Wuthering Heights in the context of "Jane Eyre"

Play Trivia Questions online!

or

Skip to study material about Wuthering Heights in the context of "Jane Eyre"

Ad spacer

⭐ Core Definition: Wuthering Heights

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 landowning families living on the West Yorkshire moors, the Earnshaws and the Lintons, and their turbulent relationships with the Earnshaws' ethnically uncertain foster son, Heathcliff. Driven by themes of love, possession and revenge, the novel, influenced by Romanticism and Gothic fiction, is considered a classic of English literature.

Wuthering Heights was accepted by publisher Thomas Newby along with Anne Brontë's Agnes Grey before the success of their sister Charlotte Brontë's novel Jane Eyre, but they were published later. The first American edition was published in April 1848 by Harper & Brothers of New York. After Emily's death, Charlotte edited a second edition of Wuthering Heights, which was published in 1850.

↓ Menu

>>>PUT SHARE BUTTONS HERE<<<
In this Dossier

Wuthering Heights in the context of Yorkshire dialect

Yorkshire dialect, also known as Yorkshire English, Broad Yorkshire, Tyke, or Yorkie, is a grouping of several regionally neighbouring dialects of English spoken in Yorkshire. Yorkshire experienced drastic dialect levelling in the 20th century, eroding many traditional features, though variation and even innovations persist, at both the regional and sub-regional levels. Organisations such as the Yorkshire Dialect Society and the East Riding Dialect Society exist to promote the survival of the more traditional features.

The dialects have been represented in classic works of literature such as Wuthering Heights, Nicholas Nickleby and The Secret Garden, and linguists have documented variations of the dialects since the 19th century. In the mid-20th century, the Survey of English Dialects collected dozens of recordings of authentic Yorkshire dialects.

↑ Return to Menu

Wuthering Heights in the context of Romance (literary fiction)

Romance is "a fictitious narrative in prose or verse; the interest of which turns upon marvellous and uncommon incidents", a narrative method that contrasts with the modern, main tradition of the novel, which realistically depicts life. Walter Scott describes romance as a "kindred term" to the novel, and many European languages do not distinguish between them (e.g., "le roman, der Roman, il romanzo" in French, German, and Italian, respectively).

There is a second type of romance: love romances in genre fiction, where the primary focus is on love and marriage. The term "romance" is now mainly used to refer to this type, and for other fiction it is "now chiefly archaic and historical" (OED). Works of fiction such as Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre combine elements from both types.

↑ Return to Menu

Wuthering Heights in the context of Emily Brontë

Emily Jane Brontë (/ˈbrɒnti/, commonly /-t/; 30 July 1818 – 19 December 1848) was an English writer best known for her 1847 novel Wuthering Heights. She also co-authored a book of poetry with her sisters Charlotte and Anne entitled Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell.

Emily was the fifth of six Brontë siblings, four of whom survived into adulthood. Her mother died when she was three, leaving the children in the care of their aunt, Elizabeth Branwell. Apart from brief intervals at school, Emily was mostly taught at home by her father, Patrick Brontë, who was the curate of Haworth. She was very close to her siblings, especially her younger sister Anne, and together they wrote little books and journals depicting imaginary worlds. She was described by her sister Charlotte as solitary, strong-willed and nonconforming, with a keen love of nature and animals.

↑ Return to Menu

Wuthering Heights in the context of Anne Brontë

Anne Brontë (/ˈbrɒnti/, commonly /-t/; 17 January 1820 – 28 May 1849) was an English novelist and poet. She was the youngest member of the Brontë literary family.

Anne was the daughter of Maria (née Branwell) and Patrick Brontë, a poor Irish clergyman in the Church of England. Anne lived most of her life with her family at the parsonage in Haworth on the Yorkshire Dales, where her father served as perpetual curate. She attended a boarding school in Mirfield between 1836 and 1837, and between 1839 and 1845 she worked as a governess with a number of families. In 1846, she published a book of poems with her sisters, under the pen name Acton Bell. Her first novel, Agnes Grey, was published in 1847 as one of a three-volume set which included Wuthering Heights by her sister Emily Brontë. Anne's second novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, was published in 1848, and is considered by many to be one of the first feminist novels.

