Of all the books of all the Brontës, this one is the supreme
masterpiece. Charlotte has genius and imagination. She has passion
too. But there is a certain demonic violence about Emily which carries
her work into a region of high and desperate beauty forbidden to the
gentler spirit of her sister. The love of Heathcliff and Catherine
breaks the bonds of ordinary sensual or sentimental relationship and
hurls itself into that darker, stranger, more unearthly air, wherein
one hears the voices of the great lovers; and where Sappho and
Michaelangelo and Swift and Shelley and Nietzsche gasp forth their
imprecations and their terrible ecstasies. Crude and rough and jagged
and pitiless, the style of this astounding book seems to rend and
tear, like a broken saw, at the very roots of existence. In some
curious way, as in Balzac and Dostoievsky, emotions and situations
which have the tone and mood of quite gross melodrama are so driven
inwards by sheer diabolical intensity, that they touch the granite
substratum of what is eternal in human passion. The smell of
rain-drenched moors, the crying of the wind in the Scotch firs, the
long lines of black rooks drifting across the twilight,--these things
become, in the savage style of this extraordinary girl, the very
symbols and tokens of the power that rends her spirit.