at two in the afternoon after she had already, as Charlotte described it in a letter to her close friend Ellen Nussey, “turned her dying eyes from the pleasant sun” (Frank, A Chainless Soul: A Life of Emily Brontë, p. 261). The death-embracing side of Emily is discernible in her only novel, but it is even clearer in the poems she wrote, in one of which she characterizes life as “a labour, void and brief.”

It was Charlotte who suggested to her own publishers—she had by now “come out” to them as the celebrated author of Jane Eyre—that Wuthering Heights deserved to be reprinted and, as an added inducement, proposed to edit this second edition herself. As part of her program to render both herself and her sister more acceptably modest in spirit and less bold in thought than their fiction might otherwise suggest, Charlotte endeavored to make Emily’s novel more accessible by downplaying its stylistic oddities—standardizing her sister’s idiosyncratic punctuation and abrupt cadences. This second edition also came with a curiously apologetic preface that, advertently or not, paved the way for many apologetic interpretations to come. In it, Charlotte addressed the novel’s many critics by insisting on the untutored quality of her sister’s literary genius (Emily, like Charlotte, was in fact unusually well-educated) while at the same time admitting to her own consternation about the author’s impulses: “Whether it is right or advisable,” Charlotte wrote, “to create beings like Heathcliff, I do not know: I scarcely think it is.” She also appended a biographical note explaining to the reading public that she and her two younger sisters, Emily and Anne, were the authors, respectively, of Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and Agnes Grey.

More than 150 years and many cultural upheavals later, Emily Brontë’s novel remains almost blindingly original, undimmed in its power to convey the destructive potential of thwarted passion as expressed through the unappeasable fury of a rejected lover. To paraphrase Shakespeare, age cannot wither it, nor custom stale its infinite variety. Every aspect of the novel—whether it be the writer’s expert grasp of the laws pertaining to land and personal property, her meticulous rendering of local dialect, or her use of multiple narrators—has been put under microscopic study. And yet, despite the shelf after shelf of books that have been written in the attempt to understand the frail yet flinty-willed young woman—“the sphinx of literature,” as she was called by Angus M. Mackay in The Brontës: Fact and Fiction (1897)—who wrote it, as well as the tragedy-struck, remarkably talented family from which she came, Wuthering Heights still presents a dark and fierce view of the world that is seemingly without precedent.

The book’s autobiographical components aroused interest from the start, especially given the original mystery surrounding its authorship. Lucasta Miller, in The Brontë Myth, gives an often spellbinding account of the ways in which the Brontës’ “lonely moorland lives” (p. xi) lent themselves to the process of mythification even before the last sister had died. (None of them lived to see forty: Anne died within five months of Emily, at the age of twenty-nine, and Charlotte, the only one of the sisters to marry, was in the early months of pregnancy at the time of her death, at the age of thirty-nine.) But unlike Charlotte, who lived long enough to help shape the myth that would grow up around the Brontës, beginning with Elizabeth Gaskell’s landmark Life of Charlotte Brontë, which appeared in 1857 and for which she was the primary source, Emily wasn’t around to answer for herself. “All of Emily’s biographers have had to cope with the absences surrounding her,” Miller notes (p. 193). The baroque conjectures concerning her character were first introduced by Gaskell’s Life, which included scenes that had Emily pummeling her disobedient bulldog into submission with her bare hands and dramatically cauterizing a bite from a strange dog with a red-hot kitchen iron. Gaskell’s two-dimensional portrait of Emily as kind of savage force of nature, “a remnant of the Titans,—great-grand-daughter of the giants who used to inhabit earth,” held sway for decades, drawing admirers like the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne, whose own provocative impulses (which included a well-documented sadomasochistic bent) were stirred by the novel’s almost pagan quality, its disregard for bourgeois niceties.

The efforts to penetrate Emily’s veils grew even more overheated in the wake of Freud, just as the textual analyses would become more and more exotic in the trail of the new French theories of narrative propounded by Derrida and Foucault. One 1936