Wuthering Heights is the first and only novel by the
English author Emily Brontë, initially published in 1847 under her pen
name "Ellis Bell". It concerns two families of the landed gentry
living on the West Yorkshire moors, the Earnshaws and the Lintons, and
their turbulent relationships with the Earnshaws' foster son, Heathcliff.
The novel was influenced by Romanticism and Gothic fiction.
Wuthering Heights is now widely considered to be one of
the greatest novels ever written in English, but contemporaneous reviews
were polarised. It was controversial for its depictions of mental and
physical cruelty, including domestic abuse, and for its challenges to
Victorian morality, religion, and the class system.