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 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 surprised to find that Heathcliff, instead of being an exotic, romantic character living in rural isolation, is rude and unfriendly.. His servants are also 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. 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 only two well off families in the area, the Earnshaws who were gentleman farmers and the richer Lintons of Thrushcross Grange, a much bigger estate. There were 2 Earnshaw 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 living rough in Liverpool. He adopted the boy, called him Heathcliff and treated him as his own son.