I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will” Jane Eyre.

“The wind I hear it sighing, with autumn’s saddest sound; withered leaves all thick are lying, as spring-flowers on the ground. This dark night has won me to wander far away; old feelings gather fast upon me.”

The Complete Poems of Emily Bronte Volume 1

The present splendid brotherhood of fiction-writers in England, whose graphic and eloquent pages have issued to the world more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists and moralists put together, have described every section of the middle class from the “highly genteel” annuitant and fundholder who looks upon all sorts of business as vulgar, to the little shopkeeper and lawyer’s clerk. And how have Dickens and Thackeray, Miss Brontë and Mrs Gaskell painted them? As full of presumption, affectation, petty tyranny and ignorance; and the civilised world has confirmed its verdict with the damning epigram that it has fixed to this class that “they are servile to those above, and tyrannical to those beneath them.”

Karl Marx: The English Middle Class

Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) stands as a significant novel in English literature, deserving of detailed analysis for its emotional and psychological complexity as well as its social themes. Paul Bond notes in a review of Emerald Fennell’s new film adaptation that Wuthering Heights reveals “an almost organic expression of this devastating personal impact which has definite social roots in property relations.” This view is essential for a comprehensive understanding of Brontë.[1]

Emily Brontë (1818–1848) stands out as a significant figure in English literature. An important question for any detailed biography is: how did a daughter of a clergyman, largely living in solitude on the Yorkshire moors, create Wuthering Heights? This novel wields deep emotional and social influence and continues to engage readers nearly two centuries later. As Bond observes, the novel’s main strength lies in its “wild intensity” and “almost organic expression of devastating personal impact, rooted in social property relations.” Wuthering Heights is more than a gothic romance or a story of doomed love; it is a novel where love, cruelty, ambition, and destruction are intricately connected to land ownership, social class, and social exclusion.

Heathcliff’s tragedy extends beyond psychology. As a child, he specifically envies Edgar Linton, saying, “I wish I had light hair and fair skin, and was dressed, and behaved as well, and had a chance of being as rich as he will be.” His vengeance involves property issues, mortgage debt, strategic marriage, and inheritance schemes. Brontë insightfully recognised that in bourgeois society, passion and property are closely linked rather than opposites.

The Danger of Biographical Reduction

Deborah Lutz’s focus on Emily Brontë’s life to understand her work is insightful. However, it risks falling into the trap of literary biography, which often explains a work through the author’s psychology or personal details, reducing a great novel to a reflection of its creator’s inner world. This approach is individualist and idealist. In contrast, a materialist perspective asks different questions: What historical and social circumstances made Wuthering Heights possible? What was the Brontë family’s social class? They were educated and cultured but faced economic insecurity, were dependent on the church, and lived amid the rough industrial capitalism of the West Riding of Yorkshire. What did Emily observe about the harsh changes capitalism was bringing to the English countryside and its inhabitants during the 1830s and 40s?.

Lutz’s earlier research on Brontë certainly deserves attention. Her two publications on Brontë form part of Victorian studies that concentrate on either “material culture” or “thing theory.” While this perspective offers significant benefits, it also faces limitations when detached from class analysis. Lutz’s “Paperwork” essay provides valuable insights and, in some respects, exemplifies a genuinely materialist approach to scholarship. By analysing physical elements of Emily Brontë’s writing, such as the cost of paper in the 1830s and 1840s, the rag trade, the underdeveloped paper industry, and the tax on paper that wasn’t lifted until 1860, Lutz connects Brontë’s poetic expression to tangible economic factors. The Brontës were not working in a detached, artistic realm; instead, they operated amidst material shortages. Small scraps, recycled Latin exercise pages, and meticulous handwriting all mirror these material conditions.[2]

The paper’s main components were linen and cotton rag, with persistent rag shortages increasing costs; the manuscript’s link to the rag-and-bone trade and working-class clothing provides solid historical context for good literary scholarship. For instance, Charlotte’s concern that her “The Professor manuscript” might be reused as lining in leather trunks or butter barrels highlights the vulnerability of intellectual work within capitalism, even among Victorian middle-class authors.

Lutz’s concept of “thing theory,” along with material culture studies, haptic reading, and phenomenology, remains firmly rooted in bourgeois academic discourse. It focuses on objects and their meanings but does not fully explore the social relations involved in their creation. Collectors and workers gathered raw materials, such as rag cloth, which were processed into paper at early industrial sites, including paper mills. The challenges faced by the Brontës were not only personal or aesthetic; their status as daughters of a clergyman living in Haworth also shaped them. In this industrial region of Yorkshire, the wool trade had already transformed the landscape and affected the lives of the working class.

