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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
The Complete Works of Emily Brontë presents an exquisite tapestry of her literary genius, showcasing not only her celebrated novel "Wuthering Heights" but also her lesser-known poetry. Brontë's narrative style intricately weaves gothic elements with rich characterizations, evoking the tumultuous landscapes of Yorkshire that serve as a backdrop to her themes of passion, isolation, and the supernatural. Her work, emerging amid the constraints of Victorian expectations on women, delves deep into the psychological landscapes of her characters, providing a candid exploration of human emotions within a starkly beautiful yet violent world. Emily Brontë, one of the renowned Brontë sisters, lived a life steeped in the evocative wilderness of the Yorkshire moors, which profoundly influenced her writing. Her insatiable curiosity, alongside her unique insights into emotional depth and nature, equipped her to confront societal norms through her unfettered muse. Despite a short life marked by personal loss and isolation, her literary contributions resonate with enduring grandiosity that challenges the conventions of her era. For readers seeking a compelling blend of intense emotion and rich narrative, The Complete Works of Emily Brontë is indispensable. This collection not only encapsulates her contributions to literature but invites readers to explore the depths of her imagination and the striking beauty of her prose and poetry. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - The Author Biography highlights personal milestones and literary influences that shape the entire body of writing. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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The Complete Works of Emily Brontë
Table of Contents
Introduction
This collection presents the creative achievement of Emily Brontë in a single, coherent volume. It brings together her entire extant fiction—her sole novel—and a comprehensive gathering of her poems, alongside a nineteenth-century life by A. Mary F. Robinson. The aim is twofold: to let readers encounter Brontë’s voice across forms, and to situate that voice within the context of her time and immediate reception. Read in sequence, these works illuminate one another, revealing a distinctive imagination at once private and elemental. The arrangement favors clarity and continuity, inviting both first-time readers and returning admirers to engage the full compass of her art.
The contents are deliberately simple and focused. The novel Wuthering Heights stands as Brontë’s complete contribution to long-form fiction. It is complemented here by a large body of lyric and narrative verse, encompassing meditations, songs, dramatic monologues, and occasional pieces from across her writing life. To round out the portrait, the volume includes The Life of Emily Brontë by A. Mary F. Robinson, a Victorian biographical study that traces her circumstances and early reputation. There are no plays, essays, letters, or diaries in this collection; rather, it concentrates on the forms in which Brontë is securely known to have excelled.
Context matters to the experience of these texts. Wuthering Heights first appeared in 1847 under the pseudonym Ellis Bell, and its originality was remarked upon even by early, often puzzled, reviewers. The poetry had reached print a year earlier in a joint volume issued as Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell; many additional poems were later preserved and published from manuscripts. The biography by A. Mary F. Robinson, written within the long nineteenth century, offers a near-contemporary lens on Emily Brontë’s life and the reception of her work. Together, these materials frame an oeuvre compact in size yet inexhaustible in suggestiveness.
At the collection’s core stands Wuthering Heights, a novel set on the Yorkshire moors whose story unfolds through layered testimony and memory. A newcomer to the district encounters two neighboring houses and becomes the listener to a history of fierce attachments, family divisions, and the shaping force of place. Without revealing its turns, it is fair to stress the book’s daring structure, shifting perspectives, and uncompromising moral imagination. The moorland setting is not merely background but an active presence, emphasizing isolation, endurance, and the weather of the soul. Its intensity and formal boldness continue to challenge and captivate readers.
Brontë’s poems amplify and refine the novel’s concerns while extending far beyond them. The lyrics move through solitude, longing, remembrance, steadfastness, and visionary hope, often anchoring their reflection in wind, night, heather, and stone. Pieces such as Remembrance, The Old Stoic, The Night-Wind, Love and Friendship, and No Coward Soul Is Mine exemplify her ability to join austere thought to haunting cadence. Elsewhere, shorter songs and meditative stanzas bring an economy of image to large inward questions. Read individually or as a sequence, the poems chart a temperament at once disciplined and ardent, reconciling strength of will with tenderness and awe.
Much of Emily Brontë’s verse is shaped by adopted personae and an imagined chronicle often referred to as the Gondal world, a private saga of contested power, exile, and return. Even when specific narrative references recede, the poems retain dramatic energy: speakers address absent lovers, challenge adversaries, or assert inner freedom against outward constraint. Titles like The Prisoner or The Visionary hint at a poetics drawn to thresholds and confinements, to imprisonment and flight. This grounding in imagined history enriches rather than limits the lyrics, giving them a tensile narrative backbone that sharpens their ethical and emotional stakes.
Stylistically, Brontë favors clear, forceful diction, concentrated imagery, and rhythms that balance songlike movement with stern resolve. She often works with refrains, stark contrasts, and elemental metaphors—earth and sky, storm and calm, day and night—so that inner life is felt in weather and landscape. The result is not ornamental but keenly distilled. In poem after poem the speaking voice insists on integrity, endurance, and an inward law, yet never at the expense of sympathy for pain and loss. This fusion of hardness and compassion, of metaphysical reach with local detail, is a hallmark across the writings gathered here.
Read alongside the poems, the novel’s architecture appears in fresh relief. Frames within frames echo the poems’ refrains; retellings and returns mirror the verse’s haunted repetitions; and the landscape that shapes character in prose is the same landscape that steadies thought in lyric. Across forms Brontë probes boundaries between self and other, freedom and obligation, wildness and social order. She is preoccupied with what endures through time—memory, love, conscience—and with the costs of violating or honoring those demands. The works thus form a conversation: the novel dramatizes pressures that the poems test, distill, and, at times, defy.
From its first appearance, Wuthering Heights elicited divided responses, its severity and originality surprising many readers. Over subsequent decades it came to be recognized as a central work of English fiction, its influence detectable across later narrative experiment and psychological portraiture. The poems, once less widely known, have steadily claimed critical and popular attention for their concentrated music and spiritual poise; pieces such as No Coward Soul Is Mine and Remembrance are frequently anthologized. Together, the writings have proved durable because they do not flatter or console; they tell the truth about passion, solitude, duty, and the claims of the unseen.
