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Books Like Wuthering Heights
Dark Gothic Novels Like Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights is the ur-Gothic of English fiction — Heathcliff's obsessive love, the wild moors, the haunting that outlasts death. These 8 novels share its emotional violence, its refusal to moralize, and its sense that the greatest love is also the most destructive.
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Jane Eyre
by Charlotte Brontë
Published the same year by Emily's sister Charlotte — Jane Eyre is the disciplined, hopeful twin of Wuthering Heights; where Emily's Heathcliff destroys everything he touches, Charlotte's Rochester is redeemable; where Emily refuses all consolation, Charlotte insists on it; reading them together reveals what each is doing by contrast with the other
- 2Buy
Rebecca
by Daphne du Maurier
A narrator haunted by the perfect ghost of her husband's first wife at a Cornish estate — du Maurier's Gothic masterpiece shares Wuthering Heights' preoccupation with a living person overshadowed by a dead one, and with a house that embodies and preserves the past; Manderley is a twentieth-century version of the Heights
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The Picture of Dorian Gray
by Oscar Wilde
A beautiful young man's soul is captured in a portrait that ages while he remains forever young and pursues pleasure without consequence — Wilde's novel shares Wuthering Heights' Gothic preoccupation with a beautiful, amoral figure who destroys the people around them, and its sense that the most intense aesthetic experiences carry a moral price
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Tess of the d'Urbervilles
by Thomas Hardy
Tess Durbeyfield, exploited by Alec d'Urberville and failed by Angel Clare — Hardy's 1891 novel shares Wuthering Heights' uncompromising tragic vision, its refusal of conventional moral consolation, and its sense that the social and natural orders are arranged against the people who feel most deeply; the Victorian novel that is most similar in its emotional violence
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Fingersmith
by Sarah Waters
A Victorian orphan who pickpockets for a living is hired to help con a sheltered heiress out of her fortune — Waters's 2002 novel shares Wuthering Heights' Victorian setting, its Gothic atmosphere, and its dark, obsessive love story, told from two unreliable perspectives that reveal their mutual deceptions; the most acclaimed Gothic thriller of recent years
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Beloved
by Toni Morrison
Sethe, a formerly enslaved woman living near Cincinnati, is haunted by the ghost of the daughter she killed to spare her from slavery — Morrison's Pulitzer Prize winner shares Wuthering Heights' Gothic preoccupation with a dead woman who refuses to stay dead and who dominates the lives of those who loved her; the most important American Gothic novel
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The Master and Margarita
by Mikhail Bulgakov
The Devil visits Soviet Moscow accompanied by a giant cat, a hitman, and a naked witch — Bulgakov's satirical fantasia shares Wuthering Heights' conviction that the most powerful forces in human life are not rational or social but elemental and demonic, and its sense that love and destruction are the same thing at sufficient intensity
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Anna Karenina
by Leo Tolstoy
Anna Karenina's passionate affair with the officer Vronsky destroys her marriage, her reputation, and finally her life — Tolstoy's great tragic novel shares Wuthering Heights' refusal to let its most passionate characters escape the consequences of their intensity, and its understanding that the most vivid love is incompatible with the social structures that contain it
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