The article “Relics and Death Culture’ highlights Terry Eagleton’s Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Brontës* (1975), which is arguably the most comprehensive analysis of the Brontës so far. Eagleton views Heathcliff’s transformation from a social outsider to a vengeful landowner through the lens of the conflicts between early capitalism and bourgeois values. Myths of Power is among the most frequently referenced works of Marxist criticism in the Anglo-American academic world. It warrants serious consideration and critique. While it offers valuable insights into class contradictions in the Brontë novels, its broader theoretical framework aligns with Althusserian structural Marxism, ultimately distorting both the literary works and the Marxist approach it claims to represent.

The most significant contribution of the book is its argument that understanding the Brontës requires considering the unique social and historical context of mid-19th-century England. This includes the struggles between agrarian and industrial capitalism, the unstable status of the lower gentry and middle classes, and how ideas of personal passion and romantic ideals helped to interpret and obscure those economic and social conflicts.

Eagleton’s interpretation of Wuthering Heights is particularly insightful. He sees Heathcliff as a symbol of the contradictions within a capitalist system that produces its own monsters: brutalised by the class system as a foundling, Heathcliff then exploits the logic of property and wealth accumulation to exact revenge on those who degraded him. As Paul Bond pointed out in his critique of Emerald Fennell’s flawed film adaptation, Brontë’s deep passion often manifests in complex ways through themes of land ownership and household dynamics — aspects Fennell, aimed at a narrow upper-middle-class audience, completely misses. Eagleton, however, understands this. He views Emily Brontë’s novel not as a timeless romantic story but as a piece deeply rooted in real class conflicts and brutality, to borrow Bond’s words. On this crucial issue, Eagleton is largely correct, and his analysis surpasses the more simplistic liberal-humanist criticism that previously dominated academia.

However, this is where the critique must become more precise. Althusser explicitly influenced Eagleton’s 1975 theoretical framework, drawing on Louis Althusser’s structuralist reinterpretation of Marxism, his concept of “ideological state apparatuses,” and his idea of literature as a practice that creates a particular “aesthetic effect” by revealing ideology at its boundaries. This framework introduces a significant distortion into what might otherwise have been a straightforward historical-materialist criticism.

Althusserian Marxism was not a step forward from orthodox Marxism but a step back. By viewing ideology as a relatively independent “level” of social structure governed by its own internal logic rather than the conscious actions of individuals in specific historical contexts, Althusser disconnected literature from the real class struggles. In Eagleton’s interpretation, this results in a critique that is formally Marxist but essentially structuralist: texts are examined as systems of signs and ideological conflicts, while the actual historical context—such as the particular stage of English capitalism, the working-class political movements, and the social struggles over religion, gender, and reform that shaped the world of the Brontës falls into the background.

Lutz’s “thing theory” offers an alternative perspective, highlighting the non-commodity nature of relics and their resistance to circulation. However, this approach serves more as a complement than a replacement. Eagleton’s core argument is that Wuthering Heights reflects the tensions and brutalities of a society in transition to capitalism, and that the intense, destructive love between Catherine and Heathcliff can only be understood in light of these social contradictions.[3]

One aspect of the “Paperwork” essay that warrants further thought is its treatment of Brontë’s secrecy and isolation. Lutz carefully describes how Brontë concealed her poems, even from her sisters, in a tiny script “meant to conceal even as it revealed,” and how the small size of the writing served as a form of privacy. This is a significant and compelling point. However, a Marxist perspective would question: what social conditions compelled an exceptionally talented woman to hide her inner life so completely? The Brontë sisters had to publish under pseudonyms  Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell to avoid potential dismissal. Emily’s intense privacy was not merely a personal eccentricity or aesthetic preference; it was influenced by the societal position of women in Victorian bourgeois society, their exclusion from public intellectual participation, and their confinement to domestic roles. The “prison house” of the body, a recurring motif in Brontë’s poetry, was not merely a romantic or mystical image; it also embodied the tangible social restrictions women faced in mid-19th-century England.

Lutz’s The Life of Emily Brontë extends this materialist-biographical approach across Brontë’s whole life, centred on what Lutz calls the “nine objects” of The Brontë Cabinet (her 2015 work). This is a richly researched and readable approach to biography, and it avoids the worst tendencies of romantic mythologization to which Brontë biography is prone. But the limitation remains: the social and class framework stays underdeveloped. The Haworth that the Brontës inhabited was a specific place in a specific moment of capitalist development, the factory system, Chartism, and the condition of the working class in Yorkshire, and this context appears only at the periphery of Lutz’s scholarship.

