In brief
A tenant calls on his landlord in 1801, is set on by dogs, snowed in, and put to bed in a closet where a dead girl tries to climb in at the window. His housekeeper then tells him the thirty years behind it: a farmer brings a foundling home from Liverpool, the foundling grows up with the farmer’s daughter and is degraded by his son, and he comes back with money to destroy both families by lawful means. People remember this as a love story. It contains a love, but the book itself is about what cruelty does to a household and how long it takes to leave.
Read it expecting romance and you meet a hanged dog, a beaten wife, a child dropped over a banister and a girl locked up until she marries a dying boy. Read it expecting only horror and you miss how funny it is, how exact its law is, and how quietly its last chapters repair what the first ones broke.
The argument
Everything starts from one speech, made in the kitchen to Nelly Dean (ch. 9). Catherine has just accepted Edgar Linton and is explaining why this changes nothing. “My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it”, she says, while her love for Heathcliff “resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary.” Then: “Nelly, I am Heathcliff!”
That line is quoted as the height of passion. In context it is also the error the whole plot punishes. She thinks she can marry for rank because Heathcliff is not someone she could lose; he is “my own being”, as permanent as herself. What she has declared is that she does not see him as a separate person with feelings of his own, and at that moment he is behind the settle, hearing the part where it “would degrade” her to marry him. At their last meeting he gives her the verdict: “Why did you betray your own heart” (ch. 15).
The second argument is about inheritance, of damage as much as of land. Hindley brutalises Heathcliff; Heathcliff, given Hindley’s son, sets out to do it again on purpose. “And we’ll see if one tree won’t grow as crooked as another, with the same wind to twist it!” (ch. 17). The experiment nearly works. It fails partly because Hareton turns out to love him, and partly because Heathcliff tires. “I have lost the faculty of enjoying their destruction”, he tells Nelly, and “It is a poor conclusion, is it not” (ch. 33). It is no conversion. He dies saying he repents of nothing (ch. 34). Revenge simply runs out, like a lease.
What replaces it is small. A girl teaches a young man to read, and they plant flowers where the old servant kept his currant bushes. I think the novel means this to be real and also means us to feel how little it weighs against the rocks. It refuses to choose. Its last sentence has Lockwood wondering how anyone could imagine “unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth”, a page after a shepherd boy has wept in terror: “There’s Heathcliff and a woman yonder, under t’ nab” (ch. 34). Lockwood has been wrong about everything since page one.
The shape of the book
It is built in twos: two houses, two generations, two narrators, and a set of children who shuffle the same few names. Catherine Earnshaw’s daughter is Catherine Linton and, for a while, Catherine Heathcliff; the three names Lockwood finds scratched on the window ledge in ch. 3 turn out to be her mother’s possible lives and her own actual ones, read in reverse order. By the end she is about to become an Earnshaw.
The story starts near its end. We see the household of 1801 first, a sullen young widow, a lout and a tyrant, and only then learn how they came to be so. In the first edition the novel filled two volumes, with the division after ch. 14. Catherine dies in ch. 16 of thirty-four, and a good half of the book is still to come. Most adaptations stop there, and readers sometimes feel the book does too. I disagree. The second half is the first played back with its terms changed: an educated girl, a degraded boy who cannot read, a mocking refusal, but this time she apologises.
The time scheme is far stricter than it looks. Few dates are given, but C. P. Sanger showed in 1926 that ages, seasons and days of the week can be worked out and that they hold together. The wild book is carefully engineered.
The voice
Lockwood writes first, and he is a comic creation: a fashionable young man playing at melancholy, who calls the moors “A perfect misanthropist’s Heaven” and imagines he and his landlord are “such a suitable pair to divide the desolation between us” (ch. 1). He misreads who is married to whom, mistakes dead rabbits for pets and is bled on the nose for his trouble. Then, in the dream of ch. 3, he meets the child at the window and something happens that readers often pass over. “Terror made me cruel”, he reports, and rubs her wrist on the broken pane until the blood soaks the bedclothes. The first savage act in the book is done by the polite southerner.
