Wuthering Heights

Emily Brontë's "Wuthering Heights" is one of the strangest, most ferocious, and most unforgettable novels in the English language. It is frequently shelved alongside its sister novel "Jane Eyre" as a romance, but that label is wildly misleading. This is not a love story — or if it is, it is a love story in the way that a wildfire is a campfire. The passion between Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw is not tender or uplifting; it is obsessive, destructive, and terrifying in its intensity, a force that devours everyone it touches across two generations.

The novel's structure is as wild as its content. The story is narrated primarily by Nelly Dean, the housekeeper, to Mr. Lockwood, a bemused tenant, and it spirals backward and forward through time as it traces how Heathcliff — a foundling brought to Wuthering Heights as a child — is raised alongside Catherine, falls into an all-consuming bond with her, is driven away by humiliation, returns transformed into a gentleman of mysterious wealth, and proceeds to systematically destroy the two families who wronged him.

Brontë wrote this novel at the age of twenty-nine, having spent nearly her entire life on the Yorkshire moors. She died a year after its publication and never knew it would become one of the most celebrated works of fiction in history. The novel bewildered its first readers, who found it savage and morally repugnant. They were right that it is savage — but that is precisely its genius. Brontë refused to domesticate passion, to tidy it into something comfortable. She put the full, ungovernable force of human desire on the page and dared the reader to look at it.

"Wuthering Heights" belongs on this list because no other novel in the English language captures the raw, destructive power of obsessive love with such unflinching honesty. Brontë was not interested in the polite courtship rituals of Austen or even the moral conflicts of her sister Charlotte. She went straight to the primal heart of human passion — the place where love and hate are indistinguishable, where desire is indistinguishable from destruction — and she wrote it with a fearlessness that still shocks readers almost two centuries later.

The novel also represents a remarkable literary achievement on purely formal grounds. Its nested narrative structure — a story within a story within a story — was avant-garde for 1847, and its refusal to provide a reliable moral perspective forces the reader to make their own judgments about characters who resist easy categorization. Heathcliff is one of literature's most complex creations: simultaneously a victim of class cruelty, a tragic romantic, and a genuine monster.

Beyond its literary merits, "Wuthering Heights" expanded what the English novel was capable of. It brought the wild, the mythic, and the supernatural into a form that had been largely concerned with social realism, proving that the novel could channel the same elemental forces as poetry and tragedy. Emily Brontë wrote one novel. It was enough.

"Wuthering Heights" was published in 1847 under the pseudonym Ellis Bell and received mixed reviews — many critics found it powerful but morally disturbing. Emily Brontë died of tuberculosis in 1848, never knowing the novel's future fame. It is now universally recognized as one of the greatest novels in the English language and appears on virtually every major list of essential literature. The novel has been adapted into dozens of films, including William Wyler's classic 1939 version starring Laurence Olivier, and a notable 2011 adaptation by Andrea Arnold. Kate Bush's 1978 debut single "Wuthering Heights" — written when she was just eighteen — became a number-one hit in the UK and introduced the novel to a new generation. The Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth, Yorkshire attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors annually. The novel fundamentally influenced the Gothic tradition and the literary exploration of the irrational, paving the way for everyone from the Surrealists to modern dark romance.