Emily BrontF (1818-48) was born in the parsonage at Thornton in Yorkshire and two years later her father became rector of Haworth, also in Yorkshire. Her single novel, Wuthering Heights, is infused with the spirit of the moors around Haworth and the singular nature of the BrontF family's lives and accomplishments have made biography-based criticism the principle approach to their novels. While there is much in the novels of Charlotte and Anne that is clearly derived from their own experience, Emily's great work is less susceptible to this approach. Very little is known about her short life and much of what is known is filtered through the protective, and defensive, Charlotte. Thompson's recent analysis of the role of gender in the initial reception of Wuthering Heights and her critique of the "Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell" that Charlotte appended to the 1850 edition of Wuthering Heights suggest that critical readings of the novel may still be bound by gender and biographical expectations that are not really justified. And Stoneman's comparison of the novel with Shelley's Epipsychidion offers an innovative approach to a freer reading in which various audience expectations are set aside and the critic/reader tries to see the novel plainly. In an open reading that considers Catherine Earnshaw as a woman who rejects conventional thinking about love in favor of a radical, alternative that occurs to her because of her unconventional upbringing with Heathcliff, it becomes possible to see more clearly what it was in this novel that was truly, fundamentally shocking to its contemporaries. The surface level problems of coarse language, brutality, and implications of sexual irregularity did not get at the essence of what was disturbing about the book--that a woman (Emily or Catherine) could conceive of and expect the world to conform to (at least to the extent of taking her suggestions seriously) a notion of love that was de...