Emily Brontë

Wuthering Heights (1847) was Emily Brontë's only novel. She also wrote a significant body of poetry, much of it originally shared in a collaborative manuscript with her sisters Charlotte and Anne under their male pseudonyms of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell.

Emily Brontë published Wuthering Heights under the pseudonym Ellis Bell in 1847. Her sisters Charlotte and Anne used the pseudonyms Currer and Acton Bell respectively, as female authors faced prejudice in the Victorian publishing world.

Emily Brontë died of tuberculosis in December 1848 at the age of 30, just one year after the publication of Wuthering Heights. Her brother Branwell had died of the same disease months earlier, and her sister Anne would die of tuberculosis the following year.

Early reviewers were shocked by the novel's depiction of cruelty, passion, and moral ambiguity, with some calling it coarse and depraved. Its unconventional structure—narrated through multiple layers of framing devices—and its unsympathetic characters challenged Victorian expectations of the novel form.