"Wuthering Heights" by Emily Bronte

Essay by dianfigueroa June 2004

download word file, 6 pages 5.0

Perhaps the greatest writer of the three Brontë sisters - Charlotte, Emily and Anne. Emily Brontë published only one novel, WUTHERING HEIGHTS (1847), a story of the doomed love and revenge. The sisters also published jointly a volume of verse, POEMS BY CURRER, ELLIS AND ACTON BELL. Only two copies of the book was sold.

--'Heatcliff had knelt on one knee to embrace her; he attempted to rise, but she seized his hair, and kept him down.

--"I wish I could hold you," she continued bitterly, "till we were both death! I shouldn't care what you suffered. I care nothing for your sufferings. Why shouldn't you suffer? I do! Will you forget me? Will you be happy when I am in the earth? Will you say twenty years hence, 'That's the grave of Catherine Earnshaw. I loved her long ago, and was wretched to lose her; but it is past.

I've loved many others since: my children are dearer to me than she was; and at death, I shall not rejoice that I am going to her: I shall be sorry that I must leave them! Will you say so, Heatcliff?"

--"Don't torture me till I am as mad as yourself," cried he, wrenching his head free, and grinding his teeth."'

(from Wuthering Heights)

Emily Brontë was born in Thornton, Yorkshire, in the north of England. Her father, the Rev. Patrick Brontë, had moved from Ireland to Weatherfield, in Essex, where he taught in Sunday school. Eventually he settled in Yorkshire, the centre of his life's work. In 1812 he married Maria Branwell of Penzance. Patrick Brontë loved poetry, he published several books of prose and verse and wrote to local newspapers. In 1820 he moved to Hawort, a poverty-stricken little town at the edge of a large...