Nelly Dean tells most of the rest, in a shrewd, unhurried voice that is easy to trust. It should not be. She sees Heathcliff slip away before Catherine says the rest of what she feels, and says nothing to him. She keeps things from Edgar, carries letters she disapproves of. Around her come other people’s words, Isabella’s letter from the Heights (ch. 13), Zillah’s report (ch. 30), Heathcliff’s monologues, so that everything reaches us through someone with a stake in it.
Against all this stands Joseph, in Yorkshire so thick that it is half a barrier: “by th’ heart, maister, I cannot stand it!” (ch. 33). Charlotte softened his dialect for the 1850 edition, on the grounds that southern readers could not follow it. The language of the place keeps returning in the figures people use. Catherine warns Isabella that Heathcliff is “an arid wilderness of furze and whinstone” (ch. 10), and the title is glossed with a townsman’s condescension as “a significant provincial adjective” (ch. 1).
What the law allows
The great shock of the book, once you notice it, is that Heathcliff’s revenge is mostly paperwork. He wins Wuthering Heights at cards and by loans: “Earnshaw had mortgaged every yard of land he owned for cash to supply his mania for gaming; and he, Heathcliff, was the mortgagee” (ch. 17). He gets a claim on the Grange by marrying Isabella, then by forcing her niece to marry his son. When Edgar, dying, sends for his lawyer to put Cathy’s money beyond reach, Mr. Green delays: “He had sold himself to Mr. Heathcliff” (ch. 28). And when young Linton dies, Nelly reports the outcome: “The lands, being a minor, he could not meddle with. However, Mr. Heathcliff has claimed and kept them in his wife’s right and his also: I suppose legally” (ch. 30).
That “I suppose legally” is doing a lot of work. A woman with no money and no friends cannot test the point. Sanger was a barrister, and he found the law sound. Arnold Kettle drew the political conclusion: Heathcliff beats the gentry with their own weapons of money and arranged marriage. The demon of the Yorkshire moors is, in the terms of the plot, a successful landlord.
The people
Heathcliff
We never learn who he is. Mr Earnshaw finds him “starving, and houseless, and as good as dumb, in the streets of Liverpool” and says he is “as dark almost as if it came from the devil” (ch. 4). Old Linton guesses “a little Lascar, or an American or Spanish castaway” (ch. 6); Nelly, consoling him, offers “Who knows but your father was Emperor of China” (ch. 7). Liverpool in the 1770s was Britain’s chief slaving port, and critics have read him as African, Irish or Roma. The novel keeps the blank on purpose: he is whatever the people around him need to look down on. His later crimes are real and not excused. The first thing Isabella sees him do on leaving the Grange is “hang up her little dog” (ch. 14), and her question stands: “Is Mr. Heathcliff a man? If so, is he mad? And if not, is he a devil?” (ch. 13).
Catherine Earnshaw
Selfish, funny, violent and wholly alive, she is ruined less by choosing Edgar than by believing she need not choose. Her delirium in ch. 12 is the most frightening writing in the novel: she tears a pillow apart naming the feathers, does not know her own face in the mirror, and longs to be “a girl again, half savage and hardy, and free”.
Nelly Dean
The servant who outlasts them all, and the book’s most contested figure. James Hafley’s 1958 essay called her the villain, which is too much, but you should watch her.
Edgar and Isabella Linton
Easy to despise, which is the trap. Edgar is gentle, loves his wife and nurses her through madness and is treated by her, and by many readers, as weak. Isabella goes after Heathcliff with her eyes shut and writes the clearest account of what living with him is like. She then does the bravest thing in the book, running away across the moor in the snow (ch. 17).
Hareton and the younger Catherine
She laughs at his spelling, and he hits her; she comes round before he does. Their courtship over a book in ch. 32 is the only scene of ordinary happiness in the novel, and it is watched through a window by a man who has no share in it. Hareton’s grief at Heathcliff’s death is the book’s harshest irony: the boy he set out to ruin is the only person who mourns him.
