary evil to protect the pure, who otherwise might unwittingly provoke the male to rape them" (Kent 62).

Although I'm not sure Victorian men really considered themselves to be so bestial and animalistic "theorists constructed a single sexuality for men that acknowledged the urgency of male drives and the necessity of relieving them" (Kent 62). The whole field of prostitution seemed to be built upon the belief that men had to express their sexual energy, women being the means of men's expression. The Contagious Disease Acts of the 1860's tried to limit the spread of venereal diseases and prostitution, by requiring the examination of the genitals of women who were suspected of being prostitutes: "Treatment was compulsory only for women...a military doctor said periodic examination of the soldiers 'would tend to destroy the men's self-respect'" (Perkin 231). Several years later, feminists fought and "opposed the acts not simply because they singled out one sex for punishment and obloquy, but because they sanctioned the notion of woman as the acceptable object for male use and abuse" (Kent 66). Prostitution thus was a direct identification of women as "the Sex."

Men's and society's consistent definition of women's roles according to their separate spheres and the reproductive system can also be seen through what today we would consider the 'weird' sexual values of Victorians. To begin with, sex as a subject was not at all discussed. Girls could grow up into women and still not know where children came from: "Women's bodies, hidden in long, voluminous clothes, were almost as much of a mystery to themselves as to men...'Nice ladies no more thought of showing their legs than did nice chairs'" (Perkin 51). Sexuality and anything in relation to it contradicted the accepted notions of purity and was strictly looked down upon. Masturbation was so demonized that it was considered a mental disorder. Doctors maintained that masturbation caused "'certain forms of insanity, epilepsy and hysteria in females" (Perkin 22). Victorians, it seemed, simply could not understand why anyone would voluntarily choose to participate in such revolting and degrading activities.

One solution was the mutilation of female genitals: "Clitoridectomy was performed to cure dysuria, amenorrhea, sterility, epilepsy, masturbation, 'hysterical mania,' and various manifestations of insanity. The source of these diseases was thought to be sexual arousal; the termination of sexual arousal through clitoridectomy cured the disease" (Kent 47). Men so deeply believed the idea of women as beings who were controlled by their sexuality that some even thought the reason women were so unhappy with their positions as females was because they lacked a male's sexual organs. The psychologist Sigmund Freud explained this argument: "The personality development of the female centered upon her discovery in early childhood that she lacked a penis; penis envy created in the female child a lifelong dissatisfaction with her identity as a woman" (Kent 224). The extent to which men stressed view of women as "the Sex" was almost limitless. The best view, perhaps, stated clearly to define women's social niche, was written by an eminent British psychiatrist Henry Maudsley:

Reproductive process demanded all the energy a woman could muster; to spend it in another direction would inexorably undermine the very function that gave woman her only raison d'être [reason for being]. If women foolishly attempted to undertake study, he concluded, they risked ruining forever their childbearing capacities (Perkin 51).

In the end, there was simply no way to escape from men's never-ending subordination of women due to female's sexuality.

It was not until after 1850's that the effective women's organizations arose and finally began to stand up against male oppression. From an early age girls were taught they were useless; supported by the ideology of separate spheres, women lived their lives in conditions that some feminists saw as being close to slavery. Feminists and suffragists viewed their campaign as the best way to end the sexual discrimination against women brought on by the separate spheres - "an ideology that finally reduced women's identity to a sexual one, encouraged the view of women as sexual objects, and perpetuated women's powerlessness in both spheres" (Kent 5). If women were going to fight against the oppression forced on them by men, they had to get to the root of the problem, and the idea of the separate spheres was the basis. One Victorian woman referring to her childhood recalled: "'We just got instilled in us the feeling of being second best, if not coming up to scratch. We were girls, you see, and what use were girls anyway?'" (Perkin 6) The women of the early twentieth century realized their freedom lay in the dissolution of the ideology of separate spheres, through emending men's views, and overhauling the legal system. By discarding the underlying beliefs that upheld the unjust aspects of Victorian society, women understood that their position in society would increasingly improve, especially in the institutions of marriage, motherhood, and law: "A truer, more moral relationship between the sexes, a sex peace, if you will, depended upon the reconstruction of gender and sexual identity...It was a fundamental step, they realized, if the laws and customs that subjected women to men were to be overturned" (Kent 134-9). Many of the freedoms we take for granted today indeed sprang from the seeds of Victorian women's repression, and women's continuous determination to fight patriarchal society.

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Historical Analysis: Women as the "the Sex" During the Victorian Era

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Historical Analysis Women as "the Sex" During the Victorian Era The most common way to characterize a society at a given time is to divide it into social classes and evaluate the differences between each group.

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The reader’s guide to Emily Bronte’s classic ‘Wuthering Heights’

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A guide to Emily Bronte’s masterpiece about Cathy and Heathcliff - a tale of love and revenge on the Yorkshire moors. Summaries, character details, maps and timelines - all here.

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Wuthering Heights is an 1847 novel by Emily Brontë, published under the pseudonym Ellis Bell. It concerns two families of the landed gentry living on the West Yorkshire moors, the Earnshaws and the Lintons, and their turbulent relationships with Earnshaw's adopted son, Heathcliff. It was influenced by Romanticism and Gothic fiction.

Wuthering Heights is now considered a classic of English literature, but contemporaneous reviews were polarised. It was controversial for its depictions of mental and physical cruelty, and for its challenges to Victorian morality, and religious and societal values.

Wuthering Heights was accepted by publisher Thomas Newby along with Anne Brontë's before the success of their sister Charlotte's novel , but they were published later. Charlotte edited a second edition of Wuthering Heights after Emily's death which was published in 1850. It has inspired an array of adaptations across several media, including a hit song.

In 1801, Mr Lockwood, the new tenant at Thrushcross Grange in Yorkshire, pays a visit to his landlord, Heathcliff, at his remote moorland farmhouse, Wuthering Heights. There he meets a reserved young woman (later identified as Cathy Linton); Joseph, a cantankerous servant; and Hareton, an uneducated young man who speaks like a servant. Everyone is sullen and inhospitable. Snowed in for the night, he reads some diary entries of a former inhabitant of his room, Catherine Earnshaw, and has a nightmare in which a ghostly Catherine begs to enter through the window. Woken by Lockwood, Heathcliff is troubled.

