Emily Brontë wrote her first and only novel, Wuthering Heights, between October 1845 and June 1846. It was finally published on 14 December 1847 by Thomas Cautley Newby in London. This first edition was a part of a three-volume set: Wuthering Heights took up two volumes, while Agnes Grey by Anne Brontë, Emily’s younger sister, completed the set as the third volume.

Brontë published under the male pseudonym “Ellis Bell” to obscure her gender and retain her privacy. Emily and her sisters desired to be respected and taken seriously as writers, which was not usually extended to female writers in the Victorian era.