What Makes The Brontës Endure

Wuthering Heights is rooted not only in a harsh landscape but also in a real social world marked by class division and savagery, which must be reflected in the passions of our everyday lives. It, therefore, stands as a genuine and remarkable work of art. Should this benchmark be applied to any biography of Emily Brontë? Does it help us understand how a real person, shaped by specific material and social circumstances, created a piece of art that surpasses those conditions and resonates with universal human experience? The reader needs to ask whether Lutz’s biography meets this standard by situating Brontë’s remarkable inner life within the tangible context of Victorian England, including its class conflicts, treatment of women, religious hypocrisies, and economic instability among the educated poor. If it does, then it warrants serious engagement. Conversely, if it indulges in romantic myths about a solitary genius communing with nature, it will reveal less about Brontë than her novel already does.

The Brontë Sisters

The Brontë sisters—Charlotte (1816–1855), Emily (1818–1848), and Anne (1820–1849) hold a unique place in English literary history. Rather than serving as passive defenders of Victorian society, they acted as its passionate, often anguished critics. Viewing their work through a Marxist lens does not reduce it to merely sociological commentary; instead, it highlights why their art remains profoundly impactful: because it reflects, whether consciously or not, the genuine social contradictions of their era. Moreover, their greatest works explore universal truths about human experience that go beyond the specific context of their time.

The Brontës wrote during the 1840s, a decade characterised by revolutionary upheaval across Europe and severe social crisis in Britain. The Chartist movement, the first large-scale working-class political movement, was challenging the foundations of the British establishment. Ireland faced famine, while the Industrial Revolution generated immense wealth and profound poverty simultaneously. In 1854, Karl Marx recognised this social unrest in literature, noting that Charlotte Brontë, along with Dickens, Thackeray, and Gaskell, produced work that reveals more political and social truths than all the speeches of politicians, publicists, and moralists combined.

The Brontës were neither aristocrats looking down on society nor comfortably bourgeois. They were the daughters of a Yorkshire clergyman, forced into the fragile and humiliating role of governesses—educated women with refined sensibilities who had to sell their intellectual labour in households that viewed them with barely concealed disdain, neither fully servants nor equals. This sense of class ambiguity, caught between refinement and labour, permeates all their writing.

Charlotte Brontë and Jane Eyre

Jane Eyre (1847) fundamentally explores the dignity and independence of an individual who has nothing, no family, property, or social standing, in a society that judges worth solely on those criteria. Jane, an orphan, is sent to a charity school where harsh religious piety disguises cruelty. Her later role as a governess places her in a socially vulnerable position, which Charlotte experienced in her life. The novel is “rich with sharp social critique and disdain for the hypocrisy of organised religion and for social norms that corrupt genuine human relationships”, created during a period marked by mass strikes and Chartist protests that challenged the British political system.

The governess’s role highlights a broader social contradiction: while educated women are rising, they are still prevented from gaining independent economic power due to bourgeois property systems. Jane’s famous statement, “I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will,” is not merely romantic. It represents a rebellion against Victorian societal norms that viewed women as the property of their fathers, brothers, or husbands. Charlotte’s novel underscores that this rebellion is justified. Jane’s moral integrity, inner life, and independence are valued more than Rochester’s inherited wealth and social rank.

The novel doesn’t fully resolve this contradiction. Jane inherits wealth and marries Rochester, becoming equal again through the divine destruction of his past life. Charlotte wasn’t a socialist, and we shouldn’t interpret her as such. Yet, her strong focus on Jane’s human dignity, along with her sharp critique of class hypocrisy, the parasitic aunt, the sadistic clergyman, the sycophantic social climbers, embodies a rebellious intensity that explains why the book has been adapted into film more than twenty times. Such passionate depictions of injustice remain compelling across generations.

The Brontës wrote from a specific social background, the provincial petty bourgeoisie, daughters of a clergyman on the Yorkshire moors, and their work thoughtfully explores issues of social constraint, passion, moral independence, and the oppressive influence of class society on personal growth. Wuthering Heights, especially with Heathcliff’s origins in poverty and his revenge against the class system that harmed him, reflects significant social tensions that deserve deep literary-historical analysis.