The inclusion of A. Mary F. Robinson’s The Life of Emily Brontë serves readers who wish to place the works within a documented life. Written by a poet and critic of the Victorian period, it assembles available facts, family context, and early responses. Inevitably it reflects its period’s critical vocabulary and perspectives, yet it remains valuable as evidence of how Brontë’s art first entered the cultural record. Read after the literary works, it can clarify circumstances without dictating interpretation, preserving the distinction between an author’s lived conditions and the imaginative freedom of her pages.
Taken together, these materials encourage several ways of reading. One may begin with the novel and then turn to the poems for resonance and counterpoint, or start with the shorter lyrics to hear the voice before entering the broader design of the narrative. The organization here permits both approaches. The poems’ variety—meditative, visionary, stoic, and tender—builds a flexible bridge to the novel’s concentrated power, while the biography supplies orientation and record. Whatever the path, the reward is cumulative: a deepening sense of mind and music, of an author who trusted intensity, clarity, and the stark measures of the moor.
Emily Brontë’s body of work is small by volume and vast by reach. In it, elements are pared to essentials: love and law, exile and home, endurance and release. The novel gives those forces room to collide; the poems crystallize them into sudden stillness or storm. The biography conserves traces of a life that enabled such art. This collection’s purpose is to keep these facets in view at once, so readers may feel the unity beneath the variety. More than a monument, it is an invitation—to walk the high ground of her imagination and listen to its weather.
Author Biography
Emily Brontë (1818–1848) was an English novelist and poet of the Victorian period, remembered above all for Wuthering Heights, a singular work that reshaped ideas about passion, nature, and narrative design. Publishing under the masculine pseudonym Ellis Bell, she participated in a brief but transformative moment in nineteenth-century literature alongside her writing sisters. Though her lifetime output was small, the intensity and originality of her language, the stark moorland settings, and her austere moral imagination secured her place in the canon. During her short life she remained private and reluctant to court publicity, yet her posthumous reputation has grown steadily, making her a touchstone for readers and scholars.
She spent most of her life in the Yorkshire village of Haworth, a hilltop community surrounded by sweeping moors that became central to her sensibility. The local landscape, with its heaths, winds, and isolated farmsteads, provided a vocabulary of weather and wilderness that informed both her poetry and fiction. Largely educated at home, she read widely in the Bible, classical history, and contemporary poetry, and kept disciplined habits of study. The household valued reading and composition, and from early on she practiced verse and dramatic sketches. This inward, self-directed training fostered an exacting style marked by compression, musicality, and a fierce independence of vision.
Attempts at formal schooling punctuated her youth. She spent a brief period at a girls' school in the mid-1830s, but poor health and homesickness led her back to Haworth. Later, seeking credentials for a proposed school, she traveled to Brussels in the early 1840s with a sister to study languages at a noted pensionnat. There she strengthened her command of German and French and encountered Continental Romanticism, which deepened her interest in intensity of feeling, moral absolutes, and the sublime. The European sojourn was short, and she soon returned to the moors, where the solitude and rigorous routines suited the temperament that shaped her mature writing.
From adolescence she created an extensive body of private verse and prose set in imagined kingdoms, a practice that honed narrative stamina and lyrical control. In the mid-1840s, after discovering each other's manuscripts, the three Brontë sisters prepared a joint volume, Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. Issued at their expense, it attracted little notice, but reviewers who did comment praised the power and originality of 'Ellis Bell.' Emily's poems, compressed lyrics often invoking elemental forces, conscience, and freedom, are now recognized as some of the most distinctive in nineteenth-century English poetry, notable for their metrical confidence and unflinching, unsentimental tone.
She composed her only novel, Wuthering Heights, in the mid-1840s and published it in the late 1840s under the Ellis Bell pseudonym. The book's intricate frame narrative, stark imagery, and uncompromising portrayal of obsession and revenge unsettled many early reviewers, who found its manners coarse and its passions excessive. Others, however, sensed an extraordinary imaginative power. Over time, critics have admired its architectural daring, complex narration, and metaphysical reach, placing it within the Gothic tradition while noting affinities with Romantic poetry. Its setting on the moors and its austere moral atmosphere remain central to how the novel is read and taught.
Reticent by nature, she avoided literary circles and public life, and she did not promote the novel after publication. Domestic responsibilities and a rigorous daily schedule of reading, walking, and work framed her remaining months. Her health declined rapidly in the late 1840s, and she died of tuberculosis at age thirty, leaving no second novel and only a carefully preserved body of poems beyond those already printed. Posthumous notices were brief. A later edition of Wuthering Heights, issued with a biographical preface by a sister, began the long reevaluation that would eventually secure her status as one of the century's most original writers.
Today Emily Brontë's achievement is central to discussions of voice, gender, and form in Victorian literature. Wuthering Heights is studied for its layered narration, treatment of social boundaries, and fusion of Gothic and Romantic elements; her poems are valued for austere lyric intensity. The anonymity of the Bell pseudonyms, and their later revelation, continues to shape debates about authorship and reception. Translations, adaptations, and sustained academic attention have kept her work in circulation across cultures. Critics from the early twentieth century onward have reclaimed the novel's originality, and readers continue to find in her writing a bracing, elemental vision of human will and nature.
Historical Context
Emily Brontë (1818–1848) wrote within the hinge years when Romanticism yielded to Victorian modernity. Her oeuvre—centered on the 1847 novel Wuthering Heights and the 1846 volume Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell—emerged from Haworth, a West Riding village in Yorkshire, and from the austere Anglican parsonage where she lived with her father, the Reverend Patrick Brontë, and her siblings Charlotte, Branwell, and Anne. The poems, many conceived across the 1830s and 1840s, and the novel share common contexts: the industrial transformation of northern England, the pious and often contentious atmosphere of the Church of England, and the Brontës’ distinctive practice of private, collaborative mythmaking.
Haworth stood on the edge of the Pennine moors above the textile towns of Keighley, Bradford, and Halifax, places emblematic of Britain’s Industrial Revolution. The smoky valleys, expanding mills, and rising wage-labor economy contrasted sharply with the heather uplands that frame Brontë’s imagery. Chartist agitation swept the West Riding in 1838–1842, bringing mass meetings, petitions, and strikes close to the parsonage. This background of class conflict, enclosure, and rapid urbanization informs the stark social gradients, restlessness, and harsh economies of feeling that pervade her writings, while the moorland’s physical geography—winds, peat bogs, sudden becks—provided a vocabulary for passion, endurance, and solitude.