Lockwood falls ill from his walk in the snow and becomes bedridden after he returns to Thrushcross Grange. As he recovers, Lockwood's housekeeper Ellen (Nelly) Dean tells him the story of the strange family.

Nelly's tale

Thirty years earlier, the Earnshaws live at Wuthering Heights with their children, Hindley and Catherine, and a servant - Nelly herself. Returning from a trip to Liverpool, Earnshaw brings a young orphan whom he names Heathcliff and treats as his favourite. His own children he neglects, especially after his wife dies. Hindley beats Heathcliff, who gradually becomes close friends with Catherine.

Hindley departs for university, returning as the new master of Wuthering Heights on the death of his father three years later. He and his new wife Frances allow Heathcliff to stay, but only as a servant.

Heathcliff and Catherine spy on Edgar Linton and his sister Isabella, children who live nearby at Thrushcross Grange. Catherine is attacked by their dog, and the Lintons take her in, sending Heathcliff home. When the Lintons visit, Hindley and Edgar make fun of Heathcliff and a fight ensues. Heathcliff is locked in the attic and vows revenge.

Frances dies after giving birth to a son, Hareton. Two years later, Catherine becomes engaged to Edgar. She confesses to Nelly that she loves Heathcliff, and will try to help but cannot marry him because of his low social status. Nelly warns her against the plan. Heathcliff overhears part of the conversation and, misunderstanding Catherine's heart, flees the household. Catherine falls ill, distraught.

Edgar and Catherine marry, and three years later Heathcliff unexpectedly returns - now a wealthy gentleman. He encourages Isabella's infatuation with him as a means of revenge on Catherine. Enraged by Heathcliff's constant presence at Thrushcross Grange, Edgar cuts off contact. Catherine responds by locking herself in her room and refusing food; pregnant with Edgar's child, she never fully recovers. At Wuthering Heights Heathcliff gambles with Hindley who mortgages the property to him to pay his debts. Heathcliff elopes with Isabella, but the relationship fails and they soon return.

When Heathcliff discovers that Catherine is dying, he visits her in secret. She dies shortly after giving birth to a daughter, Cathy, and Heathcliff rages, calling on her ghost to haunt him for as long as he lives. Isabella flees south where she gives birth to Heathcliff's son, Linton. Hindley dies six months later, leaving Heathcliff as master of Wuthering Heights.

Twelve years later, Isabella is dying and the still-sickly Linton is brought back to live with his uncle Edgar at the Grange, but Heathcliff insists that his son must instead live with him. Cathy and Linton (respectively at the Grange and Wuthering Heights) gradually develop a relationship. Heathcliff schemes to ensure that they marry, and on Edgar's death demands that the couple move in with him. He becomes increasingly wild and reveals that on the night Catherine died he dug up her grave, and ever since has been plagued by her ghost. When Linton dies, Cathy has no option but to remain at Wuthering Heights.

Having reached the present day, Nelly's tale concludes.

Lockwood grows tired of the moors and moves away. Eight months later he sees Nelly again and she reports that Cathy has been teaching the still-uneducated Hareton to read. Heathcliff was seeing visions of the dead Catherine; he avoided the young people, saying that he could not bear to see Catherine's eyes, which they both shared, looking at him. He had stopped eating, and some days later was found dead in Catherine's old room.

In the present, Lockwood learns that Cathy and Hareton plan to marry and move to the Grange. Joseph is left to take care of the declining Wuthering Heights. Nelly says that the locals have seen the ghosts of Catherine and Heathcliff wandering abroad together, and hopes they are at peace.

C. P, Sanger's Timeline (1926). Sanger's essay, "The Structure of Wuthering Heights"

1500:

The stone above the front door of Wuthering Heights, bearing the name Earnshaw, is inscribed, presumably to mark the completion of the house.

1757:

Hindley Earnshaw born (summer)

1765:

Catherine Earnshaw born (summer); Isabella Linton born (late 1765)

1771:

Heathcliff brought to Wuthering Heights by Mr Earnshaw (late summer)

1773:

Mrs Earnshaw dies (spring)

1774:

Hindley sent off to university by his father

1775:

Hindley marries Frances; Mr Earnshaw dies and Hindley comes back (October); Heathcliff and Catherine visit Thrushcross Grange for the first time; Catherine remains behind (November), and then returns to Wuthering Heights (Christmas Eve)

1778:

Hareton born (June); Frances dies

1780:

Heathcliff runs away from Wuthering Heights; Mr and Mrs Linton both die

1783:

Catherine has married Edgar (March); Heathcliff comes back (September)

1784:

Heathcliff marries Isabella (February); Catherine dies and Cathy born (20 March); Hindley dies; Linton Heathcliff born (September)

1797:

Isabella dies; Cathy visits Wuthering Heights and meets Hareton; Linton brought to Thrushcross Grange and then taken to Wuthering Heights

1800:

Cathy meets Heathcliff and sees Linton again (20 March)

1801:

Cathy and Linton are married (August); Edgar dies (August); Linton dies (September); Mr Lockwood goes to Thrushcross Grange and visits Wuthering Heights, beginning his narrative

1802:

Mr Lockwood goes back to London (January); Heathcliff dies (April); Mr Lockwood comes back to Thrushcross Grange (September)

1803:

Cathy plans to marry Hareton (1 January)

Heathcliff is a dark-skinned foundling from Liverpool, who is taken by Mr Earnshaw to Wuthering Heights, where he is reluctantly cared for by the family, and spoiled by his adopted father. He and Catherine Earnshaw grow close, and their love is the central theme of the first volume. His revenge against the man she chooses to marry and its consequences are the central theme of the second volume. Heathcliff has been considered a Byronic hero, but critics have pointed out that he reinvents himself at various points, making his character hard to fit into any single type. He has an ambiguous position in society, and his lack of status is underlined by the fact that "Heathcliff" is both his given name and his surname. The character of Heathcliff may have been inspired by Branwell Brontë. An alcoholic and an opium addict, he would have indeed terrorised Emily and her sister Charlotte during frequent crises of delirium tremens that affected him a few years before his death. Even though Heathcliff has no alcohol or drug problems, the influence of Branwell's character is likely. Hindley Earnshaw, an alcoholic, often seized with madness, also owes something to Branwell.

