Wuthering Heights

Wuthering Heights is the only novel of Emily Brontë, published in December 1847 under the pseudonym “Ellis Bell”, and one of the most extraordinary novels in English. It tells, through two narrators, the story of two families on the Yorkshire moors — the Earnshaws of Wuthering Heights, a bleak, wind-battered farmhouse, and the Lintons of Thrushcross Grange, a gentle, wealthy house in the valley — and of the destructive, transcendent love between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, a dark, wild foundling her father brought home from Liverpool. When Catherine marries the refined Edgar Linton instead of Heathcliff, he disappears, returns rich and transformed, and devotes his life to revenge on both families, extending into the next generation. It is a love story without tenderness, a revenge tragedy, a ghost story, and a study of passion as an elemental force like the moorland wind (“wuthering” is a Yorkshire word for the roaring of a storm).

Its first reviewers were baffled and horrified; one called it “a compound of vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors”. It is now regarded as one of the masterpieces of the novel.

At a glance

The story

In 1801, Mr Lockwood, a fastidious young gentleman from the south who has rented Thrushcross Grange to escape society, calls on his landlord at Wuthering Heights four miles away: Heathcliff, a dark-skinned, gentlemanly but savage man who lives in a grim, comfortless farmhouse with a sullen young widow, the second Catherine (Cathy), and a rough, uneducated young man, Hareton Earnshaw, as well as an old canting servant, Joseph, and a pack of vicious dogs. Everyone seems to hate everyone. Snowed in on his second visit, Lockwood is put to sleep in an old oak-panelled bed in a closet, where he finds names scratched on the window ledge — “Catherine Earnshaw”, “Catherine Heathcliff”, “Catherine Linton” — and a diary of a girl’s childhood written in the margins of old books. In a nightmare he hears a branch tapping at the window, breaks the glass to stop it, and his hand is seized by an icy little hand: a voice sobs “Let me in — let me in! … I’m come home: I’d lost my way on the moor!… It is twenty years… I’ve been a waif for twenty years!” In terror he rubs the child’s wrist against the broken glass until blood soaks the sheets. His cry brings Heathcliff, who, believing himself alone, wrenches open the window and sobs into the storm: “Come in! come in! Cathy, do come. Oh, do — once more!”

Back at the Grange, ill with a cold, Lockwood asks his housekeeper, Nelly Dean, for the history of the family, and her story makes up most of the novel.

Thirty years earlier, old Mr Earnshaw of Wuthering Heights walked to Liverpool and came back with a ragged, black-haired, “dirty, ragged, black-haired child”, found starving in the streets, speaking “some gibberish” — “as dark almost as if it came from the devil”. He named him Heathcliff, after a son who had died. His own children — Hindley, fourteen, and Catherine, six — at first hated the boy; but Catherine soon became inseparable from him. Mr Earnshaw favoured Heathcliff; Hindley hated him and bullied him, and Heathcliff endured blows without complaint, but never forgot. When Mr Earnshaw died, Hindley, now master, returned from college with a wife, Frances, and degraded Heathcliff to a farm labourer, forbidding him education. Heathcliff and Cathy ran wild on the moors together.

One night they spied through the windows of Thrushcross Grange on the spoiled Linton children, Edgar and Isabella, quarrelling over a puppy. Caught by the Lintons’ bulldog, Cathy was bitten and taken in; Heathcliff was sent home as a gypsy ruffian. Cathy stayed five weeks at the Grange and returned a young lady, in fine clothes, and Heathcliff was humiliated. Frances died after giving birth to a son, Hareton; Hindley, maddened by grief, became a violent drunkard and gambler.

Edgar Linton, gentle and refined, courted Catherine, and at fifteen she accepted his proposal. That night, in the kitchen, she confided in Nelly, not knowing that Heathcliff was listening in the shadows. She would marry Edgar because he was handsome, rich and loved her — but in her soul she knew she was wrong:

It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now; so he shall never know how I love him; and that, not because he’s handsome, Nelly, but because he’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same; and Linton’s is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire.

Heathcliff heard her say it would degrade her to marry him — and left before hearing the rest:

My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I’m well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff! He’s always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being.

That night Heathcliff vanished. Catherine searched for him in a thunderstorm, fell ill with fever, and, after recovering, married Edgar three years later and went to live at the Grange.

Six months after the wedding, Heathcliff returned — tall, educated, gentlemanly, mysteriously rich. Catherine was wild with joy; Edgar was jealous. Heathcliff took lodging at Wuthering Heights with Hindley, encouraging his drinking and gambling and winning the mortgage of the Heights. Edgar’s young sister Isabella fell infatuated with Heathcliff; Catherine warned her that he was “an unreclaimed creature… a fierce, pitiless, wolfish man”, but Heathcliff, seeing a means of revenge on Edgar and of claiming the Linton property, encouraged her. When Edgar forbade Heathcliff the house, Catherine locked herself in her room, starving herself in a frenzy, and fell into delirium, tearing feathers from her pillow, seeing her own face in the mirror as a stranger’s, longing for the moors and her childhood: “I wish I were a girl again, half savage and hardy, and free.” Heathcliff eloped with Isabella, hanging her little dog on the way.

Two months later Isabella wrote to Nelly from the Heights, describing her misery and Heathcliff’s brutality: “Is Mr. Heathcliff a man? If so, is he mad? And if not, is he a devil?” Catherine, pregnant and gravely ill, was visited by Heathcliff in a scene of terrible passion; they embraced, accused and forgave each other: “You teach me now how cruel you’ve been — cruel and false… Why did you betray your own heart, Cathy?… You loved me — then what right had you to leave me?” That night Catherine gave birth prematurely to a daughter, Cathy, and died. Heathcliff, waiting all night in the garden, raged at her death and cursed her: “May she wake in torment!… Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living! You said I killed you — haunt me, then!… Be with me always — take any form — drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! it is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!” He dashed his head against a tree. At the funeral he opened her coffin and replaced Edgar’s lock of hair in her locket with his own.

