Wuthering Heights is the only novel by the English author Emily Brontë, initially published in 1847 under her pen name "Ellis Bell". It concerns two extensive upland estates and their landowning families on the West Yorkshire moors, the Earnshaws and the Lintons; and their turbulent relationships with the Earnshaws' foster son, Heathcliff. Driven by themes of romance, possession, revenge, and reconciliation, the novel is influenced by Romanticism and Gothic fiction. It is considered a classic of English literature.
Plot Opening:
In 1801, Mr Lockwood, the new tenant at Thrushcross Grange in Yorkshire, visits his landlord, Heathcliff, at his remote moorland farmhouse, Wuthering Heights. There he meets a reserved young woman (later identified as Cathy Linton), Joseph, an ill-tempered servant, and Hareton, an uneducated young man who speaks like a servant. Everyone is sullen and inhospitable. Snowed in for the night, Lockwood reads diary entries of the former inhabitant of his room, Catherine Earnshaw, and has a nightmare in which a ghostly Catherine begs to enter through the window. Awakened by Lockwood's yells, Heathcliff is distraught.