Catherine Earnshaw: First introduced to the reader after her death, through Lockwood's discovery of her diary and carvings. The description of her life is confined almost entirely to the first volume. She seems unsure whether she is, or wants to become, more like Heathcliff, or aspires to be more like Edgar. Some critics have argued that her decision to marry Edgar Linton is allegorically a rejection of nature and a surrender to culture, a choice with unfortunate, fateful consequences for all the other characters. She dies hours after giving birth to her daughter.

Edgar Linton: Introduced as a child in the Linton family, he resides at Thrushcross Grange. Edgar's style and manners are in sharp contrast to those of Heathcliff, who instantly dislikes him, and of Catherine, who is drawn to him. Catherine marries him instead of Heathcliff because of his higher social status, with disastrous results to all characters in the story. He dotes on his wife and later his daughter.

: The main narrator of the novel, Nelly is a servant to three generations of the Earnshaws and two of the Linton family. Humbly born, she regards herself nevertheless as Hindley's foster-sister (they are the same age and her mother is his nurse). She lives and works among the rough inhabitants of Wuthering Heights but is well-read, and she also experiences the more genteel manners of Thrushcross Grange. She is referred to as Ellen, her given name, to show respect, and as Nelly among those close to her. Critics have discussed how far her actions as an apparent bystander affect the other characters and how much her narrative can be relied on.

Isabella Linton: Edgar's sister. She views Heathcliff romantically, despite Catherine's warnings, and becomes an unwitting participant in his plot for revenge against Edgar. Heathcliff marries her but treats her abusively. While pregnant, she escapes to London and gives birth to a son, Linton. She entrusts her son to her brother Edgar when she dies.

Hindley Earnshaw: Catherine's elder brother, Hindley, despises Heathcliff immediately and bullies him throughout their childhood before his father sends him away to college. Hindley returns with his wife, Frances, after Mr Earnshaw dies. He is more mature, but his hatred of Heathcliff remains the same. After Frances's death, Hindley reverts to destructive behaviour, neglects his son, and ruins the Earnshaw family by drinking and gambling to excess. Heathcliff beats Hindley up at one point after Hindley fails in his attempt to kill Heathcliff with a pistol. He dies less than a year after Catherine and leaves his son with nothing.

Hareton Earnshaw: The son of Hindley and Frances, raised at first by Nelly but soon by Heathcliff. Joseph works to instill a sense of pride in the Earnshaw heritage (even though Hareton will not inherit Earnshaw property, because Hindley has mortgaged it to Heathcliff). Heathcliff, in contrast, teaches him vulgarities as a way of avenging himself on Hindley. Hareton speaks with an accent similar to Joseph's, and occupies a position similar to that of a servant at Wuthering Heights, unaware that he has been done out of his inheritance. He can only read his name. In appearance, he reminds Heathcliff of his aunt, Catherine.

Cathy Linton: The daughter of Catherine and Edgar Linton, a spirited and strong-willed girl unaware of her parents' history. Edgar is very protective of her and as a result, she is eager to discover what lies beyond the confines of the Grange. Although one of the more sympathetic characters of the novel, she is also somewhat snobbish towards Hareton and his lack of education. She falls in love with and marries Linton Heathcliff.

Linton Heathcliff: The son of Heathcliff and Isabella. A weak child, his early years are spent with his mother in the south of England. He learns of his father's identity and existence only after his mother dies when he is twelve. In his selfishness and capacity for cruelty he resembles Heathcliff; physically, he resembles his mother. He marries Cathy Linton because his father, who terrifies him, directs him to do so, and soon after he dies from a wasting illness associated with tuberculosis.

Joseph: A servant at Wuthering Heights for 60 years who is a rigid, self-righteous Christian but lacks any trace of genuine kindness or humanity. He speaks a broad Yorkshire dialect and hates nearly everyone in the novel.

Mr Lockwood: The first narrator, he rents Thrushcross Grange to escape society, but in the end, decides society is preferable. He narrates the book until Chapter 4, when the main narrator, Nelly, picks up the tale.

Frances: Hindley's ailing wife and mother of Hareton Earnshaw. She is described as somewhat silly and is obviously from a humble family. Frances dies not long after the birth of her son.

Mr and Mrs Earnshaw: Catherine's and Hindley's father, Mr Earnshaw is the master of Wuthering Heights at the beginning of Nelly's story and is described as an irascible but loving and kind-hearted man. He favours his adopted son, Heathcliff, which causes trouble in the family. In contrast, his wife mistrusts Heathcliff from their first encounter.

Mr and Mrs Linton: Edgar's and Isabella's parents, they educate their children in a well-behaved and sophisticated way. Mr Linton also serves as the magistrate of Gimmerton, as his son does in later years.

Dr Kenneth: The longtime doctor of Gimmerton and a friend of Hindley's who is present at the cases of illness during the novel. Although not much of his character is known, he seems to be a rough but honest person.

Zillah: A servant to Heathcliff at Wuthering Heights during the period following Catherine's death. Although she is kind to Lockwood, she doesn't like or help Cathy at Wuthering Heights because of Cathy's arrogance and Heathcliff's instructions.

Mr Green: Edgar's corruptible lawyer who should have changed Edgar's will to prevent Heathcliff from gaining Thrushcross Grange. Instead, Green changes sides and helps Heathcliff to inherit the Grange as his property.

The original text as published by Thomas Cautley Newby in 1847 is available online in two parts. The novel was first published together with Anne Brontë's Agnes Grey in a three-volume format: Wuthering Heights filled the first two volumes and Agnes Grey made up the third.

In 1850 Charlotte Brontë edited the original text for the second edition of Wuthering Heights. She addressed the faulty punctuation and orthography but also diluted Joseph's thick Yorkshire dialect. Writing to her publisher, W S Williams, she said that

Irene Wiltshire, in an essay on dialect and speech, examines some of the changes Charlotte made.

Early reviews of Wuthering Heights were mixed in their assessment. Most critics recognised the power and imagination of the novel, but were baffled by the storyline, and objected to the savagery and selfishness. Published in 1847 when the background of an author was thought important, many critics were intrigued by the authorship of the Bell novels.

The Atlas review called it a "strange, inartistic story," but commented that every chapter seems to contain a "sort of rugged power."

