Jane Eyre vs Wuthering Heights: Which First?

Two sisters, one publishing year, one stretch of Yorkshire moor — and two of the most opposite novels in English. Charlotte's Jane Eyre (1847) is a first-person climb: an orphan governess with no beauty, no money and no intention of bending her conscience. Emily's Wuthering Heights (1847) is passion reported at second hand — love as weather, narrated through two unreliable witnesses across two generations. Choosing between them is really choosing between two kinds of reading pleasure. Both are here with a Jane Eyre quiz, a Wuthering Heights quiz, and full reading-time breakdowns.

The core difference, one paragraph each

Jane Eyre (Charlotte, 1847): the self advances by spine. Orphaned, humiliated, poor, plain, Jane refuses to be either crushed or bought — not by her aunt, not by a sadistic school, not by the employer she loves when his secret surfaces. The novel has gothic machinery (an attic, a fire, a madwoman) but a moral engine: every obstacle is an integrity test, and the famous ending — "Reader, I married him" — is earned, not granted. It is the warmer book, and the more legible one: Jane tells you herself what she thinks, chapter by chapter.

Wuthering Heights (Emily, 1847): the self is weather. Heathcliff and Catherine love each other the way a storm loves a coast — destructively, mutually, beyond reason and beyond death — and everyone around them pays for it for two generations. There is no moral engine and no guide: the story arrives inside a frame (a lodger, a housekeeper) whose tellers both miss the point, and the moors function as the only honest character. It is the stranger, crueller, more hypnotic book — the one readers either finish in a trance or abandon at the second flashback.

Side by side

Difficulty runs opposite to length: Jane Eyre is the bigger book (500 pages) but reads steadily, while Wuthering Heights is shorter and harder — the narration frames and the dialect do the damage, which is why it sits a band higher at Grades 10-12. Structure notes are in the Jane Eyre chapter guide and the Wuthering Heights chapter guide.

Which should you read first?

By temperament, honestly. If you read for a companion: Jane Eyre — a narrator who confides, a plot that moves, justice roughed out in the end. If you read for atmosphere and are unafraid of confusion: Wuthering Heights — nothing else in the century feels like it. If you plan to read both: Jane first. Her conventional spine steadies you for Emily's storm; the reverse order makes Jane Eyre feel tame, which it is not.

For students, the same rule with numbers attached: Jane sits at Grades 9-11, Wuthering Heights at Grades 10-12 — both bands are on the reading levels shelf, and the free reading level test places a real reader in one before you commit 12 hours and 53 minutes to her.

After either one

The household produced one more classic sister: Anne Brontë's Agnes Grey (not yet on this shelf, named honestly). Ours continues with Pride and Prejudice for the courtship-with-stakes line, Frankenstein for the gothic weather, and each Brontë's own most quoted lines and readalike picks.

More classic showdowns

• 1984 vs Brave New World — Control by fear vs control by pleasure — Orwell and Huxley answering one question with opposite mechanisms.
• Animal Farm vs 1984 — The same author twice: a revolution hijacked, and the finished state it becomes.
• The Hobbit vs Lord of the Rings — A children's tale and the epic it grew into: reading order, tone, and the weight of the Ring.
• Frankenstein vs Dracula — The monster you made vs the monster that comes for you — the two founding horror novels.
• 1984 vs Fahrenheit 451 — Fear vs comfort: Orwell's surveillance state against Bradbury's burning one.

Frequently asked questions