The World Emily Brontë Knew
Emily Brontë was born in 1818 in Thornton, Yorkshire, and moved at the age of two to Haworth, a moorland village on the edge of the West Riding, where her father Patrick served as perpetual curate. She lived there, with few and brief interruptions, until her death from tuberculosis in December 1848, one year after Wuthering Heights was published. The parsonage sat at the top of a steep village street; beyond its graveyard the moor stretched unbroken for miles. That landscape — its weather, its isolation, its capacity for both beauty and violence — is not merely a backdrop in the novel but a governing force, and it was the landscape Brontë walked daily.
The Brontë household was unusual. Patrick Brontë was an Irish-born clergyman of scholarly ambition who encouraged his children to read widely and to debate freely. Their mother died in 1821, and the children — Charlotte, Branwell, Emily, and Anne — formed an intensely self-sufficient imaginative community, inventing elaborate fictional worlds in childhood and sustaining serious literary ambition into adulthood. Emily's formal education was limited: a few months at Cowan Bridge school (where her two eldest sisters fell fatally ill), a period at Roe Head, and several months in Brussels in 1842 studying French and German at the Pensionnat Heger. She returned to Haworth after her aunt's death and never left again. Her inner life was, by all accounts, far richer and more turbulent than her outward circumstances suggested.
When the Novel Is Set
Wuthering Heights opens in 1801 and Nelly Dean's retrospective narrative reaches back roughly thirty years, placing its central events in the late 1770s and 1780s. This is a period before the Industrial Revolution had fully transformed the West Riding, when the moorland economy still depended on sheep farming and small-scale domestic textile work. The social hierarchy Brontë depicts — landed gentry such as the Lintons at Thrushcross Grange, yeoman farming families such as the Earnshaws at Wuthering Heights, and a mobile underclass represented by the foundling Heathcliff — was a recognisable feature of late eighteenth-century Yorkshire. The novel is acutely sensitive to the legal mechanisms by which property passed between families: entail, mortgage, and the marriage settlements that governed a woman's fortune. These are not incidental details. Heathcliff's entire scheme of revenge is conducted through legal instruments — he wins Wuthering Heights from Hindley through debt, and he secures Thrushcross Grange by engineering the marriage of Linton and Catherine so that her property passes to her husband, and thus to him.
The law Brontë depicts is the law of England before the Married Women's Property Acts. Under the legal doctrine of coverture, a wife had no independent legal existence: her property became her husband's on marriage. This is why Catherine Linton Heathcliff, as Nelly makes clear by the close of Chapter Twenty-Eight, is effectively Heathcliff's prisoner not merely by force but by statute. Brontë does not editorialize about this; she simply shows its consequences with cold precision.
Class, Mobility, and the Foundling
Heathcliff's origins are never explained. He arrives from Liverpool as a dark-skinned, nameless child, and old Mr. Earnshaw's account of finding him is vague. Liverpool in the 1770s was the principal British port of the Atlantic slave trade, a fact Brontë's first readers would have known without being told. The novel does not make Heathcliff's racial identity explicit, but it repeatedly marks him as racially other — characters call him a "gipsy," a "lascar," and worse — and his social exclusion operates with the logic of racial as well as class prejudice. Scholars disagree about how consciously Brontë encoded this history; what is certain is that she set his origins in a city whose wealth was built on enslaved labour, and that she gave him no past.
His transformation between Chapters Nine and Ten — from degraded labourer to prosperous gentleman — is equally unexplained. The novel offers no account of where he went or how he acquired money. This is a deliberate compression. Brontë is less interested in the mechanics of social mobility than in its psychological and moral consequences: what it costs a person to be expelled from a community and what it costs that community when he returns with power.
The Novel's Moment of Publication
Wuthering Heights was published in December 1847 by Thomas Newby, as the first two volumes of a three-volume set whose third volume was Anne Brontë's Agnes Grey. Emily published under the pseudonym Ellis Bell. Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre had appeared two months earlier under the name Currer Bell, to considerable success, and reviewers were confused and divided about the relationship between the two books and their authors. Wuthering Heights received mixed notices: some critics admired its power while finding it brutal and morally obscure; others were simply hostile. Emily did not live to see its reputation recover. She died in December 1848 without having published another novel.
The 1840s were a decade of acute social anxiety in Britain. Chartism — the working-class movement demanding political representation — reached its peak in 1848. The Irish Famine was devastating Ireland from 1845 onward, sending waves of destitute migrants through English ports. The question of who belonged to respectable society, and on what terms an outsider might claim a place in it, was not an abstract one. Brontë does not write a novel about Chartism or the Famine, but the figure of a dark, propertyless foundling who acquires wealth by ruthless means and is never fully admitted to the society he destroys speaks to anxieties that were very much alive in 1847.
Timeline of Key Real Events
- 1770s–1780s: Period of the novel's central action; Liverpool is at the height of its involvement in the Atlantic slave trade.
- 1818: Emily Brontë born at Thornton, Yorkshire, 30 July.
- 1820: Brontë family moves to Haworth Parsonage.
- 1821: Maria Brontë (the mother) dies of tuberculosis.
- 1824–1825: Emily briefly attends Cowan Bridge school; her two elder sisters die of tuberculosis contracted there.
- 1842: Emily studies in Brussels at the Pensionnat Heger; returns to Haworth after her aunt's death.
- 1845–1846: Charlotte discovers Emily's private poems; the three sisters publish Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell (1846) at their own expense.
- 1847: Jane Eyre published in October; Wuthering Heights published in December.
- 1848: Emily Brontë dies of tuberculosis, 19 December, aged thirty.
- 1870: Married Women's Property Act begins the legal reform of coverture — the very system Heathcliff exploits — in England.