The Growth of Wuthering Heights

Extract

When Wuthering Heights first appeared the immediate and quite predictable reaction of Victorian readers and reviewers was to view with dismay, if not with disgust, the wildness and brutality of the characters and emotions described in it. Charlotte Brontë herself, while professing great admiration for her sister's work, doubted whether it was right to create men like Heathcliff. Today the wonder of critics is turned upon another aspect of the book; namely, how could a girl in Emily's situation, with her limited experience and living her secluded life, write such a book at all? The researches of biographers have thrown little light on this problem, largely because of the very meager sources to which they may turn. Emily was a fiercely reticent person. She seems to have had no friends and hardly any acquaintances outside her family circle. As to people beyond that circle, Charlotte tells us that “she had scarcely more knowledge of the peasantry amongst whom she lived than a nun has of the country people who sometimes pass her convent gates.” Her letters and manuscripts were with very few exceptions—two brief letters and some manuscripts of her poems—destroyed either by Charlotte or herself.