Wuthering Heights

1Identity & Context

A pseudonymous first novel, rushed into print on the coat-tails of Jane Eyre.

Occasion. In 1845 Charlotte found Emily's poems and pushed the three sisters into print. Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell (1846) sold two copies. Each sister then wrote a novel. Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey were accepted, but Jane Eyre reached print first, in October 1847, and became a sensation. Newby then rushed the other two "Bell" novels out to profit from the name.

2The Author — Brief Note

"Stronger than a man, simpler than a child." — Charlotte on Emily

Emily Jane Brontë (1818–1848) was the fifth of six children of Patrick Brontë, an Irish-born Anglican curate, and grew up in the parsonage at Haworth on the edge of the West Yorkshire moors. Her mother died when she was three. Her two eldest sisters died after time at the Cowan Bridge school, which Charlotte later portrayed as Lowood. Emily left home only for short, unhappy periods: Roe Head, a teaching post at Law Hill near Halifax (1838–39), and Brussels with Charlotte (1842). She died of tuberculosis at thirty, three months after her brother Branwell and about a year after the novel appeared. She is said to have refused a doctor until her last day.

Preoccupations. From childhood she and Anne co-wrote Gondal, an imaginary island kingdom of usurpers, prisoners, doomed lovers, and exiles. Only her poems from it survive. Those poems ("No coward soul is mine", "Remembrance", "The Prisoner") return again and again to a self that refuses consolation, a freedom found only beyond the body, love stronger than death, and nature as an absolute, impersonal force.

Reputation. In the 19th century Emily was overshadowed by Charlotte, and Charlotte's 1850 preface helped make her a myth: an untaught genius who did not fully know what she had made. Modern criticism rejects that view and treats her as a deliberate, highly controlled artist. Many readers now rank her above Charlotte.

3Where It Sits in the Canon

One novel, about two hundred poems, and a lost second book.

Among the sisters' novels it is an outlier. Jane Eyre and Agnes Grey are first-person stories of a governess growing into herself. Wuthering Heights has no central consciousness, no moral education, and no narrator the author endorses. Its real relatives are Emily's own poems.

4Plot & Structure

Two houses, two generations, and a story that begins near its end.

Setting. Wuthering Heights is an old, exposed farmhouse belonging to the Earnshaws. Thrushcross Grange, four miles away in a sheltered park, belongs to the genteel Lintons.

Who's who — the two families

First generation (1771–1784): Heathcliff comes between the Earnshaw siblings, loses Catherine to Edgar Linton, and marries Edgar's sister Isabella out of spite.

The story, scene by scene

Filter by part of the book. Numbers on the left are chapters.

