Some with more, some with less tragedy, but all guaranteed to scratch that same itch!
Wuthering Heights is one of my favorite books (for reasons you can learn about in my review here) and I’m always searching for stories that will give me a similar feeling. Unfortunately, Emily Bronte wrote just the one book, and anything like it is hard to find. I guess people don’t want to write about obsessed, necrophilic men and incestuous families — who would have thought?
But all jokes aside, I love how sweeping and dramatic Wuthering Heights is, and I love its setting, so I did some reading and rounded up some books that can give you all of those Kathy and Heathcliff vibes, minus the incest and the toxicity. Maybe even minus the tragedy? We’ll see.
And if you don’t want to scroll all the way through the list, here’s a quick overview of my favorite books like Wuthering Heights:
- The Favorites by Layne Fargo — This is literally a retelling of Wuthering Heights but with ice skaters. So, I mean, what are you waiting for?
- Black Silk by Judith Ivory — A widow goes to her husband’s cousin to give him an inheritance and they slowly become fascinated with each other. Much drama, very slow burn!
- The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas — The best revenge story ever written, so if that part of Wuthering Heights is appealing, read this.
- Frankenstein by Mary Shelley — If you love brooding, isolated men and just those same gothic vibes, Frankenstein is your buddy!
- Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier — Read this for the haunted, oppressive and claustrophobic atmosphere akin to the moors of Wuthering Heights.
- Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte — What better to read than Emily Bronte’s sister’s book? It has the same intensity and a similar(ish) atmosphere, but perhaps a little less toxic, mostly because of Jane.
- Lady Audley’s Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon — This book was a sensation when it came out and it shocked people. These days, you can enjoy it for the secrets and the gossip as well.
- Villette by Charlotte Bronte — This is probably the strangest Bronte book, full of longing, isolation, and loneliness. Much sadder than Wuthering Heights, but give it a go for the atmosphere.
- The Tennant of Windfell Hall by Anne Bronte — This is kind of “what would happen if you did marry the broody bad boy” which is to say, awful.
- Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez — A doomed romance that cannot be, but set against a more tropical backdrop. Also, what would happen if Heathcliff just waited for Edgar to die?
- Atonement by Ian McEwan — Want something even more tragic? Try this.
- Ruthless Devotion by Rebecca Kenney — This is a fantasy reimagining of Wuthering Heights, and the drama is even more dramatic.
- What Souls Are Made Of by Tasha Suri — Tasha Suri gave Cathy and Heathcliff an infinitely gentler and more hopeful story in this book, so if that’s what you’re after, this one is your best bet.
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The Favorites
“There are lots of different kinds of love. Love like a steady, warming campfire that keeps you alive in the cold. Love like a raging blaze that burns down everything in its path until nothing but ash remains.”
Kat Shaw and Heath Rocha meet as broke, parentless kids and become an ice dancing duo whose chemistry turns them into champions and eventually a scandal. Told partly through a tell-all documentary and partly through Kat’s own account a decade after their partnership imploded, the book digs into how ambition, love, and control get tangled together when two people build their entire identity around each other.
This book is so addictive because it feels like watching a scandalous documentary and reading someone’s diary at the same time. It’s truly a page-turner, and both main characters have such strong personalities that you’ll like them even when you hate them.
If you want something almost exactly like Wuthering Heights but set in modern times, this is your book.
Black Silk
“She mourned what every human being mourns in the first moments of full adulthood—that even inside a friend’s arms one can be totally, absolutely alone.”
When her elderly husband dies, young widow Submit Channing-Downes is left with one final task: deliver a small bequest to Graham Wessit, the scandal-plagued Earl of Netham her husband once guarded closely. Graham wants nothing to do with the gift or with her but a false paternity suit, a mistress he can’t quite let go of, and a tabloid serial clearly based on his own life keep pulling the two of them back into each other’s orbit.
Black Silk is written beautifully in a way that is so cinematic and mesmerising. The slow burn is so super slow (you shouldn’t expect romantic payoff any time soon), but the tension is so high. Don’t expect perfect characters, though! No one is morally clean in this one (though Submit really wants to think she is), and both Submit and Graham are perfectly imperfect and flawed.
If you want a messy, complicated relationship akin to Cathy and Heathcliff and messy, complicated characters, but with less toxicity and a happy ending, this is the book for you.
The Count of Monte Cristo
“Only a man who has felt ultimate despair is capable of feeling ultimate bliss. It is necessary to have wished for death in order to know how good it is to live…..the sum of all human wisdom will be contained in these two words: Wait and Hope.”
Edmond Dantès is a young sailor with everything going for him (a promotion, a fiancée, a bright future) until a group of jealous men frame him for a crime he didn’t commit and he’s thrown into prison for years. He escapes, claims a hidden fortune, and reinvents himself as the mysterious Count of Monte Cristo to systematically take down every person who wronged him.