The Pseudo Lefts and the Brontë sisters

A genuine Marxist view of the Brontës emphasises the historical and class factors that shape their work. This includes the effects of the Industrial Revolution in northern England, the strict constraints faced by educated women of their social class, and the tension between Romantic individualism and Victorian social norms. Rather than simply portraying them as proto-feminist icons for identity politics, a common approach among the pseudo-left, it’s important to analyse their literature in its historical context. The Socialist Workers Party’s (SWP) cultural coverage often focuses more on political trends, such as feminism and anti-racism, than on literary analysis. True appreciation of great literature requires understanding it within its historical framework and recognising its universal, enduring artistic value, guided by the Marxist tradition of thinkers such as Mehring, Plekhanov, Trotsky, and others.

The Socialist Workers Party’s portrayal of the Brontë sisters, detailed in the article “The Brontë sisters strove to be judged on their own terms,” exemplifies the pseudo-left’s approach to culture. Instead of genuinely engaging with the literary and historical significance of the Brontës’ work, the SWP primarily depicts them as women fighting against male bias, reducing three of Victorian England’s most renowned writers to symbols supporting a modern identity-politics agenda. The sisters are portrayed as proto-feminist tools in today’s cultural conflicts—rather than as complex artists shaped by their specific historical and social contexts, whose work must be appreciated for its full complexity and depth.[4]

They engage in what could be described as “the worst kind of narrow-minded, ahistorical moralising.’ The Brontës wrote during the 1840s, a decade marked by revolutionary upheavals across Europe, the same period when the Communist Manifesto was published, and Chartism reached its zenith in England. The West Yorkshire moors were not just an isolated, romanticised countryside; they were adjacent to industrial towns and symbolised the struggles of capitalism’s rise. Viewing their work solely as a narrative of gender oppression fails to recognise the broader social and historical contexts that imbue it with greater significance.

When the SWP discusses the Brontës, it’s not truly about them. Instead, it reflects the SWP’s own concerns and frustrations, using three deceased Yorkshire writers as a convenient mirror. Had the Brontës been studied earnestly, they would have been more beneficial to the working class than to the SWP’s aims. Trotsky valued literature highly and believed that great art, even from writers without revolutionary views, could elevate the human experience and expand understanding. The SWP, with its shallow focus on identity politics and political allegiance to Labour, cannot engage in this way. It reduces the complexity of the Brontës’ work to a simple morality tale, women versus patriarchy, that conveniently aligns with its current political stance. This diminishes both the Brontës’ legacy and the interests of the working class.

Emily Brontë’s ‘Wuthering Heights’ is one of the most socially charged novels in English. The story centres on Heathcliff, a foundling of likely Irish or Romani origin, rescued from the streets of Liverpool, whose life is wrecked by a rigid class system that strips him of status and keeps him apart from Catherine. His quest for revenge embodies the anger of the oppressed, a fierce rebellion against the wealth-based social order. The novel is less about romance and more about how a class-based society corrupts and destroys individuals. Understanding this core is essential, and no focus on ‘gender’ or identity politics can replace it.

Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre presents a layered exploration of independence. Jane’s notable assertion, “I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will”, is often seen as a feminist statement today. However, it is rooted in a complex social context: Jane’s independence is continually influenced by her class status as a governess, one of the most precarious roles in Victorian society educated yet without property, neither servant nor lady. Charlotte’s own life experience informed her understanding of this contradiction. Anne Brontë, often the most neglected of the three, wrote The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, a direct, unflinching account of a destructive marriage and a woman’s struggle for legal and economic independence. It was considered so scandalous that Charlotte suppressed its republication after Anne’s death to understand why requires understanding the property laws and social structures of the time, not merely projecting contemporary feminist categories backwards.

Emily Brontë and Wuthering Heights

Charlotte’s work is immediately social in tone, whereas Emily’s explores deeper themes. Wuthering Heights (1847) remains one of the most outstanding novels in English literature. Its intense passions are not isolated but are linked to property, social class, and inheritance in every aspect. The emotional core of Heathcliff and Catherine’s relationship cannot be understood without its social context. Catherine’s decision to marry Edgar Linton rather than Heathcliff is not merely a betrayal of love; it reflects a preference for social status over genuine feelings, ultimately damaging both.

Emily excels at showing how capitalist property systems, such as land ownership, estate inheritance, mortgages, and foreclosures, are not just backgrounds but vital to human passion. Heathcliff’s revenge is carried out through property dealings: he acquires Wuthering Heights through Hindley’s gambling debts and employs marriage alliances to control Thrushcross Grange. The personal and societal are deeply intertwined.

