Emily Bronte's only novel Wuthering Heights was published in 1847. It is a novel which contains a degree of emotional force and sophisticated narrative structure not seen previously in the history of the English novel. Many of the early reviewers of the novel thought that it must have been written by a man of a particularly uncontrolled temper. Wuthering Heights is a cyclical novel in structure. It moves in a tragic circle from relative peace and harmony again. It is a work of extreme contrasts set in the wild moorland of Yorkshire, which is appropriate to the wild passions it describes between the two main characters, Catherine and Heathcliff. Here is an episode from the novel in which one of the narrators, Lockwood, 'dreams' of Cathy. She is beating at his window in Wuthering Heights, a house situated at the top of a desolated hill, literally at the edge of the normal world:.
"Terror made me cruel, and finding it useless to attempt shaking the creature off, I pelled its wrist on to the broken pane, and rubbed it to and fro till the blood ran down and soaked the bed clothes: still it wailed, 'Let me in!' and maintained its tenacious grip, almost maddening me with fear." (Ch.3).
In the novel the incident is described as if it were a dream, but there is a strong emotional and psychological reality to it. It is poised between dream and reality, lucidly capturing the extreme feelings of Cathy. Another incident, narrated in a matter-of-fact way by a boy who was himself only told about it by someone else, describes how the ghosts of Heathcliff and Cathy walk across the moors after their deaths. Heathcliff himself is a man of dark and brooding passions, whose love for Cathy has no boundaries. At the times, their love for each other is violent and destructive; at others, it appears to be a completely natural phenomenon. Cathy says: 'My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary'.
