Wuthering Heights
Wuthering Heights
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Summaries & Analyses
Author Insights
NEWQuizzes
NEWReading Tools
Emily Brontë on Wuthering Heights
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
Two decades of Gondal, one real moorThe raw material of Wuthering Heights was not borrowed from books or from observation of other people’s households. It came from an imaginary world Emily had been building with her sister Anne since childhood, one with its own geography, royalty, and civil wars. When scholar Juliette Barker traced the line from that private fiction to the published novel, the continuity was almost total.
The characters, Moorland setting, casual violence, passionate and self-destructive love and vengeful theme are all typical of Gondal. As is the complete absence of any moral tone or purpose, a quality almost unique in Victorian fiction.
That last clause is the one that mattered to Victorian readers, and still matters. The absence of moral adjudication was not an oversight Emily failed to correct before publication. It was the atmosphere she had been cultivating for nearly twenty years.
Gondal, the fictional island nation Emily and Anne created together, was originally set in tropical climates. When Emily converted those stories into her only novel, she made one deliberate substitution: she replaced the invented geography with terrain she had known since she was a toddler.
Gondal was used as the basis for the only novel that she ever published, Wuthering Heights. But whereas the imaginary world was set in tropical climates, she set this in a landscape that she knew very well, the wild moors that lay at the back of the home that she lived in since she was a toddler. [paraphrased from audio]
The path from private writing to publication was not Emily’s choice alone. Charlotte discovered a notebook of her sister’s poems in September 1845, without permission, and pressed her to publish. Emily agreed eventually, but set a condition: all three sisters would appear together under pseudonyms that preserved each one’s initials. Emily became Ellis Bell. The poetry collection they paid for themselves sold two copies. They were already writing novels.
And if I pray, the only prayer / That moves my lips for me / Is, ‘Leave the heart that now I bear / And give me liberty!’
This poem, ‘The Old Stoic,’ predates Wuthering Heights and was written for no audience Emily expected to have. It is the voice she was keeping private when Charlotte opened the notebook, and the voice that Charlotte’s intervention eventually forced into print.
How she wrote it
Revisions Charlotte later tried to eraseThe popular image of Wuthering Heights is of a book that arrived whole, written by a visionary who needed no second thoughts. Deborah Lutz, a Penn State professor who spent years with Emily’s previously inaccessible notebooks and manuscripts for her 2026 biography This Dark Night, found the opposite.
I was surprised at how much she revised Wuthering Heights, since it’s easy to imagine it coming from her fully formed. But it went through distinct versions, and she really labored over it. But also how quickly she wrote it! She finished it in about two years.
Emily’s commitment to writing Yorkshire speech as it was actually spoken was precise enough to create problems for readers outside the region. Joseph’s dialogue in particular carried a full phonetic rendering of the accent. After Emily died, Charlotte edited the novel for its 1850 second edition, and that fidelity was one of the first things she softened.
Emily wrote out the Yorkshire accent so precisely in her work that when Charlotte later edited another edition of it, she felt the need to tone it down so that non-northerners would have an easier time understanding it. [paraphrased from audio]
The editing Charlotte did went further than dialect. Lutz, working from the manuscripts, concluded that Charlotte’s changes to the published text amounted to a suppression of her sister’s actual literary character. Charlotte had described Emily in the 1850 biographical notice as uneducated and instinctive, and the editorial work matched that framing: flatten the eccentricities, smooth the roughness, make the book easier to accept.
Charlotte had always been ashamed of the novel, finding it coarse, violent and immature. She made it more conventional by stringing together short paragraphs and smoothing out the local speech. This seemed like a real betrayal of her sister, given that Emily had her own eccentric voice and Charlotte tried to tame it.
Readers today who encounter the standard text are therefore reading a version that has already been edited once for palatability, by a sister who both loved Emily and was embarrassed by what she had written.
Even in the years before the novel was written, Emily had developed a habit of protecting her best hours. When she worked briefly as a teacher giving piano lessons, she arranged her schedule around her writing rather than her students.
