Wuthering Heights
Emily Brontë (1847)
“The most savage love story in English literature — written by a woman who had never been in love and died having written only this one book.”
Why This Book Matters
Initially denounced as too crude, too violent, and morally purposeless — Charlotte Brontë had to defend it in her preface to the 1850 second edition, calling it the product of a 'rustic and uneducated' imagination rather than owning its deliberate radicalism. Rehabilitated slowly over the nineteenth century, canonized in the twentieth, it is now routinely placed among the ten greatest novels in English. It has never been out of print. It is one of the most filmed, adapted, and referenced works in the language — and one of the most misunderstood, commonly reduced to its romantic surface and missing its structural savage critique of class, property, and the limits of love.
Firsts & Innovations
One of the first English novels to present a protagonist who is simultaneously the hero and a genuine monster — without resolving the contradiction
One of the earliest sustained uses of double frame narration in English fiction — creating narrative unreliability as a structural feature rather than an incidental effect
Possibly the first English novel to embed class critique within Gothic convention — using the machinery of romance to expose property law as violence
Cultural Impact
Kate Bush's 1978 song 'Wuthering Heights' reached #1 in the UK — the first song by a female artist to do so with a self-written composition
Filmed at least six times, including Laurence Olivier (1939), Timothy Dalton (1970), and Andrea Arnold's 2011 version casting Black actors as Heathcliff and young Cathy
Peter Kosminsky's 1992 film and PBS adaptations brought it to multiple generations of students
Heathcliff became cultural shorthand for the dark, brooding, dangerous lover — a template for Byronic heroes from Rochester to Edward Cullen
Ongoing debate about Heathcliff's race — the Liverpool origins, the racial descriptors — has made it a central text in Victorian race studies
Banned & Challenged
Challenged repeatedly for its frank treatment of violence, passion, illegitimate children, and — most frequently — for its perceived moral nihilism: the villain is never clearly punished, the lovers never reconciled in life, virtue (Edgar Linton) dies quietly while vice (Heathcliff) inherits everything. Victorian critics found it offensive; some modern challenges come from schools finding its domestic violence scenes inappropriate for younger readers.