Reading List

Authors Like Emily Brontë

In the autumn of 1845 Charlotte Brontë found her sister Emily's poetry notebooks at Haworth Parsonage and read them without asking. Emily was furious, but the discovery led to Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell (1846), which the sisters paid for themselves and which sold two copies. A year later, in December 1847, Thomas Cautley Newby published Wuthering Heights by “Ellis Bell” in the same set as Anne's Agnes Grey. Twelve months after that Emily was dead, at thirty, having refused a doctor almost to the end. One novel and a body of poems is the whole of it — and in February 2026 Emerald Fennell's film, with Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, sent a new generation of readers back to that one novel. What they come for is not romance in the comfortable sense: it is love as a force that destroys, a landscape that behaves like weather inside the characters, and a writer who never once explains or apologises. The writers below share at least one of those things — the family that made her, the moor as a state of mind, or the refusal to make obsession nice.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · The Brontës · Gothic · Landscape as fate · Updated October 2026

Quick answer

If you love Emily Brontë, start with her sisters: Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre for the same intensity with a narrator who survives it, and Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall for the same unsparing eye turned on a marriage. For the moor as fate, read Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native. For the gothic that came after, Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca. And for the most surprising answer, the 2026 Nobel laureate Anne Carson, who wrote a whole long poem about reading Emily.

10 authors like Emily Brontë

01
The sister who survived

Charlotte Brontë

English · b. 1816 · Novelist

Charlotte was the eldest surviving Brontë sister and the only one to live into her thirties. Jane Eyre, published as by “Currer Bell” in October 1847, was a success two months before Wuthering Heights appeared. After Emily's death she edited the 1850 second edition of Wuthering Heights and wrote the preface that fixed the image of her sister as a solitary, untaught genius of the moors — an image biographers have since questioned.

The obvious next book, and rightly so: Jane Eyre has the same heat, the same isolated house and the same love that will not be reasoned with. The difference is direction. Emily's people are consumed by what they feel; Jane walks away across the moor and comes back on her own terms. Reading the sisters side by side shows how much more extreme Emily's choices were.

— Lisanne

Every book by Charlotte Brontë →

02
Emily's closest companion

Anne Brontë

English · b. 1820 · Novelist

Anne was the youngest Brontë and Emily's closest companion; as children the two invented the imaginary kingdom of Gondal and kept writing about it into adulthood. Agnes Grey was published alongside Wuthering Heights in December 1847. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (June 1848), about a woman who leaves a violent, alcoholic husband, sold strongly; after Anne's death Charlotte declined to let it be republished, calling its subject “an entire mistake”.

Wildfell Hall is the book that most directly answers Wuthering Heights. Both are framed by a male narrator, both are full of drink and violence in a remote house, but Anne refuses to make the brutal man romantic. If Heathcliff fascinated and troubled you in equal measure, this is the novel that takes the trouble seriously.

— Lisanne

Every book by Anne Brontë →

03
The first biographer

Elizabeth Gaskell

English · b. 1810 · Novelist and biographer

Gaskell was a friend of Charlotte Brontë's in her last years, and after Charlotte's death in 1855 she was asked by Patrick Brontë to write her life. The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857) became the founding text of the Brontë legend, and drew threats of legal action that forced passages to be withdrawn and a public apology in The Times. Her own novels, including Mary Barton and North and South, are about class and conscience in industrial England.

Read Gaskell for the family, not for a matching novel. The Life is where most readers' picture of Haworth, the moors and the sisters' isolation comes from, and it is a vivid, partisan book that should be read as both a source and a story. Her fiction is warmer and more social than Emily's, which makes the contrast useful.

— Lisanne

Every book by Elizabeth Gaskell →

04
The other Emily

Emily Dickinson

American · b. 1830 · Poet

Dickinson lived almost all her life in her family's house in Amherst, Massachusetts, and published only a handful of poems in her lifetime; the first collection appeared in 1890, four years after her death, edited by Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. She admired Emily Brontë's poetry and quoted it in her letters. At her funeral in 1886, Higginson read Brontë's “No Coward Soul Is Mine”.