Graham's Lady Magazine wrote: "How a human being could have attempted such a book as the present without committing suicide before he had finished a dozen chapters, is a mystery. It is a compound of vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors".

The American Whig Review wrote:

Douglas Jerrold's Weekly Newspaper wrote:

Examiner wrote:

This is a strange book. It is not without evidences of considerable power: but, as a whole, it is wild, confused, disjointed, and improbable; and the people who make up the drama, which is tragic enough in its consequences, are savages ruder than those who lived before the days of Homer.

Literary World wrote:

The English poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti admired the book, writing in 1854 that it was "the first novel I've read for an age, and the best (as regards power and sound style) for two ages, except Sidonia", but, in the same letter, he also referred to it as "a fiend of a book - an incredible monster [...] The action is laid in hell, - only it seems places and people have English names there".

Until late in the 19th century " Jane Eyre was regarded as the best of the Brontë sisters' novels". This view began to change in the 1880s with the publication of Mary Robinson's biography of Emily in 1883.

Modernist novelist Virginia Woolf affirmed the greatness of Wuthering Heights in 1925:

Wuthering Heights is a more difficult book to understand than , because Emily was a greater poet than Charlotte. ... She looked out upon a world cleft into gigantic disorder and felt within her the power to unite it in a book. That gigantic ambition is to be felt throughout the novel ... It is this suggestion of power underlying the apparitions of human nature and lifting them up into the presence of greatness that gives the book its huge stature among other novels.

Similarly Woolf's contemporary John Cowper Powys referred in 1916 to Emily Brontë's "tremendous vision".

In 1926 Charles Percy Sanger's work on the chronology of Wuthering Heights "affirmed Emily's literary craft and meticulous planning of the novel and disproved Charlotte's presentation of her sister as an unconscious artist who 'did not know what she had done'." However, for a later critic Albert J. Guerard: "it is a splendid, imperfect novel which Brontë loses control over occasionally".

Still, in 1934, Lord David Cecil, writing in Early Victorian Novelists, commented "that Emily Brontë was not properly appreciated; even her admirers saw her as an 'unequal genius'," and in 1948 F.R. Leavis excluded Wuthering Heights from the great tradition of the English novel because it was "a 'kind of sport'-an anomaly with 'some influence of an essentially undetectable kind.'"

Writing in The Guardian in 2003 writer and editor Robert McCrum placed Wuthering Heights at number 17 in his list of 100 greatest novels of all time. And in 2015 he placed it at number 13 in his list of 100 best novels written in English. He said that

Wuthering Heights releases extraordinary new energies in the novel, renews its potential, and almost reinvents the genre. 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.

Criticising McCrum's second list journalist and author Rachel Cooke, also writing in The Guardian, agreed with the inclusion of Wuthering Heights, calling it a masterpiece.

Writing for BBC Culture in 2015 author and book reviewer Jane Ciabattari polled 82 book critics from outside the UK and presented Wuthering Heights as number 7 in the resulting list of 100 greatest British novels.

In 2018 Penguin presented a list of 100 must-read classic books and placed Wuthering Heights at number 71, saying: "Widely considered a staple of Gothic fiction and the English literary canon, this book has gone on to inspire many generations of writers - and will continue to do so".

Writing in The Independent journalist and author Ceri Radford and news presenter, journalist, and TV producer Chris Harvey included Wuthering Heights in a list of the 40 best books to read during lockdown. Harvey said that "It's impossible to imagine this novel ever provoking quiet slumbers; Emily Brontë's vision of nature blazes with poetry".}}

See also: "Wuthering Heights: Landscape" - a British Library audio-video

Novelist John Cowper Powys notes the importance of the setting:

By that singular and forlorn scenery-the scenery of the Yorkshire moors round her home-[Emily Brontë] was, however, in the more flexible portion of her curious nature inveterately influenced. She does not precisely describe this scenery-not at any length ... but it sank so deeply into her that whatever she wrote was affected by it and bears its desolate and imaginative imprint."

Likewise Virginia Woolf suggests the importance of the Yorkshire landscape of Haworth to the poetic vision of both Emily and Charlotte Brontë:

Wuthering Heights is an old house high on the Pennine moorland of West Yorkshire. The first description is provided by Lockwood, the new tenant of the nearby Thrushcross Grange:

Wuthering Heights is the name of Mr. Heathcliff's dwelling, " wuthering" being a significant provincial adjective, descriptive of the atmospheric tumult to which its station is exposed in stormy weather. Pure, bracing ventilation they must have up there at all times, indeed. One may guess the power of the north wind blowing over the edge by the excessive slant of a few stunted firs at the end of the house, and by a range of gaunt thorns all stretching their limbs one way, as if craving alms of the sun.

Lord David Cecil in Early Victorian Novelists (1934) drew attention to the contrast between the two main settings in Wuthering Heights:

Walter Allen, in The English Novel (1954), likewise "spoke of the two houses in the novel as symbolising 'two opposed principles which ... ultimately compose a harmony'". However, David Daiches, "in the 1965 Penguin English Library edition referred to Cecil's interpretation as being 'persuasively argued' though not fully acceptable". The entry on Wuthering Heights in the 2002 Oxford Companion to English Literature, "says that the ending of the novel points to a union of 'the two contrasting worlds and moral orders represented by the Heights and the Grange'".

There is no evidence that either Thrushcross Grange or Wuthering Heights are based on actual buildings, so that the following suggestions are speculative. One example is Top Withens, a ruined farmhouse in an isolated area near the Haworth Parsonage, which was first suggested as the model for Wuthering Heights by Ellen Nussey, a friend of Charlotte Brontë. However, its structure does not match that of the farmhouse described in the novel. High Sunderland Hall, near Law Hill, Halifax where Emily worked briefly as a governess in 1838, now demolished, has also been suggested as a model for Wuthering Heights. However, it is too grand for a farmhouse.

Ponden Hall is famous for reputedly being the inspiration for Thrushcross Grange, since Brontë was a frequent visitor. However, it does not match the description given in the novel and is closer in size and appearance to the farmhouse of Wuthering Heights. The Brontë biographer Winifred Gerin believed that Ponden Hall was the original of Wildfell Hall, the old mansion in Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Helen Smart, while noting that Thrush Grange has "traditionally been associated with ... Ponden Hall, Stanbury, near Haworth", sees Shibden Hall, Northowram, in Halifax parish, as more likely, referring to Hilda Marsden's article "The Scenic Background of Wuthering Heights".

