Wuthering Heights and Werther

What is it about?

The proof of a correspondence between an author and another might be philological or intuitive, but the divinatio almost always holds supremacy over the lectio and the editio. The reading of Goethe's Werther very probably influenced the writing of Wuthering Heights: in the famous German novel, Emily Brontë could find kindred images and a similar Stimmung towards nature, God, death and what lies beyond death. Pantheism, which Goethe derived from the study of Spinoza, came thus to the poems and finally to the pages of Wuthering Heights, as the poetical culmination of a life's quest and struggle.

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Why is it important?

It is important because it establishes a well argumented parallelism between some passages of The Sorrows of Young Werhter and Wuthering Heights: pantheistic view, conception of nature, vision of death.