Wuthering Heights creates a world of passionate intensities, in which particular

events are burned on the characters and readers memories, beyond reason, measure
or reserve. Terror stalks the book and defines so many of its central relationsh
ips, concerned as it is with the ecstatic, eerie and mad. The book plays with de
ath, courts death, stages death, even jokes with death, as we see when the dying
Catherine is haunted by the face in the black press (ch. 12) or when Heathcliff b
reaks through the side of Catherine s coffin or hangs his wife Isabella s puppy from
the back of a chair. Heathcliff was obviously competing with Edgar Linton in or
der to win Catherine s heart The book is fascinated by what lies at the limits of
the human and is haunted by the forces of death and the diabolical, by compulsiv
e modes of behaviour, by infantile and sublimely powerful emotions, by the force
of irresistible will, and by the terrible consequences done to human beings by
radical evil. The book is full of animals, spirits and ghosts, and those, like H
eathcliff, about whom we can never be sure.
It is also a highly organised and rationally planned novel, with a complex time
scheme and several interlocking narrators. It sets its extraordinary actions in
a vividly realised family history and landscape. It is fascinated by the power o
f fantasy, particularly erotic fantasy, in people s lives
Isabella thinks of Heath
cliff as a hero of romance (ch. 14) until she learns the truth of his brutality
those fantasies take their place within a carefully plotted story about inherita
nce, intermarriage and theft. The erotic is not separated from the economic, and
the passage of power and land across generations. Emily Bront was fascinated by
extreme emotions, radically opposing mental and social forces, and the creation
of moments of moral revelation and transformation that were typical both of Goth
ic fiction and Victorian melodrama, but she could control, ironize and disciplin
e those energies to serious purpose. Through the care she took to implant her wr
iting in a particular history, landscape and material world, through complex tim
e-schemes and inset narrators, through making Gothic into a mode of psychic expl
oration, she decisively extended the range and affective power of the English no
vel.
Emily Bronte is one of the very few authors to be an important poet as well as a
major novelist, and there is a close relationship between the two bodies of wor
k. Many of her poems appeared first in stories of the 'Gondal' world that she cr
eated with her sister Anne; she collected them in a manuscript notebook (now in
the British Library) entitled 'Gondal Poems' although when she published six of
them in the collection Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell (1846), she remove
d all references to Gondal. So the poems do not depend on an underlying narrativ
e context for their power; like other great Victorian poems, they dramatize ques
tions of identity and self through different personae in impassioned utterance a
nd often extreme situations. Like Wuthering Heights, they are drawn to emotional
extremity and passion, to scenes of loss and oblivion, and to the affirmation o
f desire in the face of death.

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