Emily Brontë
British · 19th century
Author of Wuthering Heights and a significant body of poetry. Known for gothic romance, wild moorland settings, and passionate doomed love.
Connection to Taylor Swift
A touchstone for the catalogue’s haunting and doomed-love passages. Community readers map Wuthering Heights onto ivy, casting the narrator as Catherine’s ghost caught between Heathcliff and Edgar Linton, and onto my tears ricochet, which stages the inverse of Heathcliff’s plea to be haunted by the dead Catherine. Brontë’s moorland gothic sits behind the songs where love persists past death.
Notable Works
- Wuthering Heights, Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell
Appears in the Archive
Context within the Archive
Wuthering Heights
“I'd meet you where the spirit meets the bones”
Community readers liken the song's haunted love triangle to Wuthering Heights, casting the narrator as the ghost of Catherine Earnshaw returning to the living Heathcliff while bound to her husband Edgar Linton. The reading gives the song's grave imagery and impossible, deathless attachment a Gothic precedent, and chimes with the catalogue's wider interest in a love that persists past its own ending.
Wuthering Heights
“You know I didn't want to have to haunt you / But what a ghostly scene”
Community readers parallel the speaker's reluctant haunting with Heathcliff's plea in Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff begs the dead Catherine to haunt him rather than leave him alone in her absence. The song stages the inverse arrangement: the haunting is offered, but as accusation rather than as consolation. Catherine's haunting in the novel is presence-as-love; the speaker's here is presence-as-judgement, a fame so total she is literally everywhere the antagonist looks.