Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1847)

Catherine Earnshaw tells the housekeeper she once dreamed of heaven and woke sobbing with joy to find herself flung back onto the heath, because heaven was not her home. _Wuthering Heights_ is built from that same matter, the moor and the rock rather than the drawing room, and then forced to live among people who want it tamed. Heathcliff is a foundling brought home to the Heights and raised there, degraded into a servant once his protector dies; Catherine, who says plainly that he is her own soul, marries the gentler Edgar Linton anyway and ruins them both. He comes back rich and patient, and spends what is left of his life destroying two families with the cold method of a man nursing a wound that never closed. Emily Brontë wrote only this novel, then died at thirty. No book in English has ever made love and hatred so hard to tell apart, or wanted heaven less.