Wuthering Heights
A visitor to a Yorkshire farmhouse asks about the household's strange history and is told it by a servant who watched it happen. Emily Brontë layers narrators inside narrators, so that every account of Catherine and Heathcliff arrives already interpreted by someone with an interest in the outcome.
It is not a love story in the usual sense. The book is about possession, inheritance and the way damage is passed down a house, and it refuses to make either central character likeable. That refusal is its strength.
Public-domain status
First published in 1847. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Emily Brontë died in 1848, so this work has been free to republish there since 1919.
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- Jane Eyre — Charlotte Brontë, 1847
- Frankenstein — Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, 1818
- The Picture of Dorian Gray — Oscar Wilde, 1890
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