What makes Wuthering Heights so difficult to simplify or shallowly adapt, as in Fennell’s version, is that Emily neither romanticises passion nor the social structures that distort it. The novel demonstrates “hope in the possibility” of a better future, without suggesting such hope is easily within reach. Fennell’s mistake highlights that by stripping away the novel’s exploration of property relations, class dynamics, and the second generation of characters—who reveal Heathcliff’s self-destructive vengeance—the adaptation reduces the story to mere “adulterous hot sex” and “sado-masochistic sexual cruelty.”

What sets Brontë apart from a sentimental romantic novelist is her firm stance against letting passion escape its social boundaries. Catherine’s well-known statement — “he’s more myself than I am… if all else perished, and he remained, I should continue to be, and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger” — is not just romantic fancy. It reflects a love born under social marginality and class conflict, a connection built to defy Edgar Linton’s comfortable, property-owning respectability. Nonetheless, Catherine also marries Edgar, knowing that “it would degrade her” to marry Heathcliff — not due to lesser love, but because social class restricts living outside its rules. Brontë here understands something that pure romance overlooks: the tragic distortion of human beings shaped by social forces beyond their control.

The second half of the novel, often overlooked in adaptations, is just as important. It shows Heathcliff’s revenge reaching its final stage, with the younger characters (Hareton, Cathy, Linton Heathcliff) caught in the same social cycle. Brontë reminds readers that “primordial passion plays out often inarticulately in the mechanics of land ownership and household establishment,” as Bond notes. Even the ending—where Heathcliff’s desire for revenge wanes and Hareton and young Cathy find a tentative hope—is not purely about redemption. As Bond explains, it is a “novel of hope in the possibility” that human relationships can go beyond brutality—though not guaranteed, it offers a glimpse.

We should honestly acknowledge the limits of the Brontës’ social perspective. They were not advocates of socialism or revolution. Their critique of class society is primarily moral rather than structural. The resolution in their novels usually points to a reformed or tempered bourgeois society, such as marriages between equals and personal redemption, rather than a radical overhaul of social relations that create inequality. They did not, and could not, articulate the collective action of the working class. The Chartist movement, shaking Britain at the time, appears only as a backdrop, not as a social force they recognised as significant.

This is not a condemnation; it is a recognition of the historical horizon within which they worked. The Marxist tradition has always insisted that even artists who do not consciously embrace a revolutionary perspective can produce works of great social truth when they are genuinely committed to depicting reality. Engels himself said that Balzac, a legitimist and Catholic, taught him more about French society than all the historians and economists combined, precisely because his artistic honesty compelled him to depict the contradictions of his world even against his own political sympathies. The same is true of the Brontës: their artistic integrity and their refusal to prettify the cruelties of class and gender in Victorian England produce works of enduring power.

The Brontë sisters are more than just great writers; their brilliance is deeply linked to their social context and their honest confrontation with it. The enduring relevance of their work—evidenced by how often Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre are adapted into films, studied, and widely debated—lies in their ability to portray the genuine human toll within a society driven by property, class, and the subjugation of women. This reflects “a real world of class distinction and savagery that must find reflection in the passions of our daily lives.” The conflicts they identified remain unresolved; in fact, they have worsened and spread under mature capitalism. That is why their work remains relevant today.

From a Marxist standpoint, Wuthering Heights is a work of critical realism in the tradition that Engels admired in Balzac: an author who, regardless of her conscious intentions, captures the real social forces and contradictions of her time with pitiless honesty. Brontë had no programme of social transformation, but she had the artist’s ability to perceive and render the devastation that class society inflicts on human beings — their loves, their psychologies, their possibilities. She shows us a world where the most profound human connection is crushed not by fate or natural evil, but by property, inheritance, and class power. That is an achievement of lasting significance, and it is why the novel remains, as Bond writes, “visceral and astonishing… rooted not just in a brutal landscape, but in a real world of class distinction and savagery that must find reflection in the passions of our daily lives.”

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[1] Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights: Is this all that we can expect?

[2] Emily Brontë’s Paper Work-Deborah Lutz Victorian Review

Vol. 42, No. 2 (Fall 2016), pp. 291-306 (15 pages)

[3] Relics of Death in Victorian Literature and Culture- Cambridge University Press 2015

05 January 2015

[4] socialistworker.co.uk/reviews-and-culture/the-bronte-sisters-strove-to-be-judged-on-their-own-terms/