Wuthering Heights

Mary A. Ward (Essay Date 1899)

SOURCE: Ward, Mary A. Introduction to Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey, pp. xviii-xxxix. London: John Murray, 1899.

In the following excerpt, Ward discusses the genesis of Wuthering Heights from the influence of German Romanticism to the unique temperament of Brontë herself.

Emily Brontë, like her sister, inherited Celtic blood, together with a stern and stoical tradition of daily life. She was a wayward, imaginative girl, physically delicate, brought up in loneliness and poverty, amid a harsh yet noble landscape of hill, moor and stream. Owing to the fact that her father had some literary cultivation, and an Irish quickness of intelligence beyond that of his brother-clergy, this child of genius had from the beginning a certain access to good books, and through books and newspapers to the central world of thought and of affairs. In 1827, when Emily was...