Most of the novel is the story told by housekeeper Nelly Dean to Lockwood, though the novel "uses several narrators (in fact, five or six) to place the story in perspective, or in a variety of perspectives". Emily Brontë uses this frame story technique to narrate most of the story. Thus, for example, Lockwood, the first narrator of the story, tells the story of Nelly, who herself tells the story of another character. The use of a character, like Nelly Dean is "a literary device, a well-known convention taken from the Gothic novel, the function of which is to portray the events in a more mysterious and exciting manner".

Thus the point of view comes

Critics have questioned the reliability of the two main narrators. The author has been described as sarcastic "toward Lockwood-who fancies himself a world-weary romantic but comes across as an effete snob", and there are "subtler hints that Nelly's perspective is influenced by her own biases".

The narrative in addition includes an excerpt from Catherine Earnshaw's old diary, and short sections narrated by Heathcliff, Isabella, and another servant.

Brontë possessed an exceptional classical culture for a woman of the time. She was familiar with Greek tragedies and was a good Latinist. In addition she was especially influenced by the poets John Milton and William Shakespeare. There are echoes of Shakespeare's and Romeo and Juliet in Wuthering Heights. Another major source of information for the Brontës was the periodicals that their father read, the Leeds Intelligencer and Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. Blackwood's Magazine provided knowledge of world affairs and was a source of material for the Brontës' early writing. Emily Brontë was probably aware of the debate on evolution. This debate had been launched in 1844 by Robert Chambers. It raised questions of divine providence and the violence which underlies the universe and relationships between living things.

Romanticism was also a major influence, which included the Gothic novel, the novels of Walter Scott and the poetry of Byron. The Brontës' fiction is seen by some feminist critics as prime examples of Female Gothic. It explores the domestic entrapment and subjection of women to patriarchal authority, and the attempts to subvert and escape such restriction. Emily Brontë's Cathy Earnshaw and Charlotte Brontë's are both examples of female protagonists in such a role.

According Juliet Barker, Walter Scott's novel (1819) had a significant influence on Wuthering Height, which, though "regarded as the archetypal Yorkshire novel ... owed as much, if not more, to Walter Scott's Border country". Rob Roy is set "in the wilds of Northumberland, among the uncouth and quarrelsome squirearchical Osbaldistones", while Cathy Earnshaw "has strong similarities with Diana Vernon, who is equally out of place among her boorish relations (Barker p. 501)".

From 1833 Charlotte and Branwell's Angrian tales began to feature Byronic heroes. Such heroes had a strong sexual magnetism and passionate spirit, and demonstrated arrogance and black-heartedness. The Brontës had discovered Byron in an article in Blackwood's Magazine from August 1825. Byron had died the previous year. Byron became synonymous with the prohibited and audacious.

Emily Brontë wrote in the romance tradition of the novel. Walter Scott defined this as "a fictitious narrative in prose or verse; the interest of which turns upon marvellous and uncommon incidents". Scott distinguished the romance from the novel, where (as he saw it) "events are accommodated to the ordinary train of human events and the modern state of society". Scott describes romance as a "kindred term" to novel. However, romances such as Wuthering Heights and Scott's own historical romances and Herman Melville's are often referred to as novels. Other European languages do not distinguish between romance and novel: "a novel is le roman, der Roman, il romanzo, en roman". This sort of romance is different from the genre fiction love romance or romance novel, with its "emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending". Emily Brontë's approach to the novel form was influenced by the gothic novel.

Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764) is usually considered the first gothic novel. Walpole's declared aim was to combine elements of the medieval romance, which he deemed too fanciful, and the modern novel, which he considered to be too confined to strict realism.

More recently Ellen Moers, in Literary Women, developed a feminist theory that connects female writers such as Emily Brontë with gothic fiction. Catherine Earnshaw has been identified by some critics as a type of gothic demon because she " shape-shifts" in order to marry Edgar Linton, assuming a domesticity that is contrary to her true nature. It has also been suggested that Catherine's relationship with Heathcliff conforms to the "dynamics of the Gothic romance, in that the woman falls prey to the more or less demonic instincts of her lover, suffers from the violence of his feelings, and at the end is entangled by his thwarted passion". See also the discussion of the daemonic below, under "Religion".

At one point in the novel Heathcliff is thought a vampire. It has been suggested that both he and Catherine are in fact meant to be seen as vampire-like personalities.

While readers tend to see love as the novel's central concern there are other important themes, including, "The clash of economic interests and social classes"; race; "Childhood and the family"; The patriarchal family; Morality; Religion; "Striving for transcendence"; "Clash of elemental forces".

Some early Victorian reviewers complained about how "Wuthering Heights" dealt with violence and immorality. One called it "a compound of vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors".

Emily Brontë was supposedly unaware of "the limits on polite expression" expected of Victorian novelists. Brontë's characters use vulgar language, "cursing and swearing". And though a daughter of a curate, Brontë showed little respect for religion. The only strongly religious character in Wuthering Heights is Joseph. Joseph is usually seen as satirizing "the joyless version of Methodism that the Brontë children were exposed to through their Aunt Branwell". A major influence on how Brontë depicts amoral characters were the stories her father Patrick Brontë told, about " 'the doings' " of people around Haworth that his parishioners told him, "stories which 'made one shiver and shrink from hearing' (Charlotte's friend Ellen Nussey reported)", which were " 'full of grim humour' " and violence. Stories Emily Brontë took as "'as a truth' ".

Shortly after Emily Brontë's death G.H. Lewes wrote in Leader Magazine:

Curious enough is to read Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and remember that the writers were two retiring, solitary, consumptive girls! Books, coarse even for men, coarse in language and coarse in conception, the coarseness apparently of violence and uncultivated men - turn out to be the productions of two girls living almost alone, filling their loneliness with quiet studies, and writing their books from a sense of duty, hating the pictures they drew, yet drawing them with austere conscientiousness! There is matter here for the moralist or critic to speculate on.

