Emily Brontë was born on 30 July 1818.Her father was curate of Haworth, Yorkshire and her mother died when she was five years old, leaving five daughters and one son. In 1824 Charlotte, Maria, Elizabeth, and Emily were sent to Cowan Bridge, a school for clergymen’s daughters, where Maria and Elizabeth both caught tuberculosis and died. The children were taught at home from this point on and together they created vivid fantasy worlds which they explored in their writing. Emily initially taught as a governess and later travelled to Belgium with Charlotte in order to undertake further study. In 1846, along with Charlotte and Anne, Emily published Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. After this Emily wrote Wuthering Heights, Anne wrote Agnes Grey and Charlotte wrote The Professor. Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey were both published but Charlotte’s novel was initially rejected although she later published Jane Eyre to great success. Emily died on 19 December 1848.

Synopsis

Wuthering Heights is the tale of two families both joined and riven by love and hate. Cathy is a beautiful and wilful young woman torn between her soft-hearted husband and Heathcliff, the passionate and resentful man who has loved her since childhood. The power of their bond creates a maelstrom of cruelty and violence which will leave one of them dead and cast a shadow over the lives of their children. Emily Brontë’s novel is a stunningly original and shocking exploration of obsessive passion

Reviews

The greatest love story ever told, Heathcliff the hero being a wild, stormy, gothic fellow who will not rest until his beloved Cathy is in his arms again, even though she died some years previously. My favourite moment comes when he bribes the sexton who buried Cathy to bury him next to her, with the sides of their coffins left open, so when they're dug up 50 years hence nobody will know which bones are his, and which are hers - Patrick McGrath

Only Emily Brontë exposes her imagination to the dark spirit - V. S. Pritchett

This brilliantly atmospheric Yorkshire saga has only one drawback - Emily never wrote another novel. For me, it is both fantastic but also true to life because the protagonists have such believably fierce emotions - Kate Mosse

Lambasted when it came out as irredeemably perverse and, I quote, as practically “French”’ - A. L. Kennedy

Hers...is the rarest of all powers. She could free life from its dependence on facts...by speaking of the moor make the wind blow and the thunder roar - Virginia Woolf

It is as if Emily Brontë could tear up all that we know human beings by, and fill these unrecognizable transparencies with such a gust of life that they transcend reality - Virginia Woolf

A dark and passionate tale of tortured but enduring love… Mesmerising - Guardian

When I was 16 I read Wuthering Heights for the first time, and I read it as a kind of oracle; that life is worth nothing if it is not worth everything. Disaster does not matter, intensity does. You can dilute Wuthering Heights, as Mills & Boon and musicals have done. But if you are honest, you cannot escape its central stark premise; all or nothing. The all is not Heathcliff - that is the sentimental version. The all is what Heathcliff represents, which is life itself - Jeanette Winterson

Commonly thought of as 'romantic', but try rereading it without being astonished by the comfortableness with which Brontë's characters subject one another to extremes of physical and psychological violence - Sarah Waters