Emily Brontë

Emily Brontë’s novel is a master study in character. Heathcliff is the force that looms large over the wild and desolate Yorkshire moors and the dark house where he receives sanctuary as a foundling before events drive him on a lunatic trajectory of hate and revenge.

Illustration from Folio edition

He thunders through the book and is as much a part of the setting as the stormy moors, expertly brought from the page by the author (who is, as her sister Charlotte tells us in the introduction, ‘herself a nursling of the moor’).

Emily also demonstrates her keen observance of the people of the moors in the rendering of the servants: Nelly, the housekeeper, narrates the majority of the story via Lockwood (a tenant) in this part-framed, part-epistolary structure, chiming in with her own thoughts and interferences as the events unfold, in the classic role of unreliable narrator; Joseph, an elderly servant also fails to hold his tongue, lashing the children with scripture lessons (a reference to the Bronte’s clergyman father that home-schooled his children). Emily underlines her study of the moor inhabitants by bestowing upon them a thick and colourful Dales’ dialect.

There are further layers to the novel, aside from the famous tragedy of the plot. Like Charlotte’s ‘Jane Eyre’, this book was published in a time of radicalism and Emily also deals with inequality, most notably in a scene where young Cathy mocks Hareton (a field worker) for his illiteracy, before being corrected by Nelly, who points out his lack of opportunity. Also, as with ‘Jane Eyre’ there is a sense of discomfort when reading in the 21st Century, that the ‘peasantry’ [sic] is looked down upon. Taking it in context though, any empathy for the poor was a step in the right direction, while not quite succeeding in being a work of social realism.