Really taking her work seriously, and even when she was in a professional setting, was putting her art first. [paraphrased from audio]
The personal thread
Branwell’s ruin, written from the next roomBy the time Emily was drafting Wuthering Heights, her brother Branwell had returned to the parsonage after losing his position as a tutor. He was drinking heavily, using opium, and deteriorating fast enough that his father moved him into his own bedroom to keep watch at night. One evening Branwell set fire to his own bedclothes. Anne and Emily pulled him out. Biographers reading Hindley Earnshaw’s arc in the novel, the dissolution of a once-favored son into alcohol and self-destruction, have traced it directly to what Emily was watching at close range.
Branwell’s tragic descent into alcoholism following a disastrous affair with a married woman is thought to have been the inspiration for Hindley Earnshaw’s decline in the novel.
Emily’s homesickness when removed from Haworth was severe enough at seventeen, at Roe Head school, to present as physical illness. At twenty-three, in Brussels, it happened again. These were not mild bouts of nostalgia. The moors were where she could function. When Catherine Earnshaw says in the novel, ‘I wish I were a girl again, half savage and hardy, and free,’ the longing is so specific that it reads as something Emily had already felt and named for herself before she gave it to a character.
Emily is believed to have channeled her own longing for freedom and the moorland into the character of Catherine Earnshaw, who famously yearns for the wildness of the moors.
The personal detail that makes this plausible is not just the geography but the physical cost. Emily could not stay away from Haworth without becoming ill. That is not the relationship of a writer borrowing a setting. That is someone writing from inside the only place she could breathe.
On what the book is wrestling with
No verdict, no comfort, no apologyWhen Wuthering Heights was published in December 1847, reviewers did not simply dislike it. They were disoriented by it. The Athenaeum called it ‘a disagreeable story’ on Christmas Day. The Northern British Review predicted it would never be generally read. Emily received no payment for the novel. She died the following December, having had nearly a year to absorb what critics thought of the book she had spent two years writing.
Emily, who received no payment for it, has had the last laugh over men like Lorimer. [paraphrased from audio]
What confused the novel’s first readers is the same quality that Barker identified in Gondal: the refusal to adjudicate. Victorian fiction was expected to teach. Wuthering Heights does not. Clare O’Callaghan, professor of Victorian literature at Loughborough University, locates the novel’s difficulty precisely there.
People did not know what to do with this book, because it has no clear moral angle.
Heathcliff, the novel’s central figure, is introduced as an orphan Mr. Earnshaw brings home from Liverpool and described in terms the novel never resolves. He is cruel, obsessive, and capable of sustained revenge across two generations. He is also the character through whom the book does most of its emotional work. The novel’s refusal to separate those two facts is what makes him impossible to file away neatly.
Heathcliff occupies a peculiar position in the novel—he is both the hero and the villain, and his complex character is central to the novel’s exploration of themes such as social class, love, and revenge.
The novel’s two narrative frames, Nelly Dean’s domestic account and Lockwood’s outsider record, both circle Heathcliff without settling on him. Emily built the architecture of the book around his unresolvability.
What she wants us to sit with
The damage that almost, almost endsThe novel spans roughly thirty years and two generations of the same families. The first generation’s story is one of obsession, dispossession, and revenge that costs nearly everyone something permanent. The second generation, Hareton Earnshaw and young Catherine Linton, inherits all of that damage and has to decide what to do with it. Emily built in this possibility without making it easy.
The novel ends on an ambiguous note. Heathcliff dies, haunted by visions of Catherine, and his spirit is said to walk the moors with hers. The Earnshaw property is set to pass to Hareton, and it is implied that he and young Catherine will marry. The ending suggests a cyclical pattern, as well as the possibility of breaking free from the destructive patterns of the past.
What Emily left readers with is not resolution but provocation: a book that declines to tell you who to root for, refuses to punish the right people on schedule, and ends with ghosts still walking. The double narrative structure, Nelly Dean telling the story to Lockwood, who then records it, keeps the reader at a measured distance from events that are anything but measured. That distance is deliberate.
The narrative structure of Wuthering Heights is one of its most distinctive features. Brontë uses a frame narrative, which creates a sense of distance and allows readers to piece together the story from multiple perspectives.
Emily gave readers no stable narrator to trust and no authoritative voice to follow. Every account in the novel passes through someone with an interest in how it comes out. The formal choice and the moral choice are the same choice: you have to sit with the difficulty, because she refused to resolve it for you.