It has nothing at all to do with either ‘history’ or ‘its time’, though, really. It’s basically a gothic story lifted out of Emily and Anne Bronte’s imaginary world, Gondal, which Emily at least went on enthusiastically playing all her life, though Anne seems to have tried to wean herself off it. All the prose they wrote about Gondal has been lost, which must have constituted hundreds of thousands of words, but there are surviving poems and notes — it was a series of intrigues, wars, double-crossings, murders, vendettas etc set on an island with a moors landscape and snow, and powerful, warlike, morally-ambiguous characters, and a longterm love triangle. The women are as violent and passionate as the men, and lead kingdoms, start wars, have affairs etc.
In WH, EB just moved a Gondal type story to Yorkshire and located it more credibly among an ordinary landscape of farms and houses, and gave the characters ordinary names rather than Agustin Geraldine Almeida and Julius Brenzaida. It’s why you have characters vowing revenge, two warring households, mysterious foundlings, digging up people’s graves, starving themselves to death for a ghost etc.