Wuthering Heights: Context

Wuthering Heights: Context

  • Emily Bronte: Emily Bronte is the authoress of Wuthering Heights, who skilfully employs complex narrative structures and vividly dark themes strikingly unique for a woman of her time.
  • The Bronte Sisters: The Bronte Sisters (Charlotte, Emily, and Anne) are esteemed English authors who, despite their short lives, left a significant literary legacy in the 19th century.
  • Victorian Life: Victorian Life, marked by strict social hierarchies and a culture of propriety, creates the backdrop against which the fierce passions and transgressive relationships in Wuthering Heights take on even greater significance.
  • Queen Victoria: The novel was published during the reign of Queen Victoria, a time known for its shift in morality and emphasis on respectability, markedly contrasting the uncivilised, raw emotions of Bronte’s characters.
  • Religion: The theme of religion is subtly woven into Wuthering Heights, not to propound faith but to illustrate hypocrisy and social norms of the era.
  • Haworth: Haworth, the secluded Yorkshire village where Emily Bronte lived and wrote Wuthering Heights, serves as the inspiration for the novel’s isolated and windy moor settings.
  • Ellis Bell: Emily Bronte published Wuthering Heights under the pseudonym Ellis Bell, a decision indicative of the constraints faced by women writers in the Victorian era.