How Wuthering Heights drew on Paradise Lost
A documented line of influence: Emily Brontë demonstrably engaged John Milton’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
Paradise Lost
John Milton · 1667
RenaissanceThe influenced
Wuthering Heights
Emily Brontë · 1847
The Age of the NovelRelevance
6/10
On Wuthering Heights’s page
- Heathcliff descends from the Romantic Satan of Paradise Lost — proud, magnetic, beyond redemption — reaching Brontë through Byron's Manfred
- The Brontës grew up on Milton; critics from Gilbert and Gubar onward read Catherine and Heathcliff against his Satan and Eve
- Catherine's dream of exile from heaven draws on Milton's map of damnation — read him first and the novel's cosmic stakes come into focus
On Paradise Lost’s page
- Milton was essential reading in the Brontë house — Rev. Patrick considered him indispensable, and Miltonic echoes run through the children's juvenilia
- The Romantic reading of Milton's Satan — proud, magnetic, damned and unrepentant — is the mold Heathcliff is cast in, by way of Byron's Manfred
- Catherine's dream of being flung out of heaven borrows Paradise Lost's geography of exile and damnation