Wuthering Heights (Illustrated)

Many people, generally those who have never read the book, consider Wuthering Heights to be a straightforward, if intense, love story Romeo and Juliet on the Yorkshire Moors. But this is a mistake. Really the story is one of revenge. It follows the life of Heathcliff, a mysterious gypsy-like person, from childhood (about seven years old) to his death in his late thirties. Heathcliff rises in his adopted family and then is reduced to the status of a servant, running away when the young woman he loves decides to marry another. He returns later, rich and educated, and sets about gaining his revenge on the two families that he believed ruined his life. (http://www.wuthering-heights.co.uk/summary.php)

Emily Jane Brontë (30 July 1818 19 December 1848) was an English novelist and poet who is best known for her only novel, Wuthering Heights, now considered a classic of English literature. Emily was the third-eldest of the four surviving Brontë siblings, between the youngest Anne and her brother Branwell. She wrote under the pen name Ellis Bell. (Wikipedia)

Wuthering Heights was Emily's only novel, although, like her sisters Anne and Charlotte, she wrote poetry. After her death, Anne, who was also Emily's closest friend, completed Wuthering Heights. Charlotte also rewrote Emily's poetry.

Emily had an unusual character, extremely unsocial and reserved, with few friends outside her family. She preferred the company of animals to people and rarely travelled, forever yearning for the freedom of Haworth and the moors. She had a will of iron a well known story about her is that she was bitten by a (possibly) rabid dog which resulted in her walking calmly into the kitchen and cauterising the wound herself with a hot iron.

She had unconventional religious beliefs, rarely attending church services and, unlike the other children, never teaching in the Sunday School.

In appearance, she was lithesome and graceful, the tallest of the Brontë children (her coffin measured five feet seven inches 1.7 metres) but ate sparingly and would starve herself when unhappy or unable to get her own way. As her literary works suggest, she was highly intelligent, teaching herself German while working in the kitchen (her favourite place outside of the moors) and playing the piano well enough to teach it in Brussels. Her stubbornness lasted to the end where she refused to see a doctor or rest while she was dying of tuberculosis. (http://www.wuthering-heights.co.uk/emily-bronte.php)

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