How it was made
Emily Brontë was born at Thornton in Yorkshire in 1818 and spent most of her life at Haworth parsonage, apart from a brief, miserable spell of teaching at Law Hill near Halifax in 1838 and some months in Brussels with Charlotte in 1842. With Anne she had invented the imaginary country of Gondal, and her poems were full of Byronic figures long before Heathcliff. A joint volume of the sisters’ Poems appeared in 1846 and sold two copies.
The novel came out late in 1847 from Thomas Newby under the name Ellis Bell, with Anne’s Agnes Grey as its third volume. Emily died of tuberculosis in December 1848, aged thirty. She left no manuscript of the book and no comment on it. It reaches us with Charlotte’s voice attached: her 1850 edition added a biographical notice and a preface which apologises for her sister in famous words: “Whether it is right or advisable to create beings like Heathcliff, I do not know: I scarcely think it is.” Attempts to find the original of the house, at Top Withens or High Sunderland Hall, are guesses.
Readers and critics
The Atlas called it a “strange, inartistic story” and admitted its “rugged power”. Dante Gabriel Rossetti wrote in 1854 that “The action is laid in hell”, and meant it as praise; Swinburne defended it in the 1880s. For decades it was still taken for an inspired accident.
Sanger ended that in 1926. David Cecil in 1934 proposed the reading that still shapes the discussion, of the Heights as a principle of storm and the Grange as one of calm. F. R. Leavis in 1948 left it out of his great tradition as a “kind of sport”; Q. D. Leavis later read it as a social novel about the end of the old farming culture. Kettle (1951) and Terry Eagleton (Myths of Power, 1975) read it through class, and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar (1979) as a rewriting of Milton’s Fall from a woman’s side. A book with no authorial comment and two biased narrators offers its interpreters little resistance. My own view is that the class readings have the facts and the mythic ones have the feeling, and that Brontë wanted both.
Afterlives
William Wyler’s 1939 film, with Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon, drops the second generation altogether and fixed the public idea of the novel as a doomed romance. Luis Buñuel moved it to Mexico as Abismos de pasión (1954), Jacques Rivette to France in the 1930s (1985), Yoshishige Yoshida to medieval Japan (1988). Peter Kosminsky’s 1992 version, with Juliette Binoche and Ralph Fiennes, keeps both generations. Andrea Arnold’s 2011 film cast a Black actor, James Howson, as Heathcliff. Emerald Fennell’s loose version with Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi followed in 2026.
Kate Bush wrote her song as a teenager and took it to number one in Britain in 1978, sung from the place the novel never lets us stand, Catherine’s ghost outside the window. The best novelistic answers come from far away: Maryse Condé’s Windward Heights (1995) moves the story to the Caribbean, Minae Mizumura’s A True Novel (2002) to postwar Japan, and Caryl Phillips’s The Lost Child (2015) goes looking for Heathcliff’s origins in Liverpool.
How to read it
- Keep a family tree beside you. The names repeat on purpose, and a sketch saves the first hundred pages from confusion.
- Do not stop when Catherine dies. The second half is half the argument.
- Ask who is talking. Lockwood is a fool, Nelly has a side, and Heathcliff’s own account should be weighed like the others.
- Follow the money. Note each mortgage, will and marriage.
- Read Joseph aloud. His dialect opens up when spoken, and he is funnier than he looks on the page.
- Reread the first three chapters when you finish. Nearly every detail of that first visit has changed its meaning.
Read next
- Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847). The same year and the same parsonage, with a heroine who insists on being a separate person, the thing Catherine never quite tries.
- Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848). The third sister on violent husbands and drink, without any glamour, and also told in nested narratives.
- William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! (1936). A man of unknown origin builds a dynasty out of a grudge, and the story reaches us through people who cannot agree what happened.
- Maryse Condé, Windward Heights (1995). The race question the original leaves blank, answered in Guadeloupe and Cuba.