Wuthering Heights

• 1. Introduction

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  Wuthering Heights is the only novel Emily Brontë ever published, and it first appeared in 1847 under the pen name Ellis Bell. One early review, in Graham's Lady Magazine, reacted with open horror. The critic asked how a human being could have attempted "such a book as the present without committing suicide before he had finished a dozen chapters." Today the same book is counted among the greatest novels written in English.

  The story unfolds across two upland estates on the West Yorkshire moors. Their landowning families, the Earnshaws and the Lintons, are bound together by turbulent relationships with the Earnshaws' foster son, Heathcliff. Love, possession, revenge and reconciliation drive the plot, and the mood owes a great deal to Romanticism and Gothic fiction.

  Three questions run beneath that plot. Who is actually telling the story, and how far can that voice be trusted? Why do two houses matter so much to a tale about people? And is this a love story at all, or something much harder to name?

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• 2. Stories Within Stories

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  In 1801, a man named Mr Lockwood rents Thrushcross Grange in Yorkshire and calls on his landlord, Heathcliff, at a remote moorland farmhouse. He has come to the district to escape society. The household he meets is sullen and inhospitable, and snow forces him to stay the night. In his borrowed room he finds the diary entries of a former occupant, Catherine Earnshaw. He then dreams that a ghostly Catherine is begging to come in through the window. His yells wake the house, and Heathcliff is distraught.

  Chapter 4 is where Lockwood hands the story over. He has fallen ill, and while he recovers, his housekeeper Ellen Dean, known as Nelly, tells him the history of the strange family. The result is a frame story. Lockwood describes his meeting with a mysterious household living in near isolation, and Nelly's inner story covers the two families across the previous two generations. In all, the novel uses five or six narrators, including short passages told by Heathcliff, Isabella and another servant.

  In his 1958 essay "The Villain in Wuthering Heights," the critic James Hafley made a startling claim about Nelly. In his view she only seems like the moral centre of the book because the world she describes is so unstable and violent. He argued that she is the true villain. By selectively revealing or hiding what others are doing, she drives most of the conflicts, and by the end she appears to be in control of both houses.

  Nelly has the standing to be believed. She has served three generations of the Earnshaws and two of the Lintons. Catherine, Heathcliff and Isabella all confide in her, though Edgar does not. Lockwood is no safer a guide. The author has been described as sarcastic toward him, since he fancies himself a world-weary romantic but comes across as an effete snob.

  The layered telling is a convention borrowed from the Gothic novel, where a narrator like Nelly makes events seem more mysterious and more exciting. She also ends up with a grim practical duty. She arranges Edgar's burial alongside Catherine, as his will requires, and Heathcliff later asks her to perform the same service for him.

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• 3. Two Houses

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  Lockwood gives the first description of the house. He explains that "wuthering" is "a significant provincial adjective, descriptive of the atmospheric tumult to which its station is exposed in stormy weather." He judges the strength of the north wind from "a range of gaunt thorns all stretching their limbs one way, as if craving alms of the sun."

  The house stands high on the Pennine moorland of West Yorkshire, and the date 1500 appears on the lintel over its door. The Earnshaws, an ancient farming family, have held it since before that date, though they are not gentry. Their farm has several tenants and is prosperous enough to send a son to university.

  Thrushcross Grange belongs to a different world. It is a modern house inside a walled and landscaped park, and beyond the park lies an extensive estate with several tenanted farms. The Lintons raise their children to be well-behaved and sophisticated.

  In 1934, Lord David Cecil described the Heights as "the land of storm," the home of "fiery, untamed children of the storm." The Grange, by contrast, stands "sheltered in the leafy valley below," the home of "the gentle, passive, timid Lintons." Walter Allen, writing in 1954, read the two houses as symbols of "two opposed principles which... ultimately compose a harmony." David Daiches, in a 1965 edition, called Cecil's reading "persuasively argued" but not fully acceptable. The 2002 Oxford Companion to English Literature says the ending points to a union of "the two contrasting worlds and moral orders represented by the Heights and the Grange."

  Virginia Woolf thought the weather in the Brontë sisters' books did real work. She wrote that their storms, their moors and their summer weather "carry on the emotion and light up the meaning of the book."

