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Literary Passion · Haworth, West Yorkshire

Top Withens (Wuthering Heights inspiration)

The wild, windswept ruin traditionally taken as the setting for the Earnshaw home in Emily Brontë's 'Wuthering Heights' — the most famous doomed passion in English literature. A Brontë Society plaque (1964) notes the buildings never matched her description but the desolate moorland setting 'may have been in her mind'.

StatusLegend
Datenovel 1847; farmhouse 16th c.
The peopleEmily Brontë, Heathcliff (fictional), Catherine Earnshaw (fictional)
The siteRuined farmhouse, Haworth Moor, on the Pennine Way ~3.5 miles SW of Haworth
Coordinates53.81481, -2.02981 (confidence 5/5)

The story

Top Withens, a roofless farmhouse three miles across Haworth Moor, is famous as the setting of Wuthering Heights — and the Brontë Society's 1964 plaque cheerfully admits the building "bore no resemblance to the house she described, but the situation may have been in her mind." It adds: "This plaque has been placed here in response to many inquiries." The link came from Charlotte's friend Ellen Nussey, via a publisher's illustrator in the 1870s, not from Emily. The building described in the novel probably owed more to the demolished High Sunderland Hall. The walk out — along the Pennine Way and Brontë Way, so popular that some signs carry Japanese — gives you the moor, which really was Emily's.

More stories at this spot

A book found in a desk

Some of the contemporary reviews of Wuthering Heights were discovered, after Emily's death, tucked away in her writing desk — she had kept the notices, hostile and admiring alike. She died in December 1848, a year after publication, refusing to see a doctor until the last day. She never knew the novel would outlive every review that wounded her.

Kate Bush and the stone on the moor

In 2018, forty years after her hit "Wuthering Heights," Kate Bush wrote an inscription for a memorial stone to Emily, one of four set between Haworth and the sisters' birthplace at Thornton. Carol Ann Duffy, Jackie Kay and Jeanette Winterson wrote the others. The moor that fed the novels now carries the words of the women it inspired in turn.

Sources

Nearby on the map

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The moor-edge parsonage where three sisters, walking the dining-room table nightly, invented Rochester, Heathcliff and a new voltage of desire in English fiction. Charlotte married her father's curate in the church next door in 1854 — the quietest wedding of the century's most passionate imagination.

Fact & fictionHot spotQueer HeritageShibden Hall (Anne Lister & Ann Walker)Halifax, West Yorkshire · England

Home of diarist Anne Lister, the 'first modern lesbian', who lived openly with Ann Walker; the pair considered themselves married after taking communion together in York in 1834. Lister's coded diaries are a UNESCO Memory of the World record.

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Ashwood Dale's Lover's Leap carried an elopement story and helped sell Buxton's picturesque landscape—the named place is historic, but the lovers belong to folklore.

Legend

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