The wonder of it is that Wuthering Heights, which was declared to be “unquestionably and irredeemably monstrous” upon publication, exists at all, its creative origins forever obscured by the brief and enigmatic life of its author. The novel, published in 1847 under a male pen name (Ellis Bell), was written by Emily Brontë, a 27-year-old virgin so reclusive she makes Emily Dickinson seem positively sociable, who lived in a parsonage together with her gifted sisters and alcoholic brother in the tiny village of Haworth in Yorkshire, England.
The parsonage abutted the moors, where Brontë liked to wander, and the wild, bleak landscape of which is described in the novel, acting as a symbol for the untamed nature of the romance at its center. Emily, who died a year after her book came out, somehow managed to call forth from her vivid, anarchic imagination one of the darkest love stories in Victorian (or any other) literature, creating an unprecedented Demon Lover in the portrait of Heathcliff and an obsessed madwoman in that of Catherine Earnshaw. Its erotic undertones are unmistakable and all the more powerful for being suppressed.
