A House Haunted by the Living

Review of Emily Brontë's "Wuthering Heights" (1847)

Emily Brontë's one-hit knockout Wuthering Heights (1847) has been mislabelled as a tragic romance so often it’s become a kind of inside joke among those who’ve actually read it. This book isn’t about love. It’s about obsession, cruelty, and how the dead never really shut up.

The novel tells the story of Heathcliff, a foundling brought to the Yorkshire moors by Mr. Earnshaw, and his obsessive relationship with the daughter, Catherine Earnshaw. When Catherine chooses to marry the refined Edgar Linton instead of Heathcliff, it sets off a chain reaction of vengeance that spans two generations.

"It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now; so he shall never know how I love him: and that, not because he's handsome, Nelly, but because he's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same; and Linton's is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire.”

This book is for those who enjoy protagonists who are fundamentally unlikeable, narrators who can't be trusted, and love stories that make you grateful for your own romantic disasters. It's perfect for readers who found Jane Eyre too restrained and Pride and Prejudice insufficiently violent.

When it first came out, Victorian readers were shocked by the raw passion, domestic violence, and complete absence of moral guidance. Unlike other novels of the era that punished vice and rewarded virtue, Wuthering Heights seemed to present cruelty and obsession without clear moral judgement.

The fact that it was written by a woman (though initially published under a male pseudonym "Ellis Bell") made it even more scandalous. Critics couldn't believe a lady, especially a clergyman's daughter, could have such intimate knowledge of masculine brutality and passion.

Unfortunately, Emily Brontë died a year after the book's publication, aged only 30. It was her sister Charlotte who, after achieving celebrity with her novel Jane Eyre, edited and reissued the book with a preface defending her sister's genius. Without that effort, the novel might’ve vanished into obscurity—or worse, been remembered only for its “immorality.”

The book now appears on virtually every "greatest novels" list, and has been adapted for film more than a dozen times, with actors like Laurence Olivier, Richard Burton, Timothy Dalton, Ralph Fiennes, and Tom Hardy playing Heathcliff. Kate Bush's 1978 song "Wuthering Heights" turned the novel into a pop culture phenomenon, with its haunting refrain "Heathcliff, it's me, Cathy, I've come home."

Where Brontë howls

The novel’s power lies in the shifting ground of its narration, across both space and time.

In space, the story ping-pongs between two houses: Wuthering Heights, where the Earnshaws live in Gothic squalor, and Thrushcross Grange, the comparatively civilised home of the Lintons. But these aren’t just backgrounds; they’re psychological fortresses built to mirror the characters living in them. The Heights is isolated, stormy and snarling, while the Grange's sunny exterior never seems to drive away the darkness consuming them from inside.

In time, the narrative unfolds primarily through two narrators, both about as reliable as a broken weathervane in a hurricane, creating a Russian nesting doll of storytelling that's as convoluted as the characters' family trees.

The first is Lockwood, the outsider, a pompous city dweller who thinks himself observant but misses absolutely everything. Then comes Nelly, the housekeeper who claims moral neutrality but can’t help editorialising every event with the gleeful flair of a gossip columnist. She’s everywhere and nowhere. She nurtures grudges, inserts herself into quarrels, and half the time you wonder whether she’s recounting events as they happened or as she wanted them to happen.

Brontë thrives on these narrative contradictions. You’re never certain what’s real. Memory, bias, class resentment, self-justification—they cloud every scene. The reader becomes a third narrator, forced to assemble a truth out of fragmented, self-serving stories, amidst the howling atmosphere of the Yorkshire moors.

Which is the other enduring aspect of Brontë's genius. Unusual for Victorian fiction, Wuthering Heights never leaves the Yorkshire moors, generating a peculiar form of claustrophobia. No city salons, no train stations, no London fog. Just an insular, self-consuming ecosystem of the characters' obsessions. It’s a locked room mystery where the lock is emotional dysfunction. There's something almost masochistic about continuing to read as these people systematically destroy themselves and everyone around them.

“The thing that irks me most is this shattered prison, after all. I’m tired of being enclosed here. I’m wearying to escape into that glorious world, and to be always there: not seeing it dimly through tears, and yearning for it through the walls of an aching heart: but really with it, and in it.”

These narrative and atmospheric choices may have arisen from Brontë's own mobility constraints – she never travelled farther than 50 miles from home, unlike other globe-trotting Victorian authors. As a young woman, her only exposure to the world were the few books in her father's library, each dealing with different times in history, and none contemporary.

So, she had to draw an entire cosmology from a few square miles of Yorkshire and a few short years she had spent there. Well, it's a testament to her achievement that those same Yorkshire moors have now become a pilgrimage site for thousands of literary tourists every year, all wanting to walk the same paths that inspired the novel's wild landscapes. Local businesses have capitalised on the connection—you can stay at Wuthering Heights-themed bed and breakfasts and take guided tours of "Heathcliff's moors."

“Heathcliff, make the world stop right here. Make everything stop and stand still and never move again. Make the moors never change and you and I never change.”

