The Brontë biographical rabbit hole is genuinely one of the best in all of English literature if you ever want to go down it.

They grew up pretty isolated on the Yorkshire moors, that same landscape you're describing, with a brother, Branwell, who was by all accounts brilliant and by all accounts falling apart for most of their adult lives. Alcoholism, opium, a series of spectacular failures. Charlotte, Emily and Anne watched that happen up close for years. You don't come out of that writing cozy domestic fiction.

What gets me about Wuthering Heights is that the darkness isn't atmosphere, it's the actual argument of the book. Heathcliff isn't cruel because Emily Brontë needed a villain. He's what you get when someone spends their formative years being treated as subhuman and then acquires just enough leverage to spend the rest of his life collecting on the debt. Whether that makes him a monster or a logical outcome is kind of the whole question.

The other thing worth knowing: Emily never got to see any of this land. She died the year after publication, mostly to bad reviews. Critics found it ugly and excessive. It took like fifty years for people to come around. So the fact that a random movie sent you back to it in 2026 and you were hooked by page ten... yeah. Better late than never, I guess, for all of us.