Family structure and mortality shaped Emily’s horizons. Born in Thornton, Yorkshire, on 30 July 1818, she moved to Haworth in 1820. Her mother Maria Branwell died in 1821, and two elder sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, died in 1825 after attending the Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan Bridge, an event that haunted family memory. Their aunt, Elizabeth Branwell (1776–1842), governed the household and financed later educational plans. The siblings—Charlotte (1816–1855), Branwell (1817–1848), Emily, and Anne (1820–1849)—grew into an intense creative unit. Their small “little books,” copied in miniature script, and their habit of serial storytelling nurtured formal experiment, inwardness, and the self-sufficiency reflected across poems and fiction.
Emily’s sporadic education placed her at the margin of institutional learning and inside a vigorous home curriculum. She briefly attended Roe Head School in 1835, withdrew for reasons of health and temperament, taught for a short period at Law Hill near Halifax in 1838, and, with Charlotte, studied in Brussels at the Pensionnat Heger from February to November 1842. There she strengthened her French and German and received systematic musical training. The Brussels interlude sharpened her cosmopolitan awareness amid 1840s European tensions while confirming her preference for the privacy of Haworth. The experience added linguistic precision and broadened philosophical reach without displacing the moor’s centrality in her imagination.
The Brontës’ juvenile sagas—Angria (chiefly Charlotte and Branwell) and Gondal (chiefly Emily and Anne)—supplied a crucible for Emily’s poetic voice. Although Gondal’s prose chronicles are largely lost, poems from the 1830s–1840s preserve a world of exiled monarchs, betrayal, warfare, and passionate fealty. This invented polity allowed Emily to fuse political intrigue with psychological extremity, to practice multiple speakers and dramatic monologue, and to experiment with stark scenic set-pieces. The Gondal habit—mixing landscape, fate, and sovereign will—survives in mature lyrics and underlies Wuthering Heights’ bold temporal frames and aerial vantage. Fiction and verse thus share an apprenticeship in sustained, internally coherent alternative history.
Religious culture in Emily’s lifetime was defined by Evangelical revival, the Oxford Movement (from 1833), and conflicts over authority within the Church of England. As daughter of an Irish-born Anglican clergyman, she knew parish discipline, scripture, and sermon rhetoric intimately. Yet her work expresses an idiosyncratic metaphysic, often austere and defiantly personal, formed by the King James Bible, Milton, and solitary contemplation. Poems articulate a creed that rejects conventional consolations while asserting immanence and immortality without ecclesiastical intermediaries. This spiritual independence coexists with liturgical cadences and funeral imagery drawn from parochial life in Haworth, whose churchyard pressed physically and symbolically upon the parsonage.
Victorian gender norms constrained women to domestic and subordinate professional roles—particularly as governesses and teachers. Emily’s short stints in such posts revealed the precariousness of genteel female labor and the psychic costs of dependence. In 1844 the sisters planned a school at Haworth; the venture failed to attract pupils. When they sought publication, they adopted ambiguous pseudonyms—Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell—in 1846 to evade prejudice in the metropolitan literary market. This masking of identity, typical of women writers navigating London’s publishers and circulating libraries, bears on the works’ candid treatment of desire, power, and selfhood, and on their reception by a morally vigilant press.
The literary marketplace around 1846–1847 was dominated by triple-decker novels for subscription libraries, metropolitan reviews, and fierce competition among houses such as Smith, Elder & Co. and Thomas Cautley Newby. Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell appeared in 1846; few copies sold, but the volume announced a distinctive voice. Wuthering Heights was issued by Newby in December 1847, paired with Anne’s Agnes Grey, while Charlotte’s Jane Eyre had appeared earlier that year with Smith, Elder to sensational acclaim. This coincidence set the Brontës against prevailing taste, exposing readers to a ferocity of tone and structural daring that startled mid-Victorian decorum.
Emily’s art stands at a crossroads of Romantic inheritance and Gothic revival. The Byronic hero, filtered through Byron and Scott, informs her exploration of authority, exile, and indomitable will; yet she purges ornament to achieve a severe, elemental style. Gothic architecture and fiction had re-entered fashion by the 1830s–1840s, and Emily adapts its turbulence—storms, crags, graves—into psychological topology rather than mere scenery. Her novel’s frame-narration and temporal dislocations echo experimental historical fictions popular in the period, while her lyrics compress epic scope into austere stanzas. The result is an idiom both archaic and modern, fusing ballad starkness with metaphysical intensity.
Scientific debate altered how Victorians read landscape. Geology’s deep time, popularized by Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830–1833), and new meteorological observation reshaped perceptions of rock, weather, and erosion. Emily’s moor is not a pastoral garden but a dynamic system of winds, peat, and watercourses. Natural theology, still influential in parish life, met a harder empiricism in journals the Brontës read. Her poems register an almost pantheistic attention to elemental process, while refusing to reduce spirit to mechanism. The era’s fascination with physiology and phrenology resonates in her attention to temperament and will, yet she resists scientific determinism through an ethics of inward liberty.
Questions of class, property, and law pervaded the 1830s–1840s. The Reform Act of 1832 recalibrated parliamentary representation; the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 restructured relief into workhouses; and Chartism agitated for universal male suffrage. In Yorkshire, shifting fortunes among yeomen, tradesmen, and manufacturers complicated older hierarchies. Coverture still subsumed a married woman’s property under her husband’s control, a legal context that sharpens the stakes of inheritance, custody, and dispossession in the fiction and shades the poems’ anxiety about captivity and release. Emily’s characters test the moral limits of a society where law can sanctify domination even as passion asserts a counter-sovereignty.
Epidemic disease and high mortality formed the quotidian backdrop of Haworth life. The village’s overcrowded churchyard, inadequate water supply, and poor sanitation produced grim statistics throughout the 1830s and 1840s. Tuberculosis—“consumption”—carried off Branwell on 24 September 1848, Emily on 19 December 1848, and Anne on 28 May 1849. Britain endured cholera waves in 1831–1832 and 1848–1849. Such conditions inform the works’ frank confrontations with suffering, extinction, and the persistence of memory. Funeral rites, graveyards, and the thin partition between living and dead recur, not as mere Gothic trappings but as social realities that would have been audible from the parsonage windows.