• 1–2Lockwood calls on his landlord. frame — A fashionable southerner rents the Grange and visits Heathcliff at the Heights. He finds a hostile household: a sullen young widow, Cathy; an uneducated young man, Hareton; and the fanatical servant Joseph.
• 3The ghost at the window key scene frame — Snowed in, Lockwood sleeps in an oak-panelled box bed, reads a girl's diary written in the margins of a Testament, and dreams a child's icy hand grips his: "Let me in — let me in!" He rubs her wrist across the broken glass. Heathcliff wrenches open the lattice and sobs: "Cathy, do come… once more!"
• 4The foundling. 1771 — Nelly Dean takes over the story. Old Mr Earnshaw comes home from Liverpool with a dark, ragged child and names him Heathcliff, after a son who had died. Catherine adores him; Hindley hates him.
• 5–7Degradation and the dog-bite. 1777 — Hindley inherits and makes Heathcliff a labourer. Spying on the Lintons, Catherine is bitten by their dog and stays five weeks at the Grange. She comes home a lady.
• 9"I am Heathcliff" key scene 1780 — Catherine accepts Edgar Linton. Heathcliff overhears "it would degrade me to marry Heathcliff" and leaves before she says "he's more myself than I am."
• 10–14The return. 1783 — Three years later Heathcliff comes back rich and polished. He wins the Heights from Hindley at cards and elopes with Isabella to hurt the Lintons. Isabella's letter (ch. 13) describes the abuse that follows.
• 15–16Catherine's death key scene 1784 — A last, savage embrace. She dies after giving birth to Cathy. Heathcliff: "I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!"
• 17Flight and ruin. 1784 — Isabella escapes south and gives birth to Linton. Hindley dies drunk, mortgaged to Heathcliff, who keeps the boy Hareton as a brute.
• 18Thirteen years in one chapter. 1797 — Cathy grows up sheltered at the Grange. After Isabella dies, Heathcliff claims his sickly son Linton.
• 21–26The courtship trap. 1800 — Heathcliff encourages a romance between Cathy and the dying Linton. Married to Linton, Cathy will bring him the Grange.
• 27–28Imprisonment and forced marriage turn 1801 — Heathcliff locks Cathy and Nelly in the Heights and forces the wedding. Edgar dies, then Linton. Heathcliff now owns both houses.
• 29–30Caught up. 1801 — Cathy is left a bitter widow at the Heights: the woman Lockwood met in chapter 1. The flashback has reached the present.
• 31–33A strange change. 1802 — Lockwood returns a year later. Cathy is teaching Hareton to read, and they are falling in love. Heathcliff has lost the will to finish his revenge: "I have lost the faculty of enjoying their destruction, and I am too idle to destroy for nothing."
• 34The open window ending 1802 — Heathcliff stops eating, seems to see Catherine everywhere, and is found dead in the oak-panelled bed with the window swinging open. He is buried beside her; he had earlier bribed the sexton to remove the facing sides of their coffins. Locals see two ghosts on the moor. Hareton and Cathy will marry and move to the Grange. Lockwood, at the graves, "wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth."

The last two entries (the ending) stay hidden until you click a tab: "⚠ Ending" or "All" will show them.

Spoiler-free or full arc?

Spoiler-free: Heathcliff's revenge succeeds. By 1801 he owns both houses, the heirs are in his power, and Lockwood leaves a household frozen in hatred. How does a story that cruel end? Read chapters 31–34 and find out.

Structure: reading order vs. story time

Where the chapters go

Almost half the book covers the second generation, which most adaptations cut.

Nested narration

5Characters

Seen from outside, through what they say and do. Their inner lives show as weather.

6Themes & Key Takeaways

Love as identity, revenge as inheritance, and property behind everything.

Symbols & motifs

The title. The book is named after a house, not a person. The house is buffeted, exposed, and "wuthering", and it holds the whole storm. By the end it has gone back to its rightful heir, and the storm is only weather again.

7Style & Craft

Plain sentences, extreme speech, and no authorial voice at all.

Prose. Clear, hard, and surprisingly plain for so violent a book. The narrative sentences are sober and orderly, while the dialogue is extreme and incantatory. Brontë saves her lyrical writing for set speeches and for nature. Joseph's broad Yorkshire dialect, which Charlotte toned down in 1850, ties the book to an actual place.

Technique. The two layers of narration cool the material, push the passion into the past, and make its truth uncertain. The time scheme is exact and the cast is closed, which gives the book the compression of drama.

Voice. Its only clear signature is the absence of moral commentary. Brontë never steps in to judge, and that alarmed Victorian readers more than anything.

"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!"— ch. 9

Romantic love put in geological terms. The Lintons are seasonal and Heathcliff is bedrock. The comparison is not flattering ("little visible delight") but existential ("necessary").

"I lingered round them, under that benign sky… and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth."— ch. 34, the last sentence

The final word goes back to the obtuse Lockwood. His calm is either a blessing or a last failure to understand, since we have just heard that the ghosts walk.

8Philosophical & Intellectual Analysis

A world run on energies rather than morals.

Worldview. Nature here is not good, as in Wordsworth, and not ruled by Providence, as Joseph believes. It is a field of powerful, impersonal forces, shown without consolation. Brontë's poems suggest a mystic, almost heretical spirituality: a self that goes beyond its body and finds heaven in the earth. Catherine dreams she went to heaven and wept to come home, until the angels flung her "into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy."

Tensions

• The book makes the lovers' bond its most compelling thing, and also shows that bond causing misery across two generations.
• It is a radical critique of property and class, yet it ends by giving the property back to the legitimate heir.
• Its ghosts may be real or may be products of grief. The frame never settles which.

