Wuthering Heights
Emily Brontë
Wuthering Heights
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A farmer brings home a foundling from the Liverpool streets and calls him Heathcliff, and two families on the Yorkshire moors spend the next forty years living with the consequences. Told at second hand by a housekeeper to a tenant who can make little sense of what he is being told, it is a story of love that behaves like a grievance and of children who inherit both.
About the book
Published in 1847 under the name Ellis Bell, Wuthering Heights is told through layered narration, chiefly by the housekeeper Nelly Dean to the outsider Mr Lockwood. Her account reaches back to the arrival of the orphan Heathcliff at Wuthering Heights and his upbringing alongside Catherine and Hindley Earnshaw. Emily Brontë sets the novel between two neighbouring households whose contrasting manners and fortunes shape the characters’ choices. Catherine and Heathcliff’s fierce attachment exists beside questions of class, inheritance and belonging, and the story follows how private injuries can spread through families. The remote moorland setting reinforces the novel’s atmosphere of confinement and emotional extremity.
Characters
Heathcliff — Protagonist
An orphan brought to Wuthering Heights whose fierce attachment to Catherine is shaped by exclusion and pride.
Catherine Earnshaw — Earnshaw daughter
A passionate and wilful young woman raised with Heathcliff at Wuthering Heights.
Edgar Linton — Thrushcross heir
The refined heir of Thrushcross Grange, whose manners and social position contrast sharply with Heathcliff.
Nelly Dean — Narrator
A long-serving housekeeper whose memories provide most of the history related to Mr Lockwood.
Mr Lockwood — Frame narrator
A tenant at Thrushcross Grange who asks Nelly to explain the strange household at Wuthering Heights.
Hindley Earnshaw — Catherine’s brother
Catherine’s older brother, deeply hostile to Heathcliff and conscious of his own position in the family.
Isabella Linton — Edgar’s sister
Edgar’s sheltered younger sister, fascinated by Heathcliff despite the hostility surrounding him.
About the author
Emily Brontë (1818–1848) was an English novelist and poet who published one novel and died at thirty. Wuthering Heights appeared in 1847 under the pen name Ellis Bell and baffled its first reviewers, who found its violence and its refusal to take sides shocking; it is now read as one of the strangest and most durable novels in English. She lived almost her whole life at the parsonage in Haworth, on the Yorkshire moors the book is set in. Her poems, written privately and discovered by her sister Charlotte, are considered the finest of the three sisters'.