Regional language and folk culture provide texture and authority. The West Riding’s dialect—coarse, scriptural, and wry—survives in local speech Emily heard from parishioners and servants, and enters her prose with near-ethnographic fidelity. Ballad measures, hymn tunes, and the cadence of sermons shape her verse’s music. Methodist and dissenting traditions were strong in Yorkshire, and their plain-spoken fervor filters into her rhetorical economy. The moorland’s oral lore—weather signs, omens, boundary stones—furnishes symbolic shorthand that her poetry repeatedly refines. This rootedness in place offsets the era’s metropolitan taste and asserts a provincial modernity, stern and self-possessed, against London’s polish.
Though outwardly secluded, the Brontës tracked imperial and European affairs through newspapers and magazines such as Blackwood’s and Fraser’s. The First Anglo-Afghan War (1839–1842), unrest in Spain and Italy, and especially the revolutions of 1848 fed the climate of upheaval that Gondal internalizes as coups, exile, and martial oath. The Irish Famine (1845–1849), grievously politicized in Britain, resonated with Patrick Brontë’s Irish origins and complicated public discourse about charity and state power. This wider world lent Emily’s imagined polities and moor-bound dramas a transnational pressure, where sovereignty, captivity, and fate are tested against forces larger than any single household.
Initial reception was polarized. Some 1847–1848 reviewers deplored Wuthering Heights as coarse or lawless compared with middle-class domestic fiction; others recognized an austere originality. After Emily’s death, Charlotte edited a new edition in 1850, provided a biographical notice, and shaped the public image of her sister’s personality and aims. Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857) further fixed a narrative of Haworth’s isolation and moral fortitude. Later nineteenth-century critics—among them Algernon Charles Swinburne—reassessed Emily’s genius. The trajectory from scandal to canonization frames how her poems were selected, ordered, and posthumously interpreted, often through lenses foreign to their initial conditions.
Material circumstances left distinctive textual traces. The 1846 Poems, issued by Aylott & Jones, sold poorly; some lyrics appeared only posthumously under Charlotte’s supervision, and many survive in manuscript notebooks with variant readings. The triple-decker format of 1847 mediated readers’ experience of Wuthering Heights through circulating libraries such as Mudie’s. At home, music-making and reading sustained creativity: Emily practiced the piano and the organ at St Michael and All Angels, copied out verse with meticulous hand, and annotated volumes from the parsonage library. Such domestic scholarship and artistry, against the background hum of mills and parish routine, produced a concentrated, unpublic school of craft.
Agnes Mary Frances Robinson’s The Life of Emily Brontë (1883) belongs to a late-Victorian wave of literary biography that consolidated reputations and codified virtues for a new audience. Writing decades after 1847–1849, Robinson drew on Charlotte’s notices and available correspondence, filtering Emily through post-Realist aesthetics and emergent feminist sympathies. Her study helped move Emily from provincial curiosity to a figure of spiritual authority and artistic extremity. By then the moors had become a national landscape, and Haworth, a pilgrimage site. Read together, the novel, poems, and subsequent life-writing show how a local, 1820s–1840s practice of imagination became part of English literary modernity.
Synopsis (Selection)
Wuthering Heights (Novel)
A stark, multi-generational tale on the Yorkshire moors tracing the obsessive bond between Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw and its reverberations across two families. Told through layered narrators, it follows revenge, inheritance, and the clash of passion with social constraint.
Poems: Faith, Defiance, and Metaphysics
Lyric meditations asserting spiritual conviction, stoic independence, and the soul’s endurance beyond mortality. Includes No Coward Soul Is Mine, The Philosopher, The Old Stoic, A Prayer, Confidence, Honour's Martyr, Self-Interrogation, Death, Retirement, and related pieces.
Poems: Love, Absence, and Remembrance
Elegiac and intimate addresses to an absent or lost beloved, weighing fidelity, consolation, and grief. Representative works include Remembrance, Love and Friendship, Sympathy, Plead for Me, The Absent One, If grief for grief can touch thee, Now trust a heart that trusts in you.
Poems: Nature, Night, and the Moors
Vivid evocations of wind, stars, and heathered landscapes that mirror inner weather and solitude. Pieces such as Stars, How Clear She Shines, The Night-Wind, The Bluebell, To the Bluebell, The night is darkening round me, Mild the mist upon the hill, and Thy sun is near meridian height figure the moor as a living presence.
Poems: Storms, Seasons, and Endurance
Weather-driven lyrics that frame trial and renewal through autumnal decline, winter tempest, and spring return, emphasizing fortitude. Includes Fall, leaves, fall, Awake, awake! how loud the stormy morning, A sudden chasm of ghastly light, The night of storms has past, May flowers are opening, The sunshine of a summer sun.
Poems: Imagination, Vision, and Art
Odes to creative power and visionary transport, balancing inspiration with the limits of earthly life. Key poems include To Imagination, A Day Dream, The Visionary, The Lady to Her Guitar, Harp of wild and dream-like, Shall Earth No More Inspire Thee, O dream, where art thou now?
Poems: Confinement, Prison, and Inner Freedom
Dramatic monologues that set physical captivity against an unfettered inner life. Anchored by The Prisoner, with cognate pieces about constraint and release such as In dungeons dark I cannot sing.
Poems: Gondal Cycle — Court, War, and Exile
Narrative ballads and monologues from Brontë’s imaginary kingdom of Gondal, charting political upheaval, battles, betrayals, and haunted love. Includes poems of Zamorna and court intrigues such as To the Horse Black Eagle (…Battle of Zamorna), King Julius left the south country, Geraldine, Gleneden's Dream, Aspin Castle, On the Fall of Zalona, Lord of Elbe, Douglas Ride, Roderic, What rider up Gobeloin's glen, At Castle Wood.
Poems: Childhood, Innocence, and Addresses
Direct, tender addresses that contrast youthful innocence with the world’s tempests. Examples include Tell me, tell me, smiling child, I saw thee, child, one summer day, Come hither, child; who gifted thee, This shall be thy lullaby.
Poems: Death, Tombs, and the Afterlife
Reflections on dying, burial, and what lies beyond, often austere and solemn. Representative works: A Death-Scene, My Lady's Grave, Last Words, Yes, holy be thy resting-place, I see around me piteous tombstones grey, Grave in the Ocean, Shed no tears o'er that tomb, Lines: I die, but when the grave shall press.