Emily Brontë attended church regularly "and never as far as we know, wrote anything which overtly criticised conventional religion. But she also has the reputation of being a rebel and iconoclast, driven by a spirit more pagan than orthodox Christian". Derek Traversi, for example. sees in Wuthering Heights "a thirst for religious experience,'which is not Christian'. It is this spirit which moves Catherine to exclaim, 'surely you and everybody have a notion that there is, or should be, an existence of yours beyond you. What were the use of my creation if I were entirely contained here?' (Ch. IX)".

Thomas John Winnifrith, author of The Brontes and Their Background: Romance and Reality (Macmillan, 1977), argues that the allusions to heaven and hell are more than metaphors, and have a religious significance, because "for Heathcliff, the loss of Catherine is literally hell ... 'existence after losing her would be hell' (Ch. xiv, p. 117)." Likewise in the final scene between them, Heathcliff, writhes "in the torments of hell (XV)".

The eminent German Lutheran theologian, and philosopher, Rudolph Otto, author of The Idea of the Holy, saw in Wuthering Heights "a supreme example of 'the daemonic' in literature". Otto links the "daemonic" with "a genuine religious experience". Lisa Wang argues that in both Wuthering Heights, and in her poetry, Emily Brontë concentrates on "the non-conceptual, or what Rudolf Otto has called 'the non-rational' aspect of religion ... the primal nature of religious experience over and above its doctrinal formulations". This corresponds with the dictionary meaning: "of or relating to an inner or attendant spirit, esp. as a source of creative inspiration or genius". This meaning was important to the Romantic movement.

However, the word daemon can also mean "a demon or devil", and that is equally relevant to Heathcliff, whom Peter McInerney describes as "a Satanic Don Juan". Heathcliff is also "dark-skinned", "as dark almost as if it came from the devil". Likewise Charlotte Brontë described him "'a man's shape animated by demon life - a Ghoul - an Afreet'". In Arabian mythology an "afreet" is a powerful jinn or demon. However, John Bowen, believes that "this is too simple a view", because the novel presents an alternative explanation of Heathcliff's cruel and sadistic behaviour; that is, that he has suffered terribly: "is an orphan; ... is brutalised by Hindley; ... relegated to the status of a servant; Catherine marries Edgar". See also: the discussion of the demonic in the section on the gothic novel above; the Byronic hero; and the Romantic hero.

One 2007 British poll presented Wuthering Heights as the greatest love story of all time. However, "some of the novel's admirers consider it not a love story at all but an exploration of evil and abuse". Helen Small sees Wuthering Heights as being, both "one of the greatest love stories in the English language", while at the same time a "most brutal revenge narratives". Some critics suggest that reading Wuthering Heights as a love story not only "romanticizes abusive men and toxic relationships but goes against Brontë's clear intent". Moreover while a "passionate, doomed, death-transcending relationship between Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw Linton forms the core of the novel", Wuthering Heights

"I am Heathcliff" is a frequently quoted phrase from the novel, and "the idea of ... perfect unity between the self and the other is age-old", so that Catherine says that she loves Heathcliff "because he's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same" (Chapter IX). Likewise Lord David Cecil suggests that "the deepest attachments are based on characters' similarity or affinity", However Simone De Beauvoir, in her famous feminist work The Second Sex (1949), suggests that when Catherine says "I am Heathcliff": "her own world collapse(s) in contingence, for she really lives in his." (Beauvoir, 1952, p. 725). Beauvoir, sees this as "the fatal mirage of the ideal of romantic love ... transcendence .. in the superior male who is perceived as free".

Despite all the passion between Catherine and Heathcliff, critics have from early on drawn attention to the absence of sex. In 1850 the poet and critic Sydney Dobell suggests that "we dare not doubt [Catherine's] purity", and the Victorian poet Swinburne concurs, referring to their "passionate and ardent chastity". More recently Terry Eagleton suggests their relationship is sexless, "because the two, unknown to themselves, are half-siblings, with an unconscious fear of incest".

Childhood is a central theme of Wuthering Heights. Emily Bronte "understands that 'The Child is 'Father of the Man' (Wordsworth, 'My heart leaps up', 1. 7)". Wordsworth, following philosophers of education, such as Rousseau, explored ideas about the way childhood shaped personality. One outcome of this was the German bildungsroman, or "novel of education", such as Charlotte Bronte's (1847), Eliot's The Mill on the Floss (1860), and Dickens's Great Expectations (1861). Bronte's characters "are heavily influenced by their childhood experiences", though she is less optimistic than her contemporaries that suffering can lead to "change and renewal".

Lockwood arrives at Thrushcross Grang in 1801, a time when, according to Q.D. Leavis, " 'the old rough farming culture, based on a naturally patriarchal family life, was to be challenged, tamed and routed by social and cultural changes' ", At this date the Industrial Revolution was well under way, and was by 1847 a dominant force in much of England, and especially in West Yorkshire. This caused a disruption in "the traditional relationship of social classes" with an expanding upwardly mobile middle-class, which created "a new standard for defining a gentleman", and challenged the traditional criteria of breeding and family and the more recent criterion of character."

Marxist critic Arnold Kettle sees Wuthering Heights "as a symbolic representation of the class system of nineteenth-century England", with its concerns "with property-ownership, the attraction of social comforts", marriage, education, religion, and social status. Driven by a pathological hatred Heathclff uses against his enemies "their own weapons of money and arranged marriages", as well as "the classic methods of the ruling class, expropriation and property deals".

Later, another Marxist Terry Eagleton, in Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Brontës (1975), further explores the power relationships between "the landed gentry and aristocracy, the traditional power-holders, and the capitalist, industrial middle classes". Haworth in the West Riding of Yorkshire was especially affected by changes to society and its class structure "because of the concentration of large estates and industrial centers" there.

Heathcliff is of dark skin-tone, being described in the book as a "dark-skinned gypsy" and "a little Lascar" - a 19th-century term for Indian sailors. Earnshaw calls him "as dark almost as if it came from the devil", and Nelly Dean speculating fancifully regarding his origins thus: "Who knows but your father was Emperor of China, and your mother an Indian queen?" Maja-Lisa von Sneidern states that "Heathcliff's racial otherness cannot be a matter of dispute; Brontë, makes that explicit", further noting that "by 1804 Liverpool merchants were responsible for more than eighty-four percent of the British transatlantic slave trade."