If it is the poems rather than the novel that hold you, Dickinson is the nearest voice: a woman writing alone in a family house about death, faith and the soul's independence, with no interest in being understood by her neighbours. Both are better poets than their reputations as recluses suggest, and both are at their best when they are most defiant.

— Lisanne

Every book by Emily Dickinson →

05
The heath as fate

Thomas Hardy

English · b. 1840 · Novelist and poet

Hardy set his novels in “Wessex”, a fictional version of the south-west of England where he was born. The Return of the Native opens with a long chapter on Egdon Heath before any character appears. After the hostile reception of Jude the Obscure (1895) he wrote no more novels and spent the rest of his life writing poetry.

The closest English novelist to Emily on landscape. Egdon Heath does in Hardy what the moor does in Wuthering Heights: it outlasts everyone, shapes what they want and punishes them for wanting it. Eustacia Vye, restless and contemptuous of the place that holds her, is a near relation of Catherine Earnshaw.

— Lisanne

Every book by Thomas Hardy →

06
The gothic, a century on

Daphne du Maurier

English · b. 1907 · Novelist

Du Maurier set most of her fiction in Cornwall, where she lived for most of her adult life. Rebecca, about a young second wife overshadowed by the dead first one at Manderley, is often read as a homage to Jane Eyre; in 1960 she published a biography, The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë. Rebecca has long been compared with Carolina Nabuco's Brazilian novel A Sucessora (1934), and du Maurier faced a plagiarism suit in the US over it in 1947; she denied copying, and the Nabuco claim has never been proven.

If it was the atmosphere you loved — the house that seems to hold a grudge, the dead woman who refuses to leave — du Maurier is the writer who carried it into the twentieth century. Her moorland novel Jamaica Inn is the closer match on landscape; Rebecca is the closer match on obsession.

— Lisanne

Every book by Daphne du Maurier →

07
The answer from outside

Jean Rhys

Dominican-British · b. 1890 · Novelist

Rhys was born in Roseau, Dominica, and moved to England as a teenager. After Good Morning, Midnight she published nothing for twenty-seven years, until Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), which tells the early life of Bertha Mason, the first Mrs Rochester of Jane Eyre, as a Creole heiress in Jamaica. It won the W.H. Smith Literary Award in 1967.

The Brontës read critically rather than worshipfully. Rhys writes to Charlotte, not Emily, but her subject is Emily's too: a passionate, outcast figure whose wildness the English house cannot hold. Heathcliff is also a foundling of unknown origin brought into an English family, and Wide Sargasso Sea makes it hard to read either novel innocently again.

— Lisanne

Every book by Jean Rhys →

08
The counterpoint

Stella Gibbons

English · b. 1902 · Novelist

Cold Comfort Farm sends a sensible young Londoner, Flora Poste, to stay with her doom-laden relatives on a Sussex farm and has her tidy up their passions. It parodies the rural novels of Mary Webb and Sheila Kaye-Smith, and includes a pretentious writer, Mr Mybug, who is working on a theory that the Brontë sisters' novels were written by their brother Branwell. It won the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize in 1933.

The book to read when you want to see the whole tradition from the other side. Gibbons takes the brooding family, the curse on the farm and the elemental passions that run from Wuthering Heights through its imitators, and lets common sense loose on them. It is very funny, and it makes clear how rare the real thing is.

— Lisanne
09
The Victorian, rewritten

Sarah Waters

Welsh · b. 1966 · Novelist

Waters wrote a doctorate on lesbian and gay historical fiction before publishing Tipping the Velvet (1998). Fingersmith, a Victorian crime novel set between a London thieves' den and a remote country house, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, as were The Night Watch and The Little Stranger, a haunted-house novel set in a declining Warwickshire estate after the Second World War.

The contemporary novelist who writes most fluently in the Brontës' register: shut-up houses, unreliable narrators, desire that the household cannot admit to. Fingersmith has the plot twists and the cruelty; The Little Stranger has the house that seems to want its family gone. Both share Emily's habit of letting you decide what was real.