  There is no evidence that either house copies a real building, but readers have hunted for models. Ellen Nussey, a friend of Charlotte Brontë, proposed Top Withens, a ruined farmhouse near the Haworth Parsonage, though its structure does not match the novel. High Sunderland Hall, near Law Hill in Halifax, is another candidate. Emily worked there briefly as a governess in 1838, but the demolished hall was too grand for a farmhouse. Ponden Hall is reputed to be the model for the Grange, since Brontë visited often, yet it resembles the farmhouse more closely. Helen Smart prefers Shibden Hall, at Northowram in Halifax parish.

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• 4. The Foundling

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  Returning from a trip to Liverpool, Mr Earnshaw brings home an orphan boy and names him Heathcliff. The farmer had made the 60-mile journey on foot, rather than take a horse away from the harvest. Nobody at the Heights knows where the child came from.

  The family describes him as "like a gipsy." Mr Linton, the neighbour, wonders aloud whether he is a Lascar, a term for Indian or Malaysian sailors working for the East India Company, or perhaps an American or Spanish castaway. Mr Earnshaw says he is "as dark almost as if it came from the devil." Nelly Dean answers with a fancy of her own: "Who knows but your father was Emperor of China, and your mother an Indian queen?"

  The text offers only fourteen very brief references to his appearance, and they pull in different directions. He is a "dark-skinned gipsy" with "black eyes," yet at another moment he is "as white as the wall behind him."

  The novelist Caryl Phillips suggests Heathcliff may have been an escaped slave. He points to the way the boy is called "it," the way his single name "served him" as both Christian name and surname, and the way Mr Earnshaw is referred to as "his owner." Brontë had already named characters that way in her Gondal writings. Maja-Lisa von Sneidern holds that "Heathcliff's racial otherness cannot be a matter of dispute," and she notes that by 1804 Liverpool merchants handled more than eighty-four percent of the British transatlantic slave trade. Others reply that no enslaved people were held in Liverpool itself, that gypsies are officially designated white in the UK, and that his description fits the Dark Irish, which was Terry Eagleton's conclusion. Michael Stewart calls Heathcliff's race "ambiguous" and argues that Brontë deliberately left a "missing hole in the narrative."

  Critics have also struggled to give him a type. Some have called him a Byronic hero, but he reinvents himself at several points in the book, so no single label holds. His lack of status is underlined by the fact that Heathcliff is both his given name and his surname.

  The character may owe something to Branwell Brontë. Branwell was an alcoholic and an opium addict, and crises of delirium tremens a few years before his death terrorised Emily and Charlotte. Heathcliff has no such addictions, but the likely influence is there all the same.

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• 5. Land and Law

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  Heathcliff leaves Gimmerton as a penniless labourer and returns three years later with the wealth and manners of a gentleman, and with legal expertise besides. Edgar still refuses at first to admit him to the family rooms at Thrushcross Grange. Catherine, both angry and amused, mocks Edgar's fussiness about rank. She proposes two tables in the parlour, one for the "gentry," meaning Edgar and Isabella, and one for the "lower orders," meaning herself and Heathcliff.

  The critic Q.D. Leavis placed Lockwood's arrival in 1801, when the old rough farming culture was about to be challenged by social and cultural change. By 1847 the Industrial Revolution dominated much of England, especially West Yorkshire. An expanding, upwardly mobile middle class was creating a new standard for what made a gentleman. The Marxist critic Arnold Kettle reads the novel as a symbolic picture of the class system, with its concern for property, marriage, education and status. He notes that Heathcliff turns his enemies' own weapons against them, namely money and arranged marriages. Terry Eagleton explored the same power struggles in his 1975 book Myths of Power.

  Hindley Earnshaw supplies Heathcliff's first opening. Hindley gambles and drinks heavily, and Heathcliff feeds the habit until he becomes mortgagee of the Earnshaw estate. Hindley had let him return, first because he paid generous rent, and later in the hope of winning his money back. When Hindley dies, his son Hareton inherits an estate heavy with debt. Hareton cannot take control of it while the mortgage sits with Heathcliff, and he can read only his own name.

  The Lintons' land is tied up by a different device. Mr Linton settled Thrushcross Grange by entail, under the trusteeship of the family lawyer, Mr Green. Edgar held only a life interest, and the estate was meant to pass to his eldest son. He had only a daughter, so the line turned to Isabella and her eldest son, Linton Heathcliff. Linton and Cathy married but had no children, so the entail ended with his death. The estate then reverted to old Mr Linton and passed by intestate succession to Cathy.