Various critics have explored the various contrast between Thrushcross Grange and the Wuthering Heights farmhouse and their inhabitants (eee "Setting" above). Lord David Cecil argued that "cosmic forces as the central impetus and controlling force in the novel". That there is unifying structure underlying Wuthering Heights: "two spiritual principles: the principle of the storm, ... and the principle of calm", which he further argued were not, "in spite of their apparent opposition", in conflict. Dorothy van Ghent, however, refers to "a tension between two kinds of reality" in the novel, "civilized manners" and "natural energies".

The earliest known film adaptation of Wuthering Heights was filmed in England in 1920 and was directed by A. V. Bramble. It is unknown if any prints still exist. The most famous is 1939's Wuthering Heights, starring Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon and directed by William Wyler. This acclaimed adaptation, like many others, eliminated the second generation's story (young Cathy, Linton and Hareton) and is rather inaccurate as a literary adaptation. It won the 1939 New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Film and was nominated for the 1939 Academy Award for Best Picture.

In 1958, an adaptation aired on CBS television as part of the series DuPont Show of the Month starring Rosemary Harris as Cathy and Richard Burton as Heathcliff. The BBC produced a four-part television dramatisation in 1967 starring Ian McShane and Angela Scoular.

The 1970 film with Timothy Dalton as Heathcliff is the first colour version of the novel. It has gained acceptance over the years although it was initially poorly received. The character of Hindley is portrayed much more sympathetically, and his story-arc is altered. It also subtly suggests that Heathcliff may be Cathy's illegitimate half-brother.

In 1978, the BBC produced a five-part TV serialisation of the book starring Ken Hutchinson, Kay Adshead and John Duttine, with music by Carl Davis; it is considered one of the most faithful adaptations of Emily Brontë's story.

There is also a 1985 French film adaptation, by Jacques Rivette.

The 1992 film Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights starring Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche is notable for including the oft-omitted second generation story of the children of Cathy, Hindley and Heathcliff.

More recent film or TV adaptations include ITV's 2009 two-part drama series starring Tom Hardy, Charlotte Riley, Sarah Lancashire, and Andrew Lincoln, and the 2011 film starring Kaya Scodelario and James Howson and directed by Andrea Arnold.

Adaptations which place the story in a new setting include the 1954 adaptation, retitled Abismos de Pasion, directed by Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel and set in Catholic Mexico, with Heathcliff and Cathy renamed Alejandro and Catalina. In Buñuel's version Heathcliff/Alejandro claims to have become rich by making a deal with Satan. The New York Times reviewed a re-release of this film as "an almost magical example of how an artist of genius can take someone else's classic work and shape it to fit his own temperament without really violating it," noting that the film was thoroughly Spanish and Catholic in its tone while still highly faithful to Brontë. Yoshishige Yoshida's 1988 adaptation also has a transposed setting, this time to medieval Japan. In Yoshida's version, the Heathcliff character, Onimaru, is raised in a nearby community of priests who worship a local fire god. Filipino director Carlos Siguion-Reyna made a film adaptation titled Hihintayin Kita sa Langit (1991). The screenplay was written by Raquel Villavicencio and produced by Armida Siguion-Reyna. It starred Richard Gomez as Gabriel (Heathcliff) and Dawn Zulueta as Carmina (Catherine). It became a Filipino film classic.

In 2003, MTV produced a poorly reviewed version set in a modern California high school.

The 1966 Indian film Dil Diya Dard Liya is based upon this novel. The film is directed by Abdul Rashid Kardar and Dilip Kumar. The film stars Dilip Kumar, Waheeda Rehman, Pran, Rehman, Shyama and Johnny Walker. The music is by Naushad. Although it did not fare as well as other movies of Dilip Kumar, it was well received by critics.

The novel has been popular in opera and theatre, including operas written by Bernard Herrmann, Carlisle Floyd, and Frédéric Chaslin (most cover only the first half of the book) and a musical by Bernard J. Taylor.

Mizumura Minae's A True Novel (Honkaku shosetsu) (2002) is inspired by Wuthering Heights and might be called an adaptation of the story in a post-World War II Japanese setting.

In Jane Urquhart's Changing Heaven, the novel Wuthering Heights, as well as the ghost of Emily Brontë, feature as prominent roles in the narrative.

In her 2019 novel, The West Indian, Valerie Browne Lester imagines an origin story for Heathcliff in 1760s Jamaica.

Canadian author Hilary Scharper's ecogothic novel Perdita (2013) was deeply influenced by Wuthering Heights, namely in terms of the narrative role of powerful, cruel and desolate landscapes.

The poem "Wuthering" (2017) by Tanya Grae uses Wuthering Heights as an allegory.

Maryse Condé's Windward Heights (La migration des coeurs) (1995) is a reworking of Wuthering Heights set in Cuba and Guadeloupe at the turn of the 20th century, which Condé stated she intended as an homage to Brontë.

In 2011, a graphic novel version was published by Classical Comics. It was adapted by Scottish writer Sean Michael Wilson and hand painted by comic book veteran artist John M Burns. This version, which stays close to the original novel, was shortlisted for the Stan Lee Excelsior Awards.

Kate Bush's 1978 song " Wuthering Heights" is most likely the best-known creative work inspired by Brontë's story that is not properly an "adaptation". Bush wrote and released the song when she was 18 and chose it as the lead single in her debut album. It was primarily inspired by the 1939 Olivier-Oberon film, which deeply affected Bush in her teenage years. The song is sung from Catherine's point of view as she pleads at Heathcliff's window to be admitted. It uses quotations from Catherine, both in the chorus ("Let me in! I'm so cold!") and the verses, with Catherine admitting she had "bad dreams in the night". Critic Sheila Whiteley wrote that the ethereal quality of the vocal resonates with Cathy's dementia, and that Bush's high register has both "childlike qualities in its purity of tone" and an "underlying eroticism in its sinuous erotic contours". Singer Pat Benatar covered the song in 1980 on her " Crimes of Passion" album. Brazilian heavy metal band Angra released a version of Bush's song on its debut album Angels Cry, in 1993. A 2018 cover of Bush's "Wuthering Heights" by EURINGER adds electropunk elements.

Wind & Wuthering (1976) by English rock band Genesis alludes to the Brontë novel not only in the album's title but also in the titles of two of its tracks, "Unquiet Slumbers for the Sleepers..." and "...In That Quiet Earth". Both titles refer to the closing lines in the novel.

