Emily Brontë
1818–1848 · England
“I am Heathcliff! He's always, always in my mind.”
Peak-work percentile in the canon.
The lineage through Emily Brontë
Drew From(3)
who shaped Emily Brontë
via King Lear
- The only secular work Brontë names in the whole novel — Lockwood's threats, he says, "smacked of King Lear," a wink at the play behind the book
- Brontë was reading her father's Shakespeare as she wrote, and Heathcliff's revenge and storm-driven madness run on Lear's engine: a great house wrecked by its own inheritance
- Read the play first and Heathcliff reads less like a Gothic villain and more like Lear's heir — wronged, vengeful, raging at the weather
via Paradise Lost
- Heathcliff descends from the Romantic Satan of Paradise Lost — proud, magnetic, beyond redemption — reaching Brontë through Byron's Manfred
- The Brontës grew up on Milton; critics from Gilbert and Gubar onward read Catherine and Heathcliff against his Satan and Eve
- Catherine's dream of exile from heaven draws on Milton's map of damnation — read him first and the novel's cosmic stakes come into focus
- The whole shape of Wuthering Heights — childhood innocence, a tempter, expulsion, exile — reworks the Eden story of Genesis
- Brontë was steeped in Scripture from girlhood; the novel carries some 110 biblical references and stages its fall in a garden, apples and all
- Reading Genesis first makes the paradise the lovers lose legible as the original one
Portraits
Another scan of the same 1834 group Pillar Portrait at different tone and resolution — a backup of the canonical group image.
Patrick Branwell Brontë, 1834
A young woman in profile, hair pulled back, gaze averted — long held to be Emily Bronte though some scholars now argue it depicts Anne.
Patrick Branwell Bronte, 1833
Famous Quotes
“Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.”
“Nelly, I am Heathcliff! He's always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being.”
“Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same; and Linton's is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire.”
“Be with me always — take any form — drive me mad! Only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you!”
About Emily Brontë
English novelist and poet whose only novel, Wuthering Heights, was initially received with bewilderment for its violence and unconventional structure. Now recognized as one of the greatest novels in English, it depicts the destructive passion between Heathcliff and Catherine on the Yorkshire moors. She died of tuberculosis at 30, a year after its publication.