Wuthering Heights

Emily Brontë wrote her only novel in a stone parsonage at Haworth, a mill village on the edge of the West Yorkshire moors. Her father, Patrick Brontë, was the parish clergyman, so the family home sat between the church and the graveyard. Emily kept house, baked bread, and walked the moors in most weathers. She had tried school and teaching and hated being away, which meant she spent nearly all her adult life in that one place. The landscape she wrote about was the one outside her door.

The book grew out of a family habit. As children, Emily and her sisters and their brother invented long imaginary kingdoms and wrote them down in tiny handmade books. That private writing never really stopped. In 1845 her sister Charlotte found a notebook of Emily's poems, and the three sisters decided to publish together under the pen names Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. They chose names that hid their sex, because they suspected women writers would be judged differently. The poetry book sold two copies. So they turned to novels.

Wuthering Heights appeared in December 1847, credited to Ellis Bell. It is a novel of love, class and long-nursed revenge, told at second hand by narrators who only half understand what they are reporting. The publisher, Thomas Cautley Newby, brought it out in three volumes alongside Anne's Agnes Grey. Reviewers were rattled. Several praised its power and then recoiled from its cruelty, and some assumed the author must be a coarse man. Emily never got to argue back. She caught a chill at her brother's funeral, refused most medical help, and died of tuberculosis in December 1848, aged thirty.

Charlotte reissued the novel in 1850 with a preface explaining who her sister had been, which is how the world learned Ellis Bell was Emily. Its reputation rose slowly and then enormously. The book has been filmed many times, most famously by William Wyler in 1939, and Kate Bush turned it into a hit song in 1978 by singing in Catherine's voice. Haworth is now a place people travel to on purpose.