The Gothic Lineage
Illustration (AI-generated): A windswept stone farmhouse high on the Yorkshire moors at night, stunted firs bent all one way by the wind, snow beginning, a lit window with a branch tapping it, two small figures running hand in hand over the heather far off.

Works · Novel · 1847

Wuthering Heights

by Emily Brontë

First appeared Dec 1847

Nocturne plate · illustration (AI-generated, 2026)

In 1801 Lockwood, a city tenant of Thrushcross Grange on the Yorkshire moors, calls on his landlord Heathcliff at Wuthering Heights, a farmhouse of snarling dogs and grudging inmates. Snowed in for a night, he dreams of a child scratching at the window. His housekeeper Nelly Dean then tells him how the foundling Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw grew up wild together, how Catherine chose the gentler Edgar Linton, and how Heathcliff came back rich and determined to ruin both families.

The intense horror of nightmare came over me: I tried to draw back my arm, but the hand clung to it, and a most melancholy voice sobbed, “Let me in—let me in!”

Chapter 3. Checked against Project Gutenberg ebook #768 (Gutenberg #768 text; modern punctuation, curly quotation marks as in the file)

Attribution and scope

Published as by ‘Ellis Bell’; Charlotte Brontë’s 1850 notice disclosed that Ellis Bell was her sister Emily.

Facts

  1. The first edition was a three-volume set from Thomas Cautley Newby, 72 Mortimer Street, dated 1847. Wuthering Heights, ‘by Ellis Bell’, occupies volumes I and II, and Anne’s Agnes Grey, ‘by Acton Bell’, is volume III; the British Library’s facsimile of its own 1847 copy is described as a two-volume edition of the novel.[1][2][6]
  2. Gaskell writes that in December 1847 the two novels ‘appeared’, after Jane Eyre, although Charlotte Brontë says the two novels had been accepted on terms ‘somewhat impoverishing to the two authors’ and had been in the press for months while her own book, taken by Smith, Elder, came out first.[3][4]
  3. Charlotte Brontë recalled that critics failed to do the book justice and that ‘it was said that this was an earlier and ruder attempt of the same pen which had produced Jane Eyre’, a misreading she called an ‘unjust and grievous error’.[4]
  4. A second edition of Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey appeared on 10 December 1850, after Emily’s death, with Charlotte’s ‘Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell’ prefixed; Gaskell calls that notice ‘unique, as far as I know, in its pathos and its power’.[3][7][4]

Setting

Frame narrative dated 1801-1802 in the text; Nelly Dean’s account reaches back to at least the summer of 1778 and earlier undated years[5]

  • Wuthering Heights
  • Thrushcross Grange
  • the Yorkshire moors
  • Gimmerton

Themes

Notes on dates 2 notes on disputed dates and attribution
  1. Publication date: Gaskell and the Newby title pages give December 1847; the Wikipedia infobox gives 24 November 1847 without a traceable source; the Brontë Society’s novels page lists the book under 1848. December 1847 is shown.
  2. Volume count: the Newby title pages say ‘in three volumes’ (volume III being Agnes Grey), while the British Library facsimile page calls the novel itself a two-volume edition; both are true of the same set.

Threads

Threads in

No sourced relation to an earlier work is recorded.

Threads out

No sourced relation from a later work on this timeline is recorded.

Contemporaries

Works on the timeline that first appeared within three years of 1847, and the other writers alive when Wuthering Heights appeared (ages computed from sourced dates).

Thumbnails: Nocturne plates · illustration (AI-generated, 2026).

Alive at first appearance (Dec 1847)

Where a date is known only to the month or year, an age is given as the two values it could be.

Sources

  1. Wuthering Heights. A novel, by Ellis Bell, in three volumes, vol. II (London: Thomas Cautley Newby, 1847), scan. Internet Archive (University of Illinois copy). Accessed 2026-10-09.
  2. Agnes Grey. A novel, by Acton Bell, vol. III (London: Thomas Cautley Newby, 1847), scan bound as the third volume of the Wuthering Heights set. Internet Archive (University of Illinois copy). Accessed 2026-10-09.
  3. Elizabeth Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Bronte, vol. 2 (1857; Project Gutenberg ebook 1700). Project Gutenberg. Accessed 2026-10-09.
  4. Charlotte Bronte, 'Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell' (1850), in Biographical Notes on the Pseudonymous Bells (Project Gutenberg ebook 771). Project Gutenberg. Accessed 2026-10-09.
  5. Wuthering Heights (Project Gutenberg ebook 768). Project Gutenberg. Accessed 2026-10-09.
  6. Wuthering Heights First Edition Facsimile (reproduced from the British Library's 1847 copy). British Library Shop. Accessed 2026-10-09.
  7. Elizabeth Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Bronte, vol. 1 (1857; Project Gutenberg ebook 1827; mentions the 1850 edition of Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey and Charlotte's biographical notice). Project Gutenberg. Accessed 2026-10-09.