Wuthering Heights

This is the only novel written by Emily Bronte and is considered to be the best of the Bronte Novels. It is a Gothic work, about the love of a couple who are not heroic or very good people. The novel starts with the arrival of Lockwood, a city man, to the house he is renting in the North. He calls on his landlord Mr Heathcliff, who is a country squire who lives on a local farm. Lockwood is surprsed to find that Heathcliff, instead of being a romantic figure, is unfriendly, and his servants are rough and rude. He gets snowed in and has to stay the night and has a terrifying dream. On his return to his house, Thrushcross Grange, he become ill, having caught a bad cold and he asks his housekeeper, Mrs Nelly Dean, to amuse him by telling him the history of the 2 houses and how Mr Heathcliff came to own both of them. Nelly tells him that she lived as a servant at Wuthering Heights as a young girl, and knew the family who owned it, the Earnshaws who were well to do farmers. There were 2 children, HIndley and Catherine, who grew up wild, but Mr Earnshaw, their father was a strict man. He went on a journey when his daughter was about 6 and came home with an orphan child, a boy, whom he found in Liverpool. He adopted the boy, called him Heathcliff and treated him as his own son.