Emily Bronte’s Gothic novel, Wuthering Heights, shocked readers when it was published in 1847. The violence and brutal revenge plot continue to shock readers.  Emily wrote under the male pseudonym, Ellis Currer, which theoretically facilitated publication and sales, but did not shield her from critics’ and readers’ outrage.

Some Victorian critics esteemed Wuthering Heights, others hated it.  I think of Bronte as a predecessor of D. H. Lawrence, whose wild, sometimes violent novel, Women in Love, was banned in 1920. (Gudrun’s violence is as great or greater than Heathcliff’s.) Emily’s most ardent admirer in the 19^th century was the novelist Mrs. Humphrey Ward, who claimed that Emily was a better writer than Charlotte. 

Emily might have been shocked, however, to learn that, though her work was embraced in the twentieth century, some (mostly male) critics believed that she had not written her own novel.  In other words, it was too brilliant and too disturbing to be the conception of a rector’s spinster daughter. Some critics believed that Charlotte had written it; others believed that their brother, Branwell, an alcoholic and drug user, was the author. These speculations were debunked before my time, but I recently reread the 1942 Heritage Press edition of Wuthering Heights, and in the introductory essay, “How This Book Came to Be,” .John T. Winterich considers these issues seriously.

What would Emily Bronte have thought?  I picture her walking on the moors, growling, “I’m done with publishing.”  Winterich favors the theory that Branwell may not have written the novel but probably contributed to it. There is no evidence that Branwell wrote any of it, aside from the gossip of three of Branwell’s friends, who claimed he did.  The boys’ club tried to appropriate the best for its own -perhaps while drinking. 

As a common reader, I’m a great fan of Wuthering Heights. It can be read on many levels:  as a romance about twin souls; as a prototype of monstrous, unhappy, destructive love; or as a classic of obsessive love and narcissism which shatters not only the lovers, Catherine and Heathcliff, but the lives of their respective spouses and children.

Structured as a double frame story, it is narrated by Mr. Lockwood, Heathcliff’s tenant at the Grange, who repeats the story of Wuthering Heights, as told by Nelly, his housekeeper and the former housekeeper at Wuthering Heights. 

The tragedy begins with the intrusion of a stranger.  On a dark, stormy night,  Mr. Earnshaw, the father of Catherine and Hindley, returns from London with a dark, dirty orphan boy under his coat, instead of the gifts for his children.  Jealous Hindley hates Heathcliff on sight, but Catherine and Heathcliff become as close as brother and sister, and then even best friends, and roam the moors wildly. They fall in love in adolescence, but after Mr. Earhshaw dies,.Hindley banishes Heathcliff to the stables. Catherine decides to marry a neigbor, gentle, rich Edgar Linton, whom I viewed contemptuously as “a milksop” on my first reading long ago.

Why, why, why would she marry Linton when she was in love with Heathcliff?  At a book club, the Why’s and Why Not’s among us were equally divided.  The Why’s were romantic and blamed Catherine for deserting Heathcliff; the Why Not’s were practical and thought Catherine should have a comfortable life. I can see it both ways though I blame Catherine’s selfishness for Heathcliff’s transformation. They were twin souls: they should have stayed together!

Catherine is not untroubled about the love question, and, unaware that Heathcliff is in the next room, she explains her qualms to Nelly:  “If I were in heaven, I should be intensely miserable.”

And she continues:

I was only going to say that heaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth and the angels were so angry that they flung me into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights, where I woke sobbing for joy.  That will do to explain my secret, as well as the other.  I’ve no more business to marry Edgar Linton than I have to be in heaven; and if the wicked man in there had not brought Heathcliff so low, I shouldn’t have thought of it.  It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now; so he shall never know how I love him.

This is my favorite speech in literature, and I shall leave you to ponder it and read or reread Wuthering Heights, one of the most beautifully-written novels of the 19th century.