I’ll be honest with you — I’ve started this book so many times, and failed every single one. It’s not dense but it is long, and it’s one of those books I know I’ll love, but I need to be in the right mental state to read. It’s a fan-favorite classic and many people say it’s the best book they’ve ever read, so I guarantee you’ll enjoy it.
If what you loved about Wuthering Heights is the tale of Heathcliff’s revenge (but this one mayhaps more earned and satisfying), Count of Monte Cristo is the book for you.
Frankenstein
“I do know that for the sympathy of one living being, I would make peace with all. I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other.”
Victor Frankenstein, obsessed with conquering death, builds a living creature out of dead flesh and then abandons it in horror the moment it opens its eyes. Cast out and unloved, the creature spends the rest of the novel seeking connection and revenge in equal measure, while Victor’s guilt and denial destroy everything he cares about.
With the new movie that came out, I’m sure you heard a lot about it, and saw some romantic scenes as well, but I must warn you that this is not a romance. It’s relatively short and very atmospheric, though, and the atmosphere felt pretty similar to Wuthering Heights to me, so if you want more of that, but less focus on a couple, this is the book for you.
Rebecca
“We can never go back again, that much is certain. The past is still close to us. The things we have tried to forget and put behind us would stir again, and that sense of fear, of furtive unrest, struggling at length to blind unreasoning panic – now mercifully stilled, thank God – might in some manner unforeseen become a living companion as it had before.”
A shy, unnamed young woman marries the brooding, wealthy Maxim de Winter and moves into his estate, Manderley, only to find the memory of his first wife, Rebecca, still controlling the house and everyone in it. The housekeeper’s devotion to her dead mistress borders on obsession, and the new bride spends the novel trying to compete with a ghost.
I’m a big fan of Rebecca and it’s one of my favorite books. Daphne du Maurier creates a chilling, claustrophobic atmosphere, and you can just feel that sense of dread rising with every page (from absolute marital bliss to disaster).
If you want the gothic, atmospheric vibes of Wuthering Heights, but with a mystery and a touch more horror, try this book.
Jane Eyre
“I do not think, sir, you have any right to command me, merely because you are older than I, or because you have seen more of the world than I have; your claim to superiority depends on the use you have made of your time and experience.”
Orphaned and mistreated as a child, Jane Eyre grows into a fiercely principled young governess who takes a position at Thornfield Hall and falls for her enigmatic, secretive employer, Mr. Rochester. Their connection is immediate and intense, but Rochester is hiding something in the house that threatens to destroy everything between them.
Jane Eyre is a far more reasonable heroine than Cathy, and I love how moral and sensible she tries to be throughout. So if you were annoyed by Cathy but want a similar isolated, broody setting (and a similar isolated, broody hero, just put in his place often), Jane Eyre is something you should try.
Lady Audley’s Secret
“The Eastern potentate who declared that women were at the bottom of all mischief, should have gone a little further and seen why it is so. It is because women are never lazy. They don’t know what it is to be quiet. They are Semiramides, and Cleopatras, and Joan of Arcs, Queen Elizabeths, and Catharine the Seconds, and they riot in battle, and murder, and clamour, and desperation. If they can’t agitate the universe and play at ball with hemispheres, they’ll make mountains of warfare and vexation out of domestic molehills; and social storms in household teacups. Forbid them to hold forth upon the freedom of nations and the wrongs of mankind, and they’ll quarrel with Mrs Jones about the shape of a mantle or the character of a small maid-servant. To call them the weaker sex is to utter a hideous mockery. They are the stronger sex, the nosier, the more persevering, the most self-assertive sex.”
Lucy Audley is a beautiful, charming young wife who seems to have the perfect life — until her nephew-in-law starts digging into her past and uncovers a series of buried secrets that could unravel everything. Told with the slow-building dread of a Victorian sensation novel, it’s less about romantic longing and more about the lies people build entire lives on top of.
This is perhaps just as gossipy as The Favorites, and you’ll love it if that’s something you enjoy. It’s very readable and it might tickle you to know it shocked people when it came out. It has the sort of similar sense of “things will go wrong” rising dread and doom, so read this book if that’s what you like.
Villette
“The love, born of beauty was not mine; I had nothing in common with it: I could not dare to meddle with it, but another love, venturing diffidently into life after long acquaintance, furnace-tried by pain, stamped by constancy, consolidated by affection’s pure and durable alloy, submitted by intellect to intellect’s own tests, and finally wrought up, by his own process, to his own unflawed completeness, this Love that laughed at Passion, his fast frenzies and his hot and hurried extinction, in this Love I had a vested interest; and whatever tended either to its culture or its destruction, I could not view impassibly.”
