A turbulent tale of two families - the Earnshaws and Lintons - over two generations, Wuthering Heights (1847) is Emily Brontë’s only surviving novel. It is narrated retrospectively as the diary of the book’s polite middle-class narrator, Mr Lockwood, who has rented a house in Yorkshire in order to be “completely removed from the stir of society”. In contemporary terms, Lockwood is a metropolitan tourist on a typical Romantic quest for the natural and the picturesque. The house he rents is “Thrushcross Grange”; his landlord is Mr Heathcliff, who lives at “Wuthering Heights”, and he has a housekeeper, Ellen Dean, who narrates Heathcliff’s story to him, as well as the history of the two houses and the tale of the Lintons and Earnshaw

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Published 30 June 2002

Citation: Vine, Steven. "Wuthering Heights". The Literary Encyclopedia. 30 June 2002.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=8891, accessed 9 February 2010.]