Even in character names, Brontë retains the disorientating effect of the moors. Catherine Earnshaw. Catherine Linton. Linton Heathcliff. Hareton Earnshaw. The names repeat on purpose, turning the characters into echo chambers.

Even beyond the structure, Brontë’s writing is soaked in wildness. Her prose shrieks and whispers in the same breath. One moment you're in the thick of ghost stories and the next you're in a deeply uncomfortable domestic scene.

“You teach me now how cruel you've been - cruel and false. Why did you despise me? Why did you betray your own heart, Cathy? I have not one word of comfort. You deserve this. You have killed yourself. Yes, you may kiss me, and cry; and wring out my kisses and tears: they'll blight you - they'll damn you. You loved me - what right had you to leave me? What right - answer me - for the poor fancy you felt for Linton? Because misery, and degradation, and death, and nothing that God or Satan could inflict would have parted us, you, of your own will did it. I have not broken your heart - you have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine. So much the worse for me that I am strong. Do I want to live? What kind of living will it be when you - Oh, God! would you like to live with your soul in the grave?”

Brontë understands how love can curdle into hatred, how class resentment can poison a soul, and how abuse creates more abuse in an endless cycle.

“I'd be glad of a retaliation that wouldn't recoil on myself; but treachery and violence are spears pointed at both ends: they wound those who resort to them, worse than their enemies.”

Even when Brontë is being melodramatic, she’s doing it with such bloody conviction that you buy in. You don’t want moderation from a book like this. You want it to drag you by the collar.

“My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I'm well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Healthcliff! He's always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being.”

Where you might get lost in the moors

The novel's biggest weakness is also its most audacious choice: almost every character is thoroughly detestable. While this serves Brontë's themes, it makes for an exhausting reading experience. You're desperately hoping something good eventually happens, but it doesn't. You're just watching people destroy each other with varying degrees of creativity.

“I wish you had sincerity enough to tell me whether Catherine would suffer greatly from his loss: the fear that she would restrains me. And there you see the distinction between our feelings: had he been in my place and I in his, though I hated him with a hatred that turned my life to gall, I never would have raised a hand against him. You may look incredulous, if you please! I never would have banished him from her society as long as she desired his. The moment her regard ceased, I could have torn his heart out, and drunk his blood! But, till then - if you don't believe me, you don't know me - till then, I would have died by inches before I touched a single hair of his head!”

The narrative structure, while innovative, sometimes feels unnecessarily convoluted. Having Nelly Dean relate conversations she couldn't possibly have heard verbatim strains credibility. The timeline jumps around like a caffeinated grasshopper, and keeping track of the second generation's relationships requires a flowchart.

The second half drags like a muddy hemline. Once the central fire burns out, the plot limps forward on bitter leftovers and children who feel like diluted copies of their parents. The revenge arc overstays its welcome. Some of Heathcliff's later actions cross the line from vengeful antihero into cartoonish evil villain, making him less compelling as a character and more like a Gothic boogeyman.

“Your presence is a moral poison that would contaminate the most virtuous.”

Yet, these flaws hardly diminish the novel's power. They're part of its wild, untamed character. Like the Yorkshire moors themselves, Wuthering Heights is beautiful and terrible, nurturing and destructive.

The Verdict: It doesn't care for one.

Wuthering Heights doesn’t care what you think of it. It doesn’t want your sympathy, and it certainly doesn’t want your interpretation. It wants to haunt you. And it does. It rewards your discomfort. And it leaves claw marks on the inside of your skull.

There’s no grand redemption. No growing, no healing, no apologies. The characters twist themselves around pain like ivy around a rusted gate. And yet, you can’t look away. You might even find yourself rooting for the wrong people. That’s Brontë’s trick: she makes you complicit.

Wuthering Heights endures because it’s singular. There's nothing else quite like it. Its badness is part of its charm. But it succeeds because it's uncompromisingly honest about human nature's capacity for both passion and cruelty.

To read Wuthering Heights is to open an old wound just to see what bleeds. It’s not kind, or fair, or particularly coherent. But it’s electric. It’s pure. It’s art that doesn’t care about marketability.

Read Next:

There’s no perfect comparison for Wuthering Heights. It’s too singular, too cracked. But if you need to shelve it next to something, you might try Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein—another book written by a very young woman who was deeply suspicious of men, nature, and the supposed moral order of the world.

Or, try Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, which offers the same Gothic atmosphere and obsessive relationships, but with more psychological subtlety and a narrator you can actually sympathise with.

In contemporary fiction, The Secret History by Donna Tartt delivers the class tensions and moral corruption you crave, following a group of classics students whose pursuit of beauty leads to murder.

In non-fiction, The Madwoman in the Attic by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar will help you decode the feminist rage burning beneath Victorian literature's surface. This groundbreaking work of literary criticism explores how women writers like the Brontës smuggled subversive messages past their era's moral guardians.

And A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit examines the psychology of obsession and the landscapes that shape our inner lives, much like those Yorkshire moors shaped Catherine and Heathcliff's twisted devotion.