Emily Bronte – Wuthering Heights
Wuthering Heights is Emily Brontë’s only novel.
The name of the novel comes from the Yorkshire manor on the moors on which the story centers. The narrative tells the tale of the all-encompassing and passionate, yet thwarted, love between Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw, and how this unresolved passion eventually destroys them and many around them.
The novel is narrated by Mr Lockwood, who also takes a subsidiary role in the action. His housekeeper Nelly Dean, provides a secondary narrative, embedded within his.
Lockwood relates how, in the year 1801 he arrives at Thrushcross Grange, a grand house on the Yorkshire moors that he is renting from the unsociable Heathcliff, also master of nearby Wuthering Heights. Visiting the Heights to greet Heathcliff, Lockwood is treated rudely and coldly by its inhabitants, whose relationships with one another he does not understand. After attempting to leave and being attacked by the household’s dogs, he is forced to stay overnight. In his overnight room he finds the diary of a girl named Catherine Earnshaw, and learns that she was a close childhood friend of Heathcliff. After falling asleep, Lockwood has a terrifying dream of Catherine’s ghost appearing at his window and begging to be let in. As he struggles to keep her out of the room, Heathcliff, awakened by Lockwood’s shouts, enters. Upon hearing of Catherine’s ghost, Heathcliff asks Mr. Lockwood to leave the room and as he stands outside the door, Lockwood hears Heathcliff sobbing and saying, “Oh Cathy, please come in.”
The next morning, after returning to Thrushcross Grange, Lockwood asks the housekeeper, Nelly Dean, to tell the story of Heathcliff, Catherine, and Wuthering Heights. Nelly Dean takes over the narration and begins her story thirty years earlier, when Heathcliff, a “gypsy” from the streets of Liverpool, is brought to Wuthering Heights by the then-owner, Mr. Earnshaw, and raised as his own. Both Earnshaw children, Catherine and Hindley, initially resent Heathcliff, however Catherine and Heathcliff become inseparable. Her brother Hindley continues to hate and physically abuse him seeing him as an interloper and rival for his father’s attention. When Mr. Earnshaw dies three years later, Hindley, by this time married to a woman named Frances, inherits the estate. He brutalises Heathcliff, forcing him to work as a hired hand. Catherine becomes friends with the neighbouring Linton family who live at Thrushcross Grange, who mellow her wild personality. She is attracted to the refined, mild, and young Edgar Linton, whom Heathcliff instantly dislikes.