Poems: Domestic Scenes and Rural Life
Quiet sketches of household rhythms, churchyards, gardens, birds, and village sounds that set inner moods against everyday surroundings. Includes The old church tower and garden wall, Ladybird! ladybird! fly away home, All hushed and still within the house, Redbreast, early in the morning, A thousand sounds of happiness, I've been wandering in the greenwoods.
Poems: Solitude, Weariness, and Self-Questioning
Introspective lyrics on alienation, perseverance, and testing the self’s integrity. Notable pieces include I am the only being whose doom, Sleep brings no joy to me, I'm happiest now when most away, Month after month, year after year, Through the hours of yesternight, And like myself lone, wholly lone, Strong I stand, though I have borne.
Poems: Songs and Narrative Lyrics (Miscellaneous)
Standalone songs and ballad-like pieces that tell brief stories of love, parting, and resolve outside the Gondal arc. Examples include Song: O between distress and pleasure, Song: King Julius left the south country (also linked with Gondal), To a Wreath of Snow, A Serenade, Lines: The soft unclouded blue of air.
Poems: Fragments, Stanzas, and Miscellaneous Lines
Brief or variably titled pieces—Stanzas, Stanzas to——, and Lines—that compress the collection’s themes into epigrammatic or experimental forms. They serve as codas and variations on faith, love, nature, time, and fate across the volume.
The Life of Emily Brontë by A. Mary F. Robinson (Biography)
A late-Victorian biography that recounts Brontë’s family background, education, creative habits, the making and reception of her novel and poems, and her death, shaping her early critical legacy.
The Complete Works of Emily Brontë
Novel
Wuthering Heights
Chapter I
1801. — I have just returned from a visit to my landlord — the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with. This is certainly a beautiful country! In all England, I do not believe that I could have fixed on a situation so completely removed from the stir of society. A perfect misanthropist’s heaven: and Mr. Heathcliff and I are such a suitable pair to divide the desolation between us. A capital fellow! He little imagined how my heart warmed towards him when I beheld his black eyes withdraw so suspiciously under their brows, as I rode up, and when his fingers sheltered themselves, with a jealous resolution, still further in his waistcoat, as I announced my name.
‘Mr. Heathcliff?’ I said.
A nod was the answer.
‘Mr. Lockwood, your new tenant, sir. I do myself the honour of calling as soon as possible after my arrival, to express the hope that I have not inconvenienced you by my perseverance in soliciting the occupation of Thrushcross Grange: I heard yesterday you had had some thoughts — ’
‘Thrushcross Grange is my own, sir,’ he interrupted, wincing. ‘I should not allow any one to inconvenience me, if I could hinder it — walk in!’
The ‘walk in’ was uttered with closed teeth, and expressed the sentiment, ‘Go to the Deuce:’ even the gate over which he leant manifested no sympathising movement to the words; and I think that circumstance determined me to accept the invitation: I felt interested in a man who seemed more exaggeratedly reserved than myself.
When he saw my horse’s breast fairly pushing the barrier, he did put out his hand to unchain it, and then sullenly preceded me up the causeway, calling, as we entered the court, — ‘Joseph, take Mr. Lockwood’s horse; and bring up some wine.’
‘Here we have the whole establishment of domestics, I suppose,’ was the reflection suggested by this compound order. ‘No wonder the grass grows up between the flags, and cattle are the only hedge-cutters.’
Joseph was an elderly, nay, an old man: very old, perhaps, though hale and sinewy. ‘The Lord help us!’ he soliloquised in an undertone of peevish displeasure, while relieving me of my horse: looking, meantime, in my face so sourly that I charitably conjectured he must have need of divine aid to digest his dinner, and his pious ejaculation had no reference to my unexpected advent.
Wuthering Heights is the name of Mr. Heathcliff’s dwelling. ‘Wuthering’ being a significant provincial adjective, descriptive of the atmospheric tumult to which its station is exposed in stormy weather. Pure, bracing ventilation they must have up there at all times, indeed: one may guess the power of the north wind blowing over the edge, by the excessive slant of a few stunted firs at the end of the house; and by a range of gaunt thorns all stretching their limbs one way, as if craving alms of the sun. Happily, the architect had foresight to build it strong: the narrow windows are deeply set in the wall, and the corners defended with large jutting stones.
Before passing the threshold, I paused to admire a quantity of grotesque carving lavished over the front, and especially about the principal door; above which, among a wilderness of crumbling griffins and shameless little boys, I detected the date ‘1500,’ and the name ‘Hareton Earnshaw.’ I would have made a few comments, and requested a short history of the place from the surly owner; but his attitude at the door appeared to demand my speedy entrance, or complete departure, and I had no desire to aggravate his impatience previous to inspecting the penetralium.
One stop brought us into the family sitting-room, without any introductory lobby or passage: they call it here ‘the house’ pre-eminently. It includes kitchen and parlour, generally; but I believe at Wuthering Heights the kitchen is forced to retreat altogether into another quarter: at least I distinguished a chatter of tongues, and a clatter of culinary utensils, deep within; and I observed no signs of roasting, boiling, or baking, about the huge fireplace; nor any glitter of copper saucepans and tin cullenders on the walls. One end, indeed, reflected splendidly both light and heat from ranks of immense pewter dishes, interspersed with silver jugs and tankards, towering row after row, on a vast oak dresser, to the very roof. The latter had never been under-drawn: its entire anatomy lay bare to an inquiring eye, except where a frame of wood laden with oatcakes and clusters of legs of beef, mutton, and ham, concealed it. Above the chimney were sundry villainous old guns, and a couple of horse-pistols: and, by way of ornament, three gaudily-painted canisters disposed along its ledge. The floor was of smooth, white stone; the chairs, high-backed, primitive structures, painted green: one or two heavy black ones lurking in the shade. In an arch under the dresser reposed a huge, liver-coloured bitch pointer, surrounded by a swarm of squealing puppies; and other dogs haunted other recesses.