Songwriter Jim Steinman said that he wrote the 1989 song " It's All Coming Back to Me Now" "while under the influence of Wuthering Heights". He said that the song was "about being enslaved and obsessed by love" and compared it to "Heathcliffe digging up Kathy's corpse and dancing with it in the cold moonlight".

The 2008 song " Cath" by indie rock band Death Cab for Cutie was inspired by Wuthering Heights.

The 1991 song " Cover My Eyes (Pain and Heaven)" by the band Marillion includes the line "Like the girl in the novel in the wind on the moors".

1. ^ Nussbaum, Martha Craven (1996). "Wuthering Heights: The Romantic Ascent". Philosophy and Literature. 20 (2): 20. doi:10.1353/phl.1996.0076. S2CID 170407962 - via Project Muse.

2. Wiltshire, Irene (March 2005). "Speech in Wuthering Heights: Joseph's Dialect and Charlotte's Emendations" (PDF). Brontë Studies. 30: 19-29. doi:10.1179/147489304x18821. S2CID 162093218. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2 December 2013.

3. ^ Mohrt, Michel (1984). Preface. Les Hauts de Hurle-Vent [Wuthering Heights]. By Brontë, Emily (in French). Le Livre de Poche. pp. 7, 20. ISBN 978-2-253-00475-2.

4. ^ Joudrey, Thomas J (2015). "'Well, we must be for ourselves in the long run': Selfishness and Sociality in Wuthering Heights". Nineteenth-Century Literature. 70 (2): 165-93. doi:10.1525/ncl.2015.70.2.165. JSTOR 10.1525/ncl.2015.70.2.165.

5. ^ "Contemporary Reviews of Wuthering Heights". Readers Guide to Wuthering Heights online.

6. "Originally written in German in 1848 by ^ Wilhelm Meinhold, 'Sidonia the Sorceress' was translated into English the following year by Lady Wilde, Oscar Wilde's mother. The painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti was fascinated by the story and introduced William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones to it in the 1850s. Burne-Jones was inspired to paint various scenes from the text including full-length figure studies of Sidonia and her foil Clara in 1860. Both paintings are now in the Tate collection." Kelmscott Press edition of Sidonia the Sorceress, Jane Wilde, 1893.

7. ^ Rossetti, Dante Gabriel (1854). "Full text of "Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti to William Allingham, 1854-1870"".

8. ^ Chitham, Edward (1998). The Genesis of Wuthering Heights: Emily Brontë at Work. London: Macmillan.

9. ^ Macqueen, James (June 1826). "Geography of Central Africa. Denham and Clapperton's Journals". Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. 19:113: 687-709.

10. An excellent analysis of this aspect is offered in Davies, Stevie, ^ Emily Brontë: Heretic. London: The Women's Press, 1994, ISBN 978-0704344013.

11. ^ Gérin, Winifred (1966). "Byron's influence on the Brontës". Keats-Shelley Memorial Bulletin. 17.

12. ^ Beauvais, Jennifer (November 2006). "Domesticity and the Female Demon in Charlotte Dacre's Zofloya and Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights". Romanticism on the Net (44). doi:10.7202/013999ar.

13. ^ Ceron, Cristina (9 March 2010). "Emily and Charlotte Brontë's Re-reading of the Byronic hero". Revue LISA/LISA e-journal, Writers, writings, Literary studies, document 2 (in French). doi:10.4000/lisa.3504 (inactive 17 January 2021).

14. ^ Reed, Toni (30 July 1988). Demon-lovers and Their Victims in British Fiction. University Press of Kentucky. p. 70. ISBN 0813116635 - via Internet Archive. Wuthering Heights vampire.

15. ^ Senf, Carol A (1 February 2013). The Vampire in Nineteenth Century English Literature. University of Wisconsin Pres. ISBN 978-0-299-26383-6 - via Google Books.

16. ^ Lisa Wang, "The Holy Spirit in Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights and Poetry". Literature and Theology, June 2000, Vol. 14, No. 2, p. 162.

17. ^ Peter McInerney, "Satanic conceits in Frankenstein and Wuthering Heights". Nineteenth Century Contexts, 4:1, 1-15, 1980.

18. ^ van Ghent, Dorothy, "The Window Figure and the Two-Children Figure in Wuthering Heights". Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Dec., 1952, Vol. 7, No. 3, pp. 189-197

19. ^ "Wuthering Heights: Part 1: An End to Childhood". 28 October 1967. p. 7 - via BBC Genome.

20. ^ Wolff, Rebecca. "Maryse Condé". BOMB Magazine. Archived from the original on 1 November 2016.

Maynard, John . "The Brontës and religionn", in The Cambridge Companion to the Brontës, edited by Glen, Heather, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. 92-213.

McInerney, Peter (1980), "Satanic conceits in Frankenstein and Wuthering Heights", Nineteenth Century Contexts, 4:1, 1-15

Rahman, Tahmina S., "The Law of the Moors- A legal analysis of Wuthering Heights ". UCL Jurisprudence Review. 2000

Shumani, Gideon (March 1973). "The Unreliable Narrator in Wuthering Heights". Nineteenth-Century Fiction. 27 (4).

Tytler, Graeme, "The Role of Religion in Wuthering Heights". Brontë Studies, 32:1, (2007) pp. 41-5

Wuthering Heights at the British Library

Wuthering Heights is now in the public domain. Texts can be downloaded from or read online at numerous sites. A selection:

Emily Brontë at Library of Congress Authorities, with 230 catalogue records - including 110 records of editions of Wuthering Heights

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Wuthering Heights is an 1847 novel by Emily Brontë, published under the pseudonym Ellis Bell. It concerns two families of the landed gentry living on the West Yorkshire moors, the Earnshaws and the Lintons, and their turbulent relationships with Earnshaw's adopted son, Heathcliff. It was influenced by Romanticism and Gothic fiction.

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Professor John Bowen considers the enigmatic outsider of Wuthering Heights.

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Professor John Bowen explores the nature and origins of Heathcliff, Wuthering Heights' enigmatic outsider.

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Part 1 : Feb 17
Part 2: Feb. 24
All Peer edit March 10
Final due March 15

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Guided Questions

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Home -> Authors -> Emily Brontë -> Works -> Theme and Subject -> Image, Symbol, and Motif]