  Mr Green proves a weak protector. Edgar tries to shield his personal property and Cathy's marriage portion by placing them in trust, but the attorney lets him down. He also does not attend Edgar's deathbed wish to change his will. Heathcliff later claims a lifetime right to the Grange through the common law right of curtesy, based on his marriage to Isabella. On his deathbed, Linton is pressed to leave his personal property to his father, but a minor cannot leave land by will, so the Grange cannot go to Heathcliff that way.

  Heathcliff himself dies at 38 without a will and with no next of kin, which in theory sends his estate to the crown. In practice the bulk of his wealth is unlikely to be lost to the crown. Cathy and Hareton legally own the Grange and the Heights, yet neither can challenge Heathcliff alone, since she is a minor and he lacks education. As Linton's widow and Edgar's daughter, Cathy can be recognised by the ecclesiastical courts as executrix, with the power to choose Hareton as her co-executor.

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• 6. Love or Cruelty

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  A 2007 British poll named Wuthering Heights the greatest love story of all time. Some admirers disagree and call it an exploration of evil and abuse. Helen Small manages to hold both views, calling it one of the greatest love stories in English and also one of the most brutal revenge narratives. Other critics say that reading it as romance glamorises abusive men and goes against Brontë's clear intent.

  The case for love rests on a line from Chapter IX. Catherine says she loves Heathcliff "because he's more myself than I am." She adds, "Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same." Lord David Cecil took this to show that the deepest attachments rest on similarity. Simone de Beauvoir, writing in The Second Sex in 1949, saw something more troubling. She argued that Catherine's own world collapses, "for she really lives in his." To Beauvoir this was "the fatal mirage of the ideal of romantic love."

  The book itself seems wary of the romantic reading. Heathcliff's first appearance shows him as a nasty bully. When Isabella elopes with him, he sneers that she acted "under a delusion" and was "picturing in me a hero of romance." Isabella is nineteen when she marries him. She is abused verbally and physically, kept a prisoner in the house, and eventually escapes to London while pregnant with their son.

  Critics have long remarked on the absence of sex between Catherine and Heathcliff. In 1850 the poet and critic Sydney Dobell wrote that "we dare not doubt Catherine's purity." Swinburne spoke of their "passionate and ardent chastity." Elizabeth Hardwick called the novel a "virgin's story" and described the lovers' bond as "a longing for an impossible completion." Terry Eagleton goes further and suggests the two are unknowing half-siblings, which would explain an unconscious fear of incest.

  Catherine dies hours after giving birth to her daughter, and Heathcliff rages, calling on her ghost to haunt him. Years later, Cathy and Hareton find love after a reconciliation, and Heathcliff drifts into fixation on the dead woman. He stops eating and is found dead in Catherine's old room. Locals report seeing the two ghosts together on the moors. Lockwood seeks out the graves of Catherine, Edgar and Heathcliff, lying side by side, and is convinced that all three are finally at peace.

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• 7. Gothic Inheritance

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  Emily Brontë had an unusually strong classical education for a woman of her time. She knew Greek tragedy and was a good Latinist, and Milton and Shakespeare shaped her deeply. Echoes of King Lear, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth and Hamlet run through the book. Her father also read the Leeds Intelligencer and Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, which opened the Brontë children to world affairs. The debate on evolution launched by Robert Chambers in 1844 probably reached her too.

  Closer to home were the tales that Patrick Brontë collected from parishioners about the doings of people around Haworth. According to Charlotte's friend Ellen Nussey, these stories "made one shiver and shrink from hearing." They were full of grim humour and violence, and Emily took them "as a truth."

  The biographer Juliet Barker points to Walter Scott's Rob Roy of 1817 as a significant model. That novel is set among the quarrelsome Osbaldistones, and Cathy Earnshaw resembles its heroine Diana Vernon, who is equally out of place among her boorish relations. Byron was another presence. The Brontës discovered him through an article in Blackwood's in August 1825, the year after his death. From 1833, Charlotte and Branwell's Angrian tales began to feature Byronic heroes with strong sexual magnetism and black-hearted arrogance.

  Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto of 1764 is usually counted as the first Gothic novel. Eighteenth-century Gothic fiction in English usually placed its stories in continental Europe and firmly in the past. Diane Long Hoeveler observes that the Brontë sisters moved the setting from European Renaissance castles to English provincial country houses. That shift opened the way for later Victorian fiction such as Bleak House and The Woman in White. At one point in the novel, Heathcliff is even thought to be a vampire.

  Carol Margaret Davison reads the book in the tradition of Female Gothic, which includes Ann Radcliffe's The Romance of the Forest and The Mysteries of Udolpho. The parallels are strongest in the second volume, where Heathcliff abducts Cathy into Wuthering Heights and forces her to marry his son. In that tradition, a virtuous heroine is trapped by a scheming villain who wants her property. Brontë departs from the pattern because Cathy defies Heathcliff openly and face to face, without pretending to be passive.

  In 1979, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar gave the book a landmark feminist reading in The Madwoman in the Attic. They set it against Milton's Paradise Lost. They pointed to Catherine's dream, in which "heaven did not seem to be my home." The angels, she says, flung her out onto the heath, "where I woke sobbing for joy." For Gilbert and Gubar, Catherine is the opposite of Milton's Satan, since she falls from apparent chaos into a heavenly order that destroys her.

  Davison objects that this reading undervalues the second volume, where revenge and abduction can celebrate rebellion as much as the first volume does. Beth Newman adds that Cathy's witchlike stare is a real challenge to Heathcliff's regime of confinement. Hareton's eventual ability to meet that gaze, with eyes "precisely similar," hints at a relationship of "mutuality" that resists male dominance.

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• 8. Reviews and Reputation

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  Thomas Newby accepted Wuthering Heights together with Anne Brontë's Agnes Grey before Charlotte's Jane Eyre became a success. Yet Jane Eyre reached print first. Newby issued the two sisters' books in a three-volume format, with Wuthering Heights filling the first two volumes and Agnes Grey the third. The first American edition followed in April 1848 from Harper & Brothers of New York.

  Early reviews were polarised. The Atlas called it a "strange, inartistic story" but felt a "sort of rugged power" in every chapter. The Examiner judged it wild, confused and improbable, with people "savages ruder than those who lived before the days of Homer." The Literary World found no admirable trait in any character, yet admitted, "we are spellbound." Douglas Jerrold's Weekly Newspaper said it was impossible to begin the book and not finish it. Readers in 1847 were also intrigued by who the mysterious Bell authors really were.

  After Emily's death, Charlotte edited a second edition in 1850 and wrote a foreword for it. She fixed faulty punctuation and spelling, and she softened Joseph's thick Yorkshire dialect. Writing to her publisher, W. S. Williams, she feared southern readers could not follow him, so that "one of the most graphic characters in the book is lost on them." The linguist K.M. Petyt later argued in a 1970 book that Emily had recorded the Haworth dialect accurately. The 1850 edition also joined the text into a single volume, with chapters 1 to 14 corresponding to the old first volume and chapters 15 to 34 to the second.

  The poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti wrote in 1854 that it was "a fiend of a book," and added that its action was laid in hell, "only it seems places and people have English names there." Algernon Charles Swinburne offered gentler praise in his 1883 essay in The Athenaeum. He wrote that those who do like the book "will like nothing very much better in the whole world of poetry or prose."

  For most of the 19th century, Jane Eyre was seen as the best of the sisters' novels. That view began to shift in the 1880s with A. Mary F. Robinson's 1883 biography of Emily. John Cowper Powys praised Emily's "tremendous vision" in 1916, and Virginia Woolf affirmed the book's greatness in 1925. In 1926, Charles Percy Sanger's work on the book's chronology disproved Charlotte's picture of her sister as an unconscious artist. Not everyone agreed. In 1948, F. R. Leavis excluded it from the great tradition of the English novel as "a kind of sport." In 1971, Daphne du Maurier argued that it holds more savagery and more brutality than any other 19th-century novel, and more beauty as well.

  Recent lists keep it near the top. Robert McCrum placed it among his 100 greatest novels of all time in The Observer in 2003. In 2015, he included it among the 100 best novels written in English. That same year, Jane Ciabattari polled 82 book critics from outside the UK for BBC Culture, and they ranked it number 7 among the greatest British novels. When Penguin published a list of 100 must-read classics in 2018, it placed the book at number 71 and predicted that it "will continue to do so," meaning inspire generations of writers.

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