The apartment and furniture would have been nothing extraordinary as belonging to a homely, northern farmer, with a stubborn countenance, and stalwart limbs set out to advantage in knee-breeches and gaiters. Such an individual seated in his armchair, his mug of ale frothing on the round table before him, is to be seen in any circuit of five or six miles among these hills, if you go at the right time after dinner. But Mr. Heathcliff forms a singular contrast to his abode and style of living. He is a dark-skinned gipsy in aspect, in dress and manners a gentleman: that is, as much a gentleman as many a country squire: rather slovenly, perhaps, yet not looking amiss with his negligence, because he has an erect and handsome figure; and rather morose. Possibly, some people might suspect him of a degree of underbred pride; I have a sympathetic chord within that tells me it is nothing of the sort: I know, by instinct, his reserve springs from an aversion to showy displays of feeling — to manifestations of mutual kindliness. He’ll love and hate equally under cover, and esteem it a species of impertinence to be loved or hated again. No, I’m running on too fast: I bestow my own attributes over-liberally on him. Mr. Heathcliff may have entirely dissimilar reasons for keeping his hand out of the way when he meets a would-be acquaintance, to those which actuate me. Let me hope my constitution is almost peculiar: my dear mother used to say I should never have a comfortable home; and only last summer I proved myself perfectly unworthy of one.
While enjoying a month of fine weather at the sea-coast, I was thrown into the company of a most fascinating creature: a real goddess in my eyes, as long as she took no notice of me. I ‘never told my love’ vocally; still, if looks have language, the merest idiot might have guessed I was over head and ears: she understood me at last, and looked a return — the sweetest of all imaginable looks. And what did I do? I confess it with shame — shrunk icily into myself, like a snail; at every glance retired colder and farther; till finally the poor innocent was led to doubt her own senses, and, overwhelmed with confusion at her supposed mistake, persuaded her mamma to decamp. By this curious turn of disposition I have gained the reputation of deliberate heartlessness; how undeserved, I alone can appreciate.
I took a seat at the end of the hearthstone opposite that towards which my landlord advanced, and filled up an interval of silence by attempting to caress the canine mother, who had left her nursery, and was sneaking wolfishly to the back of my legs, her lip curled up, and her white teeth watering for a snatch. My caress provoked a long, guttural gnarl.
‘You’d better let the dog alone,’ growled Mr. Heathcliff in unison, checking fiercer demonstrations with a punch of his foot. ‘She’s not accustomed to be spoiled — not kept for a pet.’ Then, striding to a side door, he shouted again, ‘Joseph!’
Joseph mumbled indistinctly in the depths of the cellar, but gave no intimation of ascending; so his master dived down to him, leaving me vis-à-vis the ruffianly bitch and a pair of grim shaggy sheep-dogs, who shared with her a jealous guardianship over all my movements. Not anxious to come in contact with their fangs, I sat still; but, imagining they would scarcely understand tacit insults, I unfortunately indulged in winking and making faces at the trio, and some turn of my physiognomy so irritated madam, that she suddenly broke into a fury and leapt on my knees. I flung her back, and hastened to interpose the table between us. This proceeding aroused the whole hive: half-a-dozen four-footed fiends, of various sizes and ages, issued from hidden dens to the common centre. I felt my heels and coat-laps peculiar subjects of assault; and parrying off the larger combatants as effectually as I could with the poker, I was constrained to demand, aloud, assistance from some of the household in re-establishing peace.
Mr. Heathcliff and his man climbed the cellar steps with vexatious phlegm: I don’t think they moved one second faster than usual, though the hearth was an absolute tempest of worrying and yelping. Happily, an inhabitant of the kitchen made more despatch: a lusty dame, with tucked-up gown, bare arms, and fire-flushed cheeks, rushed into the midst of us flourishing a frying-pan: and used that weapon, and her tongue, to such purpose, that the storm subsided magically, and she only remained, heaving like a sea after a high wind, when her master entered on the scene.
‘What the devil is the matter?’ he asked, eyeing me in a manner that I could ill endure, after this inhospitable treatment.
‘What the devil, indeed!’ I muttered. ‘The herd of possessed swine could have had no worse spirits in them than those animals of yours, sir. You might as well leave a stranger with a brood of tigers!’
‘They won’t meddle with persons who touch nothing,’ he remarked, putting the bottle before me, and restoring the displaced table. ‘The dogs do right to be vigilant. Take a glass of wine?’
‘No, thank you.’
‘Not bitten, are you?’
‘If I had been, I would have set my signet on the biter.’ Heathcliff’s countenance relaxed into a grin.
‘Come, come,’ he said, ‘you are flurried, Mr. Lockwood. Here, take a little wine. Guests are so exceedingly rare in this house that I and my dogs, I am willing to own, hardly know how to receive them. Your health, sir?’
I bowed and returned the pledge; beginning to perceive that it would be foolish to sit sulking for the misbehaviour of a pack of curs; besides, I felt loth to yield the fellow further amusement at my expense; since his humour took that turn. He — probably swayed by prudential consideration of the folly of offending a good tenant — relaxed a little in the laconic style of chipping off his pronouns and auxiliary verbs, and introduced what he supposed would be a subject of interest to me, — a discourse on the advantages and disadvantages of my present place of retirement. I found him very intelligent on the topics we touched; and before I went home, I was encouraged so far as to volunteer another visit tomorrow. He evidently wished no repetition of my intrusion. I shall go, notwithstanding. It is astonishing how sociable I feel myself compared with him.
Chapter II
Yesterday afternoon set in misty and cold. I had half a mind to spend it by my study fire, instead of wading through heath and mud to Wuthering Heights. On coming up from dinner, however, (N.B. — I dine between twelve and one o’clock; the housekeeper, a matronly lady, taken as a fixture along with the house, could not, or would not, comprehend my request that I might be served at five) — on mounting the stairs with this lazy intention, and stepping into the room, I saw a servant-girl on her knees surrounded by brushes and coal-scuttles, and raising an infernal dust as she extinguished the flames with heaps of cinders. This spectacle drove me back immediately; I took my hat, and, after a four-miles’ walk, arrived at Heathcliff’s garden-gate just in time to escape the first feathery flakes of a snow-shower.
On that bleak hill-top the earth was hard with a black frost, and the air made me shiver through every limb. Being unable to remove the chain, I jumped over, and, running up the flagged causeway bordered with straggling gooseberry-bushes, knocked vainly for admittance, till my knuckles tingled and the dogs howled.
