diligent scholars as well as wildly imaginative critics—is a good or a bad thing is a puzzle that continues to engage the novel’s readers every bit as much as when it was first published in 1847, causing, with a few exceptions, consternation and outright hostility among Victorian readers.

Emily Brontë was twenty-seven at the time she wrote Wuthering Heights. She was the second and least worldly of a triumvirate of immensely gifted writing sisters who had managed to overcome the vicissitudes of their childhood to burst forth, seemingly out of nowhere, with powerful and entirely unconventional works of the imagination. Misfortune lurked in every nook and cranny of the family history: The sisters’ mother died when the oldest, Charlotte, was five, and within the next four years, two elder sisters had died as well, at the ages of eleven and ten, as a result of the miserable conditions at a boarding school that would later be immortalized as the horrifying Lowood School in Jane Eyre. Patrick Brontë, the girls’ father, was the curate of Haworth, a remote Yorkshire village, and his four remaining children, who included a son, Branwell, grew up under strikingly isolated circumstances. Cut off from the local goings on by virtue of their not entirely secure social class (Patrick, who attended Cambridge on a scholarship, had risen from humble Irish stock) and looked after by a spinster aunt and a housekeeper named Tabby, they were thrown mostly on their own company. (Although Patrick may not have been quite the deranged character he was made out to be until fairly recently, when his image was refurbished in Juliet Barker’s exhaustively researched 1994 biography, The Brontës, he was undeniably on the peculiar side—preferring, among other habits, to take his meals alone.) The siblings entertained themselves by creating, in minuscule script on tiny scraps of paper, elaborate fantasy worlds, the most enduring of which were Angria and Gondal. Emily continued to be intensely engaged by Gondal well into adulthood, and the origins of her and her sisters’ literary gifts are clearly to be found in their juvenilia.

Charlotte, whose Jane Eyre appeared the same year as both Emily’s Wuthering Heights and Anne’s Agnes Grey, was the oldest and most enterprising of the three. She virtually dragged her younger sisters out of their cloistered existence—the parsonage in which they lived fronted on a graveyard and looked out in back on the Yorkshire moors—into the light of print by dint of her tireless efforts to get their books published. It is difficult from the vantage point of today to envision the kind of perseverance it took for the sisters to continue with their scribblings in a house where writing, as one Brontë scholar has pointed out, was “very much a male domain” (Alexander, The Early Writings of Charlotte Brontë, p. 227; see “For Further Reading”). It is equally hard to imagine the kind of resistance Charlotte faced in trying to get a reading for her and her sisters’ work. Victorian England in the middle of the nineteenth century was high handedly patriarchal, harboring deep, even irrational, misgivings about female creativity and self-assertion; and not the least remarkable aspect of the Brontë story is that Charlotte persisted in spite of her own anguished doubts and daunting rejections. (Among other people who had advised her against pursuing writing was the poet laureate Robert Southey, to whom she sent some of her poems while she was teaching at a boarding school. Although he conceded that she had “the faculty of Verse,” Southey saw fit to admonish her: “Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life: & it ought not to be.”)

All three sisters published their novels under pseudonyms—they took the intentionally masculine-sounding names of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell—and when Wuthering Heights was republished in 1850 under its author’s real name, Emily was already dead. She had died at the age of thirty, less than three months after her younger brother, Branwell, who had once been considered the family genius, died from drugs and drink. The cause of her death was officially given as consumption, but it is clear to any reader of Emily’s biography that it was a form of passive suicide—that she had helped her end along by willing herself into the next world she so devoutly believed in, frequently exalted, and finally welcomed. Emily steadfastly refused medical care until she finally gave in to her two sisters’ pleas on what turned out to be the last day of her life. The doctor arrived