Wuthering Heights: A Gothic Masterpiece of Love, Revenge, and Haunting Legacies

In this episode of She Wrote Too, I talk with comedian and writer Andy Gleeks, who also brings his background as an English teacher to our conversation. This is our second episode on Emily Brontë’s extraordinary novel, if you haven’t already, do listen to our first discussion with best-selling gothic novelist Essie Fox, where we reviewed other fascinating aspects of the book.

Few novels inspire such strong and conflicting reactions as Wuthering Heights. It is a story of obsession, revenge, and passion so intense that it transcends death itself. Unlike many of its 19th-century counterparts, which explore love within the constraints of social convention, Wuthering Heights is wild, gothic, and deeply unsettling. It is a novel that resists easy categorization as it is many things; a love story and an anti-romance, a family saga and a supernatural tale, a narrative of social class and exclusion that also carries echoes of Britain's colonial past.

One of the most fascinating aspects of Wuthering Heights is its narrative structure. Brontë gives us a story within a story, mediated by unreliable narrators including Lockwood, the clueless outsider, and Nelly Dean, whose biases and personal stake in events leave us constantly questioning what is true. This fragmented storytelling enhances the novel’s sense of mystery and psychological complexity, as the past seems to haunt the present at every turn.

We also discuss how Wuthering Heights is, in many ways, the antithesis of Pride and Prejudice. Where Austen’s novel is witty, rational, and deeply concerned with social norms, Brontë’s is elemental and ungovernable, steeped in passion, violence, and the supernatural. If Pride and Prejudice teaches its characters to temper their emotions, Wuthering Heights shows what happens when they consume and destroy.

Beyond its gothic intensity, Wuthering Heights is also a novel about intergenerational trauma and about the way pain and obsession pass down through families like a curse. The novel’s themes of power, race, and exclusion have led to modern readings that explore its links to Britain’s colonial past. As Andy observes, Heathcliff, a dark-skinned foundling whose origins remain ambiguous, is repeatedly dehumanized and brutalized by those around him, his suffering transforming into a relentless cycle of cruelty. The novel’s exploration of outsider status, revenge, and inherited suffering makes it feel as urgent today as it did when it was first published.

We consider why Wuthering Heights endures. Perhaps because it refuses to be easily explained. It is not simply a gothic romance, nor a ghost story, nor a critique of class and power but somehow all of these things at once. It is a novel that lingers in the mind long after reading, as unsettling and unforgettable as the howling winds over the Yorkshire moors.

Join us as we consider the many layers of this haunting masterpiece and discuss why Wuthering Heights remains a must-read for lovers of literature, gothic fiction, and stories that defy easy resolution. As Andy says ‘just read it’.

Our sincere thanks to Andy Gleeks and Essie Fox for their fascinating insights.

🎧 Missed our first episode with Essie Fox? Catch up here: