Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

Steven Vine (Swansea University)
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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 Earnshaws who have lived there. Ellen Dean is a proud,…

3096 words

Citation: Vine, Steven. "Wuthering Heights". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 30 June 2002 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=8891, accessed 26 April 2024.]

8891 Wuthering Heights 3 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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