1.

Victorian Novel
o Early Victorians - the novelists of the first part of the Victorian period identified
themselves with the age and depicted society as they saw it. They were aware of the
evils of their society, such as the atrocious conditions of manual workers and the
exploitation of children. Different types of novels: Sensation novels, adventure
novels, imaginative romantic novels, historical novels and romances, fantastic
novels, humanitarian novels and domestic novels.
o Later Victorians - is usually applied to writers of the second half of the Victorian
Age; novelists showed a sense of dissatisfaction and rebellion, rejected any
sentimental or romantic attitude and focused above all on the clash between man and
his environment.
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2. Emily Bront
o LIFE AND MAIN FEATURES
3. life
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was born in 1818, parents of Celtic origin which gave her a background of fantastic
story-telling and a belief in feeling and impulse over reason.
landscape of the wild and desolate Yorkshire moors in which she grew up was also
an influence
imagination was constantly stimulated by nature
Emily and her brother and sisters created a fantasy world
Charlotte, Emily and Anne were all gifted novelists.
In 1847 that their works met with success. They published three novels: Charlotte's
Jane Eyre, Anne's Agnes Grey and Emily's Wuthering Heights.

4. Themes of Wuthering Heights

o Passion and feeling are at their strongest in Emily's works. Her only novel is a
complex work: on the one hand, it looks back to the Romantic exaltation of feeling
over reason and to a mystical union with nature; on the other, it anticipates the late
Victorian and modern novel in its narrative technique and gloomy vision of life.
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5. Characters
o Wuthering Heights is the story of Heathcliff and Catherine. Heathcliff, a Byronic
hero dominated by his self-destructive passion.
o Catherine is the central character. Through her, Emily Bront gives us a vivid portrait
of a woman oppressed and divided by social conventions.
o Her real self is indistinguishable from Heathcliff - at one point she confesses: "I am
Heathcliff". However, she cannot abandon herself to her love, and her social impulse
makes her marry Edgar Linton.
o Heathcliff - Byronic hero- Heathcliff was the incarnation of the Romantic hero: bold,
impetuous, though at times melancholy; he loved solitude, and while in company he
always seemed to be distant, haunted by some grief or remorse.
o

6. The Setting
o The action of the novel is divided between Wuthering Heights, up on the moors, and
Thrushcross Grange, in the valley.
o The first is the home of unrestrained passion and instinct, the second of social
conventions. Wuthering Heights is by far the most important and almost becomes
another character.
o The actions and feeling of the two main characters are at one with the wild uplandish
scenery _ Heathcliff's name even recalls its rugged features: the heath and rocks
(cliffs). It is no coincidence that all the characters in the novel who intend to lead a
normal life in the end leave the place, while Catherine and Heathcliff always return
to it - in body or, after death, in spirit.
o

7. The narrators
o The novel's plot is brilliantly complex. Its Romantic elements, mixed with a Gothic
tale's sense of mystery, are rendered through devices such as flashbacks and time
shifts, and especially through the use of two narrators, one of which is Nelly Dean.
The result is a complex shifting of the narrator's point of view; the story is, however,
firmly held together by the central characters' passion, the physical setting, and the
author's intensely poetic prose style.