‘Wretched inmates!’ I ejaculated, mentally, ‘you deserve perpetual isolation from your species for your churlish inhospitality. At least, I would not keep my doors barred in the daytime. I don’t care — I will get in!’ So resolved, I grasped the latch and shook it vehemently. Vinegar-faced Joseph projected his head from a round window of the barn.
‘What are ye for?’ he shouted. ‘T’ maister’s down i’ t’ fowld. Go round by th’ end o’ t’ laith, if ye went to spake to him.’
‘Is there nobody inside to open the door?’ I hallooed, responsively.
‘There’s nobbut t’ missis; and shoo’ll not oppen ’t an ye mak’ yer flaysome dins till neeght.’
‘Why? Cannot you tell her whom I am, eh, Joseph?’
‘Nor-ne me! I’ll hae no hend wi’t,’ muttered the head, vanishing.
The snow began to drive thickly. I seized the handle to essay another trial; when a young man without coat, and shouldering a pitchfork, appeared in the yard behind. He hailed me to follow him, and, after marching through a wash-house, and a paved area containing a coal-shed, pump, and pigeon-cot, we at length arrived in the huge, warm, cheerful apartment where I was formerly received. It glowed delightfully in the radiance of an immense fire, compounded of coal, peat, and wood; and near the table, laid for a plentiful evening meal, I was pleased to observe the ‘missis,’ an individual whose existence I had never previously suspected. I bowed and waited, thinking she would bid me take a seat. She looked at me, leaning back in her chair, and remained motionless and mute.
‘Rough weather!’ I remarked. ‘I’m afraid, Mrs. Heathcliff, the door must bear the consequence of your servants’ leisure attendance: I had hard work to make them hear me.’
She never opened her mouth. I stared — she stared also: at any rate, she kept her eyes on me in a cool, regardless manner, exceedingly embarrassing and disagreeable.
‘Sit down,’ said the young man, gruffly. ‘He’ll be in soon.’
I obeyed; and hemmed, and called the villain Juno, who deigned, at this second interview, to move the extreme tip of her tail, in token of owning my acquaintance.
‘A beautiful animal!’ I commenced again. ‘Do you intend parting with the little ones, madam?’
‘They are not mine,’ said the amiable hostess, more repellingly than Heathcliff himself could have replied.
‘Ah, your favourites are among these?’ I continued, turning to an obscure cushion full of something like cats.
‘A strange choice of favourites!’ she observed scornfully.
Unluckily, it was a heap of dead rabbits. I hemmed once more, and drew closer to the hearth, repeating my comment on the wildness of the evening.
‘You should not have come out,’ she said, rising and reaching from the chimney-piece two of the painted canisters.
Her position before was sheltered from the light; now, I had a distinct view of her whole figure and countenance. She was slender, and apparently scarcely past girlhood: an admirable form, and the most exquisite little face that I have ever had the pleasure of beholding; small features, very fair; flaxen ringlets, or rather golden, hanging loose on her delicate neck; and eyes, had they been agreeable in expression, that would have been irresistible: fortunately for my susceptible heart, the only sentiment they evinced hovered between scorn and a kind of desperation, singularly unnatural to be detected there. The canisters were almost out of her reach; I made a motion to aid her; she turned upon me as a miser might turn if any one attempted to assist him in counting his gold.
‘I don’t want your help,’ she snapped; ‘I can get them for myself.’
‘I beg your pardon!’ I hastened to reply.
‘Were you asked to tea?’ she demanded, tying an apron over her neat black frock, and standing with a spoonful of the leaf poised over the pot.
‘I shall be glad to have a cup,’ I answered.
‘Were you asked?’ she repeated.
‘No,’ I said, half smiling. ‘You are the proper person to ask me.’
She flung the tea back, spoon and all, and resumed her chair in a pet; her forehead corrugated, and her red under-lip pushed out, like a child’s ready to cry.
Meanwhile, the young man had slung on to his person a decidedly shabby upper garment, and, erecting himself before the blaze, looked down on me from the corner of his eyes, for all the world as if there were some mortal feud unavenged between us. I began to doubt whether he were a servant or not: his dress and speech were both rude, entirely devoid of the superiority observable in Mr. and Mrs. Heathcliff; his thick brown curls were rough and uncultivated, his whiskers encroached bearishly over his cheeks, and his hands were embrowned like those of a common labourer: still his bearing was free, almost haughty, and he showed none of a domestic’s assiduity in attending on the lady of the house. In the absence of clear proofs of his condition, I deemed it best to abstain from noticing his curious conduct; and, five minutes afterwards, the entrance of Heathcliff relieved me, in some measure, from my uncomfortable state.
‘You see, sir, I am come, according to promise!’ I exclaimed, assuming the cheerful; ‘and I fear I shall be weather-bound for half an hour, if you can afford me shelter during that space.’
‘Half an hour?’ he said, shaking the white flakes from his clothes; ‘I wonder you should select the thick of a snowstorm to ramble about in. Do you know that you run a risk of being lost in the marshes? People familiar with these moors often miss their road on such evenings; and I can tell you there is no chance of a change at present.’
‘Perhaps I can get a guide among your lads, and he might stay at the Grange till morning — could you spare me one?’
‘No, I could not.’
‘Oh, indeed! Well, then, I must trust to my own sagacity.’
‘Umph!’
‘Are you going to mak’ the tea?’ demanded he of the shabby coat, shifting his ferocious gaze from me to the young lady.
‘Is he to have any?’ she asked, appealing to Heathcliff.
‘Get it ready, will you?’ was the answer, uttered so savagely that I started. The tone in which the words were said revealed a genuine bad nature. I no longer felt inclined to call Heathcliff a capital fellow. When the preparations were finished, he invited me with — ‘Now, sir, bring forward your chair.’ And we all, including the rustic youth, drew round the table: an austere silence prevailing while we discussed our meal.
I thought, if I had caused the cloud, it was my duty to make an effort to dispel it. They could not every day sit so grim and taciturn; and it was impossible, however ill-tempered they might be, that the universal scowl they wore was their everyday countenance.
‘It is strange,’ I began, in the interval of swallowing one cup of tea and receiving another — ‘it is strange how custom can mould our tastes and ideas: many could not imagine the existence of happiness in a life of such complete exile from the world as you spend, Mr. Heathcliff; yet, I’ll venture to say, that, surrounded by your family, and with your amiable lady as the presiding genius over your home and heart — ’
‘My amiable lady!’ he interrupted, with an almost diabolical sneer on his face. ‘Where is she — my amiable lady?’
‘Mrs. Heathcliff, your wife, I mean.’
‘Well, yes — oh, you would intimate that her spirit has taken the post of ministering angel, and guards the fortunes of Wuthering Heights, even when her body is gone. Is that it?’
Perceiving myself in a blunder, I attempted to correct it. I might have seen there was too great a disparity between the ages of the parties to make it likely that they were man and wife. One was about forty: a period of mental vigour at which men seldom cherish the delusion of being married for love by girls: that dream is reserved for the solace of our declining years. The other did not look seventeen.
Then it flashed on me — ‘The clown at my elbow, who is drinking his tea out of a basin and eating his broad with unwashed hands, may be her husband: Heathcliff junior, of course. Here is the consequence of being buried alive: she has thrown herself away upon that boor from sheer ignorance that better individuals existed! A sad pity — I must beware how I cause her to regret her choice.’ The last reflection may seem conceited; it was not. My neighbour struck me as bordering on repulsive; I knew, through experience, that I was tolerably attractive.
‘Mrs. Heathcliff is my daughter-in-law,’ said Heathcliff, corroborating my surmise. He turned, as he spoke, a peculiar look in her direction: a look of hatred; unless he has a most perverse set of facial muscles that will not, like those of other people, interpret the language of his soul.
‘Ah, certainly — I see now: you are the favoured possessor of the beneficent fairy,’ I remarked, turning to my neighbour.
This was worse than before: the youth grew crimson, and clenched his fist, with every appearance of a meditated assault. But he seemed to recollect himself presently, and smothered the storm in a brutal curse, muttered on my behalf: which, however, I took care not to notice.
‘Unhappy in your conjectures, sir,’ observed my host; ‘we neither of us have the privilege of owning your good fairy; her mate is dead. I said she was my daughter-in-law: therefore, she must have married my son.’
‘And this young man is — ’
‘Not my son, assuredly.’
Heathcliff smiled again, as if it were rather too bold a jest to attribute the paternity of that bear to him.
‘My name is Hareton Earnshaw,’ growled the other; ‘and I’d counsel you to respect it!’
‘I’ve shown no disrespect,’ was my reply, laughing internally at the dignity with which he announced himself.
He fixed his eye on me longer than I cared to return the stare, for fear I might be tempted either to box his ears or render my hilarity audible. I began to feel unmistakably out of place in that pleasant family circle. The dismal spiritual atmosphere overcame, and more than neutralised, the glowing physical comforts round me; and I resolved to be cautious how I ventured under those rafters a third time.
The business of eating being concluded, and no one uttering a word of sociable conversation, I approached a window to examine the weather. A sorrowful sight I saw: dark night coming down prematurely, and sky and hills mingled in one bitter whirl of wind and suffocating snow.
‘I don’t think it possible for me to get home now without a guide,’ I could not help exclaiming. ‘The roads will be buried already; and, if they were bare, I could scarcely distinguish a foot in advance.’
‘Hareton, drive those dozen sheep into the barn porch. They’ll be covered if left in the fold all night: and put a plank before them,’ said Heathcliff.
‘How must I do?’ I continued, with rising irritation.
There was no reply to my question; and on looking round I saw only Joseph bringing in a pail of porridge for the dogs, and Mrs. Heathcliff leaning over the fire, diverting herself with burning a bundle of matches which had fallen from the chimney-piece as she restored the tea-canister to its place. The former, when he had deposited his burden, took a critical survey of the room, and in cracked tones grated out — ‘Aw wonder how yah can faishion to stand thear i’ idleness un war, when all on ’ems goan out! Bud yah’re a nowt, and it’s no use talking — yah’ll niver mend o’yer ill ways, but goa raight to t’ divil, like yer mother afore ye!’
I imagined, for a moment, that this piece of eloquence was addressed to me; and, sufficiently enraged, stepped towards the aged rascal with an intention of kicking him out of the door. Mrs. Heathcliff, however, checked me by her answer.
‘You scandalous old hypocrite!’ she replied. ‘Are you not afraid of being carried away bodily, whenever you mention the devil’s name? I warn you to refrain from provoking me, or I’ll ask your abduction as a special favour! Stop! look here, Joseph,’ she continued, taking a long, dark book from a shelf; ‘I’ll show you how far I’ve progressed in the Black Art: I shall soon be competent to make a clear house of it. The red cow didn’t die by chance; and your rheumatism can hardly be reckoned among providential visitations!’
‘Oh, wicked, wicked!’ gasped the elder; ‘may the Lord deliver us from evil!’
‘No, reprobate! you are a castaway — be off, or I’ll hurt you seriously! I’ll have you all modelled in wax and clay! and the first who passes the limits I fix shall — I’ll not say what he shall be done to — but, you’ll see! Go, I’m looking at you!’
The little witch put a mock malignity into her beautiful eyes, and Joseph, trembling with sincere horror, hurried out, praying, and ejaculating ‘wicked’ as he went. I thought her conduct must be prompted by a species of dreary fun; and, now that we were alone, I endeavoured to interest her in my distress.
‘Mrs. Heathcliff,’ I said earnestly, ‘you must excuse me for troubling you. I presume, because, with that face, I’m sure you cannot help being good-hearted. Do point out some landmarks by which I may know my way home: I have no more idea how to get there than you would have how to get to London!’
‘Take the road you came,’ she answered, ensconcing herself in a chair, with a candle, and the long book open before her. ‘It is brief advice, but as sound as I can give.’
‘Then, if you hear of me being discovered dead in a bog or a pit full of snow, your conscience won’t whisper that it is partly your fault?’
‘How so? I cannot escort you. They wouldn’t let me go to the end of the garden wall.’
‘You! I should be sorry to ask you to cross the threshold, for my convenience, on such a night,’ I cried. ‘I want you to tell me my way, not to show it: or else to persuade Mr. Heathcliff to give me a guide.’
‘Who? There is himself, Earnshaw, Zillah, Joseph and I. Which would you have?’
‘Are there no boys at the farm?’
‘No; those are all.’
‘Then, it follows that I am compelled to stay.’