Isabella fled Heathcliff, escaped to the south, and bore him a son, Linton Heathcliff. Hindley died, drunk and ruined, six months after Catherine, and Heathcliff became master of Wuthering Heights, keeping Hindley’s son Hareton in ignorance and degradation, as Hindley had kept him — taking revenge on the son for the father’s cruelty, yet half loving him.

Twelve years passed. Catherine’s daughter Cathy grew up at the Grange, sheltered and loving, high-spirited and impulsive. When Isabella died, Edgar brought home her son, Linton — a sickly, whining, spoiled boy — but Heathcliff immediately claimed him and took him to the Heights. Heathcliff’s plan was to marry Linton to Cathy, so that, when Edgar died, the Grange would pass through Linton to himself.

Cathy, at sixteen, met Heathcliff on the moors and, despite her father’s prohibition, began a secret correspondence and friendship with her cousin Linton, now an invalid, petulant and cowardly. When Edgar fell gravely ill, Heathcliff lured Cathy and Nelly to the Heights, locked them in, and forced Cathy to marry the dying Linton, keeping her prisoner while her father lay dying. She escaped in time to see her father die. Heathcliff, as Linton’s guardian, had already got his son to make a will in his favour. Linton soon died, uncared for, leaving everything to his father. Heathcliff was master of both the Heights and the Grange, and Cathy, widowed at seventeen, penniless, lived at the Heights as a virtual prisoner, sharp-tongued and contemptuous of the illiterate Hareton.

Nelly’s story ends there, in the winter of 1801. Lockwood, recovered, visits the Heights once more, observes Cathy mocking Hareton’s efforts to read, and leaves for London.

In 1802, passing through the district, Lockwood calls again and finds everything changed. The Heights is open and full of flowers; Cathy is teaching Hareton to read, and they are in love. Nelly tells him the last part of the story. Heathcliff had grown strange: he no longer cared for his revenge. When he had the means to destroy both families, “I have lost the faculty of enjoying their destruction, and I am too idle to destroy for nothing.” He saw Catherine everywhere — in Hareton’s eyes, which were hers, and in everything: “The entire world is a dreadful collection of memoranda that she did exist, and that I have lost her!” He had bribed the sexton to open her coffin when Edgar was buried beside her, to look on her face once more, and arranged that he would be buried with the side of his coffin and hers removed, so that their dust would mingle. He stopped eating, wandered at night, and seemed to be seeing something invisible with fierce joy. One morning Nelly found him dead in the oak-panelled bed, the window open and swinging, the rain beating in, his eyes open and fixed in a “frightful, life-like gaze of exultation”. He was buried beside Catherine.

The country folk say Heathcliff walks the moors with a woman. A little shepherd boy weeps because “there’s Heathcliff and a woman, yonder, under t’ nab” and his sheep will not pass. Cathy and Hareton are to marry on New Year’s Day and move to the Grange. Lockwood visits the three graves on the slope by the moor:

I lingered round them, under that benign sky: watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.

Themes

Love. The love of Catherine and Heathcliff is unlike any other in Victorian fiction: not courtship, tenderness or companionship, but an absolute identification of two souls (“I am Heathcliff”), associated with childhood freedom and the wild moors, and incompatible with social life, marriage and even with physical union. It continues after death. Readers have debated whether it is the novel’s ideal or its catastrophe — a transcendent passion or a destructive egotism.

Revenge. Heathcliff’s revenge, pursued with chilling intelligence through law, property and marriage, makes him a monster; yet the novel lets us understand its roots in the humiliation he suffered as a child. In the end the revenge exhausts itself: Heathcliff loses the will to destroy, and the second generation, Cathy and Hareton, achieve a gentler love that redeems the first.

Nature and culture. The two houses form a symbolic opposition: Wuthering Heights — exposed, stormy, primitive, passionate — and Thrushcross Grange — sheltered, civilised, refined, weak. Catherine’s tragedy is that she tries to belong to both. Lord David Cecil famously described the novel as a conflict between the principles of “storm” and “calm”.

Class and race. Heathcliff, a foundling of unknown origin, “dark-skinned gipsy in aspect”, perhaps Irish (the novel was written during the Famine, when starving Irish poured into Liverpool), perhaps of African or Lascar descent, is degraded to a servant because of his origins, and rises by acquiring money and property. Terry Eagleton read the novel as a study of class conflict and capitalism.

Structure. The double narration — Lockwood’s urban, obtuse incomprehension and Nelly’s partial, opinionated, sometimes unreliable telling — keeps the passion at a distance and leaves its meaning open. Its chronology and legal details are meticulously precise.

Reception and afterlife

Early readers found the novel savage and immoral; Charlotte’s 1850 preface defended it as the product of a rustic, unworldly genius. Later critics — Swinburne, Virginia Woolf, F. R. Leavis (who at first excluded it from his “great tradition” as “a kind of sport”), J. Hillis Miller — established it as a masterpiece. It has been filmed many times (William Wyler’s 1939 version with Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon; Andrea Arnold’s 2011 version with a Black Heathcliff; Emerald Fennell’s 2026 version), turned into an opera and ballet, and immortalised in Kate Bush’s song “Wuthering Heights” (1978), sung in Cathy’s ghostly voice at the window.

In conversation

• “I am Heathcliff” — love as total identity with another.
• A Heathcliff — a brooding, passionate, vengeful romantic outsider.
• “Let me in!” — the ghost at the window; the past that will not stay buried.