↑ Return to Menu

Wuthering Heights in the context of Ten Novels and Their Authors

Ten Novels and Their Authors (originally published as Great Novelists and Their Novels) is a 1948 work of literary criticism by William Somerset Maugham. Maugham collects together what he considers to have been the ten greatest novels and writes about the books and the authors. The ten novels are:

  1. The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling by Henry Fielding (1749)
  2. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (1813)
  3. The Red and the Black by Stendhal (1830)
  4. Le Père Goriot by Honoré de Balzac (1835)
  5. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (1849)
  6. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (1856)
  7. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1851)
  8. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1847)
  9. The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky (1880)
  10. War and Peace by Tolstoy (1869)

This book was originally a series of magazine articles commissioned by Redbook.

↑ Return to Menu

Wuthering Heights in the context of Brontë family

The Brontës (/ˈbrɒntiz/) were a 19th-century literary family, born in the village of Thornton and later associated with the village of Haworth in the West Riding of Yorkshire, England. Born to Patrick Brontë, a curate, and his wife, Maria, the sisters, Charlotte (1816–1855), Emily (1818–1848) and Anne (1820–1849), were all poets and novelists who published their work under male pseudonyms: Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell respectively. Their stories attracted attention for their passion and originality immediately following their publication. Charlotte's Jane Eyre was the first to know success, while Emily's Wuthering Heights, Anne's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and other works were accepted as masterpieces of literature after their deaths.

The two eldest Brontë children were Maria (1814–1825) and Elizabeth (1815–1825), who both died at an early age. The three surviving sisters and their brother, Branwell (1817–1848) were very close. As children, they developed their imaginations first through oral storytelling and play, set in an intricate imaginary world, and then through the collaborative writing of increasingly complex stories set in their fictional world. The early deaths of their mother and two older sisters marked them and influenced their writing profoundly, as did their isolated upbringing. They were raised in a religious family. The Brontë birthplace in Thornton is a place of pilgrimage and their later home, the parsonage at Haworth in Yorkshire, now the Brontë Parsonage Museum, has hundreds of thousands of visitors each year.

↑ Return to Menu

Wuthering Heights in the context of Romance (prose fiction)

Romance is "a fictitious narrative in prose or verse; the interest of which turns upon marvellous and uncommon incidents", a narrative method that was contrasted to the new, main tradition of the 18th and 19th centuries: the novel, which realistically depicts life. Walter Scott described romance as a "kindred term" to novel, and many European languages do not distinguish between them (e.g., "le roman, der Roman, il romanzo" in French, German, and Italian, respectively).

There is a second type of romance: love romances in genre fiction, where the primary focus is on love and marriage. The term "romance" is now mainly used to refer to this type, and for other fiction it is "now chiefly archaic and historical" (OED). Works of fiction such as Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre combine elements from both types.

↑ Return to Menu

Wuthering Heights in the context of Heathcliff (Wuthering Heights)

Heathcliff is a fictional character in Emily Brontë's 1847 novel Wuthering Heights. Owing to the novel's enduring fame and popularity, he is often regarded as an archetype of the tortured antihero whose all-consuming rage, jealousy and anger destroy both him and those around him; in short, the Byronic hero.

He is better known for being a romantic hero due to his youthful love for Catherine Earnshaw, than for his final years of vengeance in the second half of the novel, during which he grows into a bitter, haunted man, and for a number of incidents in his early life that suggest that he was an upset and sometimes malicious individual from the beginning. His complicated, mesmerizing, absorbing, and altogether bizarre nature makes him a rare character, incorporating elements of both the hero and villain. Actors who have portrayed Heathcliff on screen include Laurence Olivier, Richard Burton, Timothy Dalton, Ralph Fiennes, Tom Hardy, and Jacob Elordi.

↑ Return to Menu