— Lisanne

Every book by Sarah Waters →

10
Reading Emily now

Anne Carson

Canadian · b. 1950 · Poet and classicist · Nobel 2026

Carson is a Canadian classicist and poet, born in Toronto, whose books mix verse, essay and translation. “The Glass Essay”, the long opening poem of Glass, Irony and God (1995), follows a woman visiting her mother on a northern moor after a break-up and thinking her way through it by rereading Emily Brontë. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in October 2026.

The best modern piece of writing about what it is like to read Emily Brontë. Carson treats Wuthering Heights and the poems not as romance but as a record of someone surviving solitude and loss without consolation, and sets them against her own. Read it after the novel; it changes what you remember of it.

— Lisanne

Every book by Anne Carson →

Where to start if you loved Emily Brontë

If you want the same intensity, read Charlotte Brontë.

Jane Eyre: the moor, the locked house and a heroine who chooses to live.

If Heathcliff troubled you, read Anne Brontë.

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is the sister's answer, without the romance.

If it was the moor you loved, read Thomas Hardy.

The Return of the Native, and its first chapter on Egdon Heath.

If you want it read freshly, read Anne Carson.

“The Glass Essay”, in Glass, Irony and God: a modern woman on a moor, rereading Emily.

Frequently asked questions about authors like Emily Brontë

Who should I read if I love Emily Brontë?

Her sisters first: Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre and Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, both published within a year of Wuthering Heights. For the landscape, read Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native; for the gothic house and obsessive love, Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca. For the poems, Emily Dickinson and Anne Carson's “The Glass Essay”.

What books are like Wuthering Heights?

Jane Eyre and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall are the closest, written by her sisters in the same house. Daphne du Maurier's Jamaica Inn and Rebecca share the isolated house and the dangerous attachment. Hardy's The Return of the Native does the most with landscape, and Sarah Waters's Fingersmith is the best modern novel in the same register.

Did Emily Brontë write any other novels?

No. Wuthering Heights (1847) is her only novel; she died in December 1848, a year after it was published. She also wrote around two hundred poems, some published in the 1846 Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, and many connected to Gondal, the imaginary kingdom she invented with Anne.

Which Brontë sister should I read after Wuthering Heights?

Charlotte if you want the same heat with a heroine who survives it; Jane Eyre is the obvious next book. Anne if Heathcliff troubled you: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall describes a violent, drinking husband without romanticising him, and was considered shocking when it appeared in 1848.

Is the 2026 Wuthering Heights film faithful to the book?

Emerald Fennell's film, released on 13 February 2026 with Margot Robbie as Catherine and Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff, is a free adaptation rather than a faithful one. The casting of a white actor as Heathcliff was criticised, since the novel describes him as dark-skinned and of unknown origin. The book is shorter, stranger and more violent than any adaptation has managed.

What are some modern books inspired by the Brontës?

Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) retells the life of Bertha Mason from Jane Eyre. Anne Carson's “The Glass Essay” (1995) is a long poem about rereading Emily Brontë. Sarah Waters's Fingersmith (2002) and The Little Stranger (2009) take the gothic house into new periods, and Stella Gibbons's Cold Comfort Farm (1932) parodies the whole tradition.

Footnotes

  1. Emily Brontë — Wikipedia
  2. The Brontës: No Coward Souls — Emily Dickinson Museum
  3. T.W. Higginson, Preceptor — Emily Dickinson Museum
  4. The Life of Charlotte Brontë: the aftermath — Gaskell Society
  5. The Glass Essay — Wikipedia
  6. Nobel Prize in literature goes to Canadian poet and essayist — CTV News
  7. Wuthering Heights (2026 film) — Wikipedia
  8. Cold Comfort Farm — Wikipedia

List last reviewed 15 October 2026.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. Every comparison here is a judgement about method and subject, not an algorithmic match. See more on her personal bookshelf.

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