Questions it asks

• Can a person be completed only by someone else, and if so, what does that do to everyone else?
• Is cruelty learned or innate? The novel says learned, but shows how hard the learning is to undo.
• Is peace possible in this life, or only in the grave?

9Reception, Significance & Influence

From "inexpressibly painful" to the canon.

• 1848Baffled reviewers. Douglas Jerrold's: "a strange sort of book — baffling all regular criticism; yet it is impossible to begin and not finish it." The Atlas called it "inexpressibly painful." Five such reviews were found in Emily's writing desk after her death.
• 1850Charlotte's preface. She defends her sister and also apologises for her: "Whether it is right or advisable to create beings like Heathcliff, I do not know: I scarcely think it is."
• 1883Swinburne praises it. Rossetti had already called it "a fiend of a book", with admiration.
• 1916Virginia Woolf sets Emily above Charlotte: "she looked out upon a world cleft into gigantic disorder."
• 1934Lord David Cecil reads it as a cosmic struggle between storm and calm.
• 1939Wyler's film (Olivier, Oberon) cuts the second generation and fixes the romantic image for generations of viewers.
• 1948F. R. Leavis leaves it out of The Great Tradition as "a kind of sport". Q. D. Leavis later gave it a full social reading (1969).
• 1978Kate Bush, "Wuthering Heights", sung in the voice of Catherine's ghost: a UK No. 1.
• 1975–95The theory years. Eagleton, Gilbert & Gubar, and Irish and postcolonial readings make it one of the most theorised novels in English.
• 2011Andrea Arnold's film, the first with a Black Heathcliff. Raw and almost wordless.
• 2026Emerald Fennell's "Wuthering Heights" (Robbie, Elordi). A stylised, deliberately anachronistic erotic version that divided critics and set off a new wave of reading the novel.

Influence & adaptations

10Criticism & Counterpoints

Great atmosphere, or great novel?

11Who Should Read It & How

Short, fierce, and with no moral sermon.

Ideal reader. Anyone interested in passion, cruelty, and how a story's form controls its meaning. It also suits readers who think they dislike Victorian novels.

Prerequisites. None. Keep the family tree above open, because the repeated names (Catherine, Linton, Earnshaw) cause confusion.

• Push through chapters 1–3. Lockwood's confusion is deliberate, and it pays off.
• Read the narrators sceptically. Watch what Nelly does as well as what she says.
• Do not stop at Catherine's death (ch. 16). The second half is where the novel makes its argument.
• Read Joseph aloud. The dialect makes sense once you hear it.

Pairings

12References & Further Reading

Filter by type. All links were checked to resolve, except where noted.

• 1848Contemporary Reviews of "Wuthering Heights" — full texts of the 1847–48 reviews. The best way to feel the original shock.
• essayLit Hub — "Wuthering Heights is a Virgin's Story, and Other Opinions" — a lively survey of 170 years of opinions.
• essayJVC Online — "The Radical Politics of Wuthering Heights" — a short scholarly reading of class and power.
• filmWBUR — review of Fennell's "Wuthering Heights" (2026) — the newest adaptation and what it leaves out.
• redditr/books — Wuthering Heights threads — the never-ending "romance or warning?" argument (search link; Reddit blocks crawlers, so a single thread couldn't be verified).
• forumGoodreads — "Everyone Has Read This but Me" spoiler thread — first-time readers working through Heathcliff and the narrators.
• radioBBC In Our Time — "Wuthering Heights" (2017) — Melvyn Bragg with Karen O'Brien, John Bowen, and Alexandra Lewis. The best 50-minute introduction.
• guideFive Books — expert recommendations — critics and novelists on why it makes their lists.
• guideLitCharts — Wuthering Heights — chapter summaries, theme tracker, and quotations.
• BLBritish Library — Discovering Literature — articles, manuscripts, and first-edition images.
• wikiWikipedia — Wuthering Heights — publication history, reception, and the full list of adaptations.
• wikiWikipedia — Emily Brontë — life, poems, and Gondal.
• textProject Gutenberg — full text — free, public domain.
• museumBrontë Society & Parsonage Museum — the Haworth parsonage, manuscripts, and events.