The Place of Wuthering Heights in English Literature

Abstract

Wuthering Heights is an extraordinary novel, the individual creation of a writer working in comparative isolation. Emily Brontë read widely, and despite her lack of continuing formal education, she was familiar with classical texts, French and German. However, she was emphatically outside the literary world of early Victorian times: she took no notice of its preferences and opinions, nor did she observe the developing conventions of the novel form. So, although we can trace many influences on Wuthering Heights, they are widely spaced in time and drawn together idiosyncratically in this one work.