Wurthering Heights

Wuthering Heights is a novel by Emily Brontë published in 1847 under her pseudonym "Ellis Bell". It is her only finished novel. Wuthering Heights and Anne Brontë's Agnes Grey were accepted by publisher Thomas Newby before the success of her sister Charlotte's novel Jane Eyre.At the time of its publication, Wuthering Heights was controversial because of its unusually stark depiction of mental and physical cruelty. It also challenged Victorian ideas about religion, morality, class, and a woman's place in society.In 1801, Lockwood, the new tenant at Thrushcross Grange in Yorkshire, England, pays a visit to his landlord, Heathcliff, at his remote moorland farmhouse, Wuthering Heights. There he meets a reserved young woman, Cathy Linton; Joseph, a cantankerous servant; and Hareton, an uneducated young man. While the sullen and inhospitable group is snowed in for the night, Heathcliff reads some diary entries of a former inhabitant of his room, Catherine Earnshaw, and has a nightmare in which a ghostly Catherine begs to enter through the window. Woken by Lockwood, Heathcliff is troubled.Lockwood fall ill from his walk in the snow and becomes bedridden after he returns to Thrushcross Grange. As he recovers, Lockwood's housekeeper Ellen (Nelly) Dean tells him the story of the former occupants, a very strange family.