But between their house and the landscape around their home-Brontë Country as it is now known-one finds the sisters raw and unromantic. Seemingly insulated from the rest of society, the Brontë Parsonage Museum and its library, like the village it’s nestled against, is picturesque and a pleasure for any literary fan to peruse. From the Detroit Metro Airport to Heathrow to North London, the trip to the sisters’ home in Haworth is nearly labyrinthine. Over the United Kingdom’s hottest days on record last July, I extended my doctoral research and conference trip to visit the Brontës’ genius loci. In the village of Haworth, Wuthering Heights tells a different story. Brontë’s novel, in our popular imagination, simplifies into a digestible, non-threatening story of doomed lovers.

The privileged attention to its romance overlooks Brontë’s depiction of the strangulating effect on Wuthering Heights’s Catherine Earnshaw as she transforms from a brash child to a woman enmeshed within the patriarchy’s physical and mental violence, and Heathcliff’s descent into his position of oppressor. It is perhaps less easy, but no less accurate, to envision Emily Brontë writing a radical novel in her cramped penmanship. It is very easy to think of all nineteenth-century women writers at their little solitary desks. Instead, the real Emily Brontë, eccentric and masculine, offered a radical indictment of the socio-political hegemony she and her contemporaries labored through in her masterpiece. Close friend to Charlotte, Ellen Nussey’s account of Emily as a “law unto herself, and a heroine in keeping to her law,” however, counters popular culture’s characterization of the middle sister as a waif-like mystic whose work is regularly figured as a sultry romance for mainstream audiences. Emily, by the second printing of her novel in 1850, had died of tuberculosis, and Wuthering Heights has since been widely marketed as a romance novel. Charlotte Brontë tossed a further wrench in the literary market machine when she revealed herself and her sisters as women three years later. “This is a strange book,” one succinctly remarked. Many were dismissive and a handful recognized it as a work of genius, but all were baffled. In 1847, when Emily Brontë published Wuthering Heights under the male pseudonym Ellis Bell, reviewers didn’t quite know what to make of it.

Bronte sisters wuthering heights