Books like Wuthering Heights
What should you read after Emily Bronte’s novel? It depends on what you loved most about it.
- Emily Bronte
- 1847
- Gothic classic
What did you love about it?
Choosing one reorders everything below.
Best books to read after Wuthering Heights
Ranked overall. Pick what you loved above to re-rank them.
Best overall matchJane Eyre
Charlotte Bronte
The sister novel in every sense — same year, same house-on-the-moors gothic, same conviction that love is a moral crisis rather than a comfort.
- The moors as a character
- Love that destroys people
- Class and inheritance
- Jane holds her own line
Worth a look — with a warningPride and Prejudice
Jane Austen
Here for the same reason Bronte read it and disliked it: the money, the marriages, the sheer weight of what a family estate does to people's choices.
- Class and inheritance
- Love that destroys people
- No darkness at all
Best for the gothic hauntingRebecca
Daphne du Maurier
Du Maurier learned this book by heart: a house that will not let go of a dead woman, a husband with a locked past, and a narrator being quietly consumed.
- Ghosts at the window
- Love that destroys people
- Narrators you can't quite trust
- Twentieth-century setting
Great matchTess of the d'Urbervilles
Thomas Hardy
Hardy shares Bronte's central belief: landscape and class conspire against people, and there is no earthly authority interested in fairness.
- Class and inheritance
- The moors as a character
- Love that destroys people
- Bleaker with no revenge
Worth a look — with a warningGone with the Wind
Margaret Mitchell
A selfish woman, a man who matches her, and a love that ruins both across a collapsing society — the same architecture, at enormous length.
- Love that destroys people
- Class and inheritance
- The moors as a character
- Racist depiction of slavery, unignorable
Best for the gothic dreadDracula
Bram Stoker
Told, like Bronte's, entirely through documents by people who cannot see the whole picture — and built on the same fear of a dark outsider entering an English household.
- Narrators you can't quite trust
- Ghosts at the window
- A hero who is not good
- A monster novel, plainly
Great matchGreat Expectations
Charles Dickens
A boy raised beneath everyone, a girl trained to break him, and a benefactor whose money turns out to be a trap. The Wuthering Heights plot in a Dickens key.
- Class and inheritance
- Revenge across two generations
- Love that destroys people
- Comic warmth throughout
Best for a hero who is not goodThe Picture of Dorian Gray
Oscar Wilde
A study in what happens when a beautiful person is freed from consequence. Heathcliff without the moors, and with far better dialogue.
- A hero who is not good
- Love that destroys people
- Class and inheritance
- Wit replaces raw feeling
Best for the third BronteThe Tenant of Wildfell Hall
Anne Bronte
Anne's answer to her sister: the same Yorkshire, the same ruinous man, but written as an unsparing account of what living with him actually costs.
- Love that destroys people
- Narrators you can't quite trust
- A hero who is not good
- Moral rather than mythic
Great matchFrankenstein
Mary Shelley
An abandoned creature who returns to destroy the family that rejected him, narrating his own case with terrible clarity. Heathcliff's argument, made explicit.
- A hero who is not good
- Narrators you can't quite trust
- Revenge across two generations
- Ideas foregrounded over feeling
Best for love across generationsThe Thorn Birds
Colleen McCullough
A forbidden attachment that no one can act on, deforming a family over fifty years on a station in the Australian outback. Same wound, different continent.
- Love that destroys people
- The moors as a character
- Revenge across two generations
- Big, comfortable saga reading
Best for a lighter toneNorth and South
Elizabeth Gaskell
The northern industrial landscape, the proud difficult man, the arguments about class — all present, and nobody ends up digging anyone up.
- Class and inheritance
- The moors as a character
- Love that destroys people
- Far gentler in temperament
What should you read after Wuthering Heights?
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte works on several levels at once, and which book you should read next depends on which of those levels got you. For most readers the closest match is Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte — the sister novel in every sense — same year, same house-on-the-moors gothic, same conviction that love is a moral crisis rather than a comfort.
If what stayed with you was class and inheritance, read Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen instead: here for the same reason Bronte read it and disliked it: the money, the marriages, the sheer weight of what a family estate does to people's choices. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier is the other strong option — du Maurier learned this book by heart: a house that will not let go of a dead woman, a husband with a locked past, and a narrator being quietly consumed.
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