Lucy Snowe, alone and friendless, takes a teaching position in a French boarding school and falls into a quiet, unresolved longing for a man she can’t have.
If you want Wuthering Heights but far sadder and stranger, Villette is a wonderful book to read. I mean, wonderful might not be the right word, but I just love how melancholy this was, how staunchly Lucy wanted to be independent in every sense of the word and keep her walls up, and how much she failed (despite the way she tells the story).
If it helps convince you, Villette (and perhaps all of her books) was inspired by Charlotte Bronte’s own unrequited love for a married Belgian Professor. You can find out more about it here.
The Tennant of Windfell Hall
“I am satisfied that if a book is a good one, it is so whatever the sex of the author may be. All novels are or should be written for both men and women to read, and I am at a loss to conceive how a man should permit himself to write anything that would be really disgraceful to a woman, or why a woman should be censured for writing anything that would be proper and becoming for a man.”
A mysterious young widow named Helen Graham moves into a crumbling estate with her son, fueling local gossip about her past which is slowly revealed through her own journal detailing a disastrous marriage to a charming, dissolute man.
This is not quite like the other Bronte works, but I really loved it. I feel like Helen was the most feminist of all Bronte heroines, and it’s a rare case of a woman managing to escape her abusive husband and living happily after. There’s a brave message of empowerment here, of doing what’s best for yourself (and your children), and perhaps even a rebuttal of her sister’s heroes, a lesson on what happens when you actually do end up with the broody bad boy.
So, if you’re up for that, read this book!
Love in the Time of Cholera
“To him she seemed so beautiful, so seductive, so different from ordinary people, that he could not understand why no one was as disturbed as he by the clicking of her heels on the paving stones, why no one else’s heart was wild with the breeze stirred by the sighs of her veils, why everyone did not go mad with the movements of her braid, the flight of her hands, the gold of her laughter. He had not missed a single one of her gestures, not one of the indications of her character, but he did not dare approach her for fear of destroying the spell.”
Florentino Ariza falls in love with Fermina Daza as a young man, she marries someone else, and he spends over fifty years waiting (through countless other relationships) for the chance to be with her again.
This book takes obsession to the next level. While it’s shown as romantic, the way Florentino waits for Fermina over the years, it’s also a bit much? A bit disturbing? When I was younger, I thought it romantic too, but the older I get the more I squint at it and think “hmm, maybe not?”. Either way, if you want to know what would have happened if Heathcliff simply waited for the feeble Edgar to die instead.
Atonement
“Finally he spoke the three simple words that no amount of bad art or bad faith can ever quite cheapen. She repeated them, with exactly the same slight emphasis on the second word, as though she were the one to say them first. He had no religious belief, but it was impossible not to think of an invisible presence or witness in the room, and that these words spoken aloud were like signatures on an unseen contract.”
Thirteen-year-old Briony witnesses a moment between her older sister Cecilia and their housekeeper’s son Robbie, misunderstands it, and tells a lie that destroys both their lives and keeps them apart for good. The novel jumps forward through WWII and beyond, tracing the long, devastating consequences of that one impulsive act.
This is quite sad and sort of devastating. I’d say if you want even more of a tragedy, but perhaps spurned on by other people and misunderstandings rather than the characters’ own actions, then this is the book for you.
Ruthless Devotion
“No one has ever cared enough to go through this hell with me.”
Cathy Earnshaw has spent her life hiding a supernatural secret. She can sense death coming, and grief sends her into violent episodes. Her small, cultish Southern community that treats her as cursed. Then she meets Heathcliff, a young man stolen as a child and raised by necromancers, who understands her in a way no one else can. Their bond is immediate and consuming, but the town’s buried history threatens to tear them apart.
If you’d like a slightly unhinged, spicy fantasy retelling, I highly recommend this! This author does a lot of these classics-as-fantasy retellings, and you can find one for Dorian Gray, Great Gatsby, and Phantom of The Opera too. All of them equally dramatic and romantic!
What Souls Are Made Of
“But my love for you won’t be this soft thing that fills me up and bleeds more than a heart ever could. It’ll be cold waves, drowning me. And drowning you.”
This YA remix recasts Cathy and Heathcliff as two British Indian teens in 1786 Yorkshire (Heathcliff the abandoned son of a lascar sailor, Catherine the estate owner’s daughter) both cut off from their heritage and drawn to each other as the one place they feel understood. Where the original treats Cathy and Heathcliff’s “we’re the same soul” bond as inevitable tragedy, Suri gives both characters real interiority and a more hopeful arc, using their story to explore identity, belonging, and the racism baked into the original text’s treatment of Heathcliff.
