We have been taken and carried through a new region, a melancholy waste, with here and there patches of beauty; have been brought in contact with fierce passions, with extremes of love and hate, and with sorrow that none but those who have suffered can understand.

It is not without evidences of considerable power: but, as a whole, it is wild, confused, disjointed, and improbable; and the people who make up the drama, which is tragic enough in its consequences, are savages ruder than those who lived before the days of Homer.

[18]The Literary World wrote: In the whole story not a single trait of character is elicited which can command our admiration, not one of the fine feelings of our nature seems to have formed a part in the composition of its principal actors.

[21] Rossetti's friend, the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne was another early admirer of the novel, and in conclusion for an essay on Emily Brontë, published in The Athenaeum in 1883, writes: "As was the author's life, so is her book in all things: troubled and taintless, with little of rest in it, and nothing of reproach.

[25] In 1926 Charles Percy Sanger's work on the chronology of Wuthering Heights "affirmed Emily's literary craft and meticulous planning of the novel and disproved Charlotte's presentation of her sister as an unconscious artist who 'did not know what she had done'."

[23] Still, in 1934, Lord David Cecil, writing in Early Victorian Novelists, commented "that Emily Brontë was not properly appreciated; even her admirers saw her as an 'unequal genius',"[23] and in 1948 F. R. Leavis excluded Wuthering Heights from the great tradition of the English novel because it was "a 'kind of sport'—an anomaly with 'some influence of an essentially undetectable kind.

... Emily Brontë, striding over the Yorkshire moors with her dog, did not conjure from her imagination any cozy tale of happy lovers to console women readers sitting snugly within doors.

[34] Novelist John Cowper Powys notes the importance of the setting: By that singular and forlorn scenery—the scenery of the Yorkshire moors round her home—[Emily Brontë] was, however, in the more flexible portion of her curious nature inveterately influenced.

[35]Likewise Virginia Woolf suggests the importance of the Yorkshire landscape of Haworth to the poetic vision of both Emily and Charlotte Brontë: [Who] if they choose to write in prose, [were] intolerant of its restrictions.

They seized those aspects of the earth which were most akin to what they themselves felt or imputed to their characters, and so their storms, their moors, their lovely spaces of summer weather are not ornaments applied to decorate a dull page or display the writer's powers of observation—they carry on the emotion and light up the meaning of the book.

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.

Top Withens, a ruined farmhouse in an isolated area near the Haworth Parsonage, was suggested as the model for Wuthering Heights by Ellen Nussey, a friend of Charlotte Brontë.

The frame story is that of Lockwood, who informs us of his meeting with the strange and mysterious "family" living in almost total isolation in the stony uncultivated land of northern England.

[51] The author has been described as sarcastic toward Lockwood, who fancies himself a world-weary romantic but comes across as an effete snob, and there are subtler hints that Nelly's perspective is influenced by her own biases.

Rob Roy is set "in the wilds of Northumberland, among the uncouth and quarrelsome squirearchical Osbaldistones", while Cathy Earnshaw "has strong similarities with Diana Vernon, who is equally out of place among her boorish relations".

[70] Catherine Earnshaw has been identified by some critics as a type of gothic demon because she "shape-shifts" in order to marry Edgar Linton, assuming a domesticity that is contrary to her true nature.

[76] It has also been suggested that Catherine's relationship with Heathcliff conforms to the "dynamics of the Gothic romance, in that the woman falls prey to the more or less demonic instincts of her lover, suffers from the violence of his feelings, and at the end is entangled by his thwarted passion".

Lewes wrote in Leader Magazine: Curious enough is to read Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and remember that the writers were two retiring, solitary, consumptive girls!

[86] The eminent German Lutheran theologian and philosopher Rudolph Otto, author of The Idea of the Holy, saw in Wuthering Heights "a supreme example of 'the daemonic' in literature".

[89] Lisa Wang argues that in both Wuthering Heights, and in her poetry, Emily Brontë concentrates on "the non-conceptual", or what Rudolf Otto[90] has called 'the non-rational' aspect of religion ... the primal nature of religious experience over and above its doctrinal formulations".

[100] However, John Bowen believes that "this is too simple a view", because the novel presents an alternative explanation of Heathcliff's cruel and sadistic behaviour; that is, that he has suffered terribly: "is an orphan; ... is brutalised by Hindley; ... relegated to the status of a servant; Catherine marries Edgar".

[52] Moreover, while a "passionate, doomed, death-transcending relationship between Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw Linton forms the core of the novel",[52] Wuthering Heights: ... consistently subverts the romantic narrative.

[118]: 44  Mr Earnshaw calls him "as dark almost as if it came from the devil",[98] and Nelly Dean speculates fancifully regarding his origins thus: "Who knows but your father was Emperor of China, and your mother an Indian queen?

[120] Maja-Lisa von Sneidern states that "Heathcliff's racial otherness cannot be a matter of dispute; Brontë makes that explicit", further noting that "by 1804 Liverpool merchants were responsible for more than eighty-four percent of the British transatlantic slave trade.

In 1958, an adaptation aired on CBS television as part of the series DuPont Show of the Month starring Rosemary Harris as Cathy and Richard Burton as Heathcliff.

[128] Les Hauts de Hurlevent is a French mini-series in six 26-minute episodes, in black and white, created and directed by Jean-Paul Carrère based on the novel, and broadcast between 1964 and 1968 on the first ORTF channel.

In 1978, the BBC produced a five-part TV serialisation of the book starring Ken Hutchinson, Kay Adshead and John Duttine, with music by Carl Davis; it is considered one of the most faithful adaptations of Emily Brontë's story.

[130] The 1992 film Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights starring Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche is notable for including the oft-omitted second generation story of the children of Cathy, Hindley and Heathcliff.

[136] Mizumura Minae's A True Novel (Honkaku shosetsu) (2002) is inspired by Wuthering Heights and might be called an adaptation of the story in a post-World War II Japanese setting.

"[140] Canadian author Hilary Scharper's ecogothic novel Perdita (2013) was deeply influenced by Wuthering Heights, namely in terms of the narrative role of powerful, cruel and desolate landscapes.