Description:

Wuthering Heights is Emily Brontë's only novel. Written between October 1845 and June 1846, Wuthering Heights was published in 1847 under the pseudonym "Ellis Bell"; Brontë died the following year, aged 30. Wuthering Heights and Anne Brontë's Agnes Grey were accepted by publisher Thomas Newby before the success of their sister Charlotte's novel, Jane Eyre. After Emily's death, Charlotte edited the manuscript of Wuthering Heights, and arranged for the edited version to be published as a posthumous second edition in 1850. Although Wuthering Heights is now widely regarded as a classic of English literature, contemporary reviews for the novel were deeply polarised; it was considered controversial because its depiction of mental and physical cruelty was unusually stark, and it challenged strict Victorian ideals of the day regarding religious hypocrisy, morality, social classes and gender inequality. The English poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, although an admirer of the book, referred to it as "A fiend of a book – an incredible monster [...] The action is laid in hell, – only it seems places and people have English names there."

Review

Most novels that survive a century and a half do so because their readers can agree on what they are. Wuthering Heights has survived precisely because no one can. It is sold as a love story and read as a horror story; it is taught as a Romantic manifesto and studied as a cold piece of structural engineering. The book invites all of these readings and rebuffs each one before it can settle. What I want to argue is that Emily Brontë's only novel is not, at its core, a romance at all, but a sustained inquiry into whether love that claims to fuse two identities is a form of transcendence or a form of damnation — and that the novel's genius lies in refusing, to the last sentence, to tell us which. The famous double declaration around which everything else turns — Catherine's "I am Heathcliff" and Heathcliff's answering "I cannot live without my soul" — is usually quoted as the high-water mark of passion in English fiction. Read in context it is closer to a diagnosis. These are not lovers describing devotion; they are two people reporting that they have lost the boundary that would let either survive the other's loss. The rest of the book is the working-out of that catastrophe across two generations and three graves.

The premise is deceptively domestic. Old Mr. Earnshaw brings home a starving, dark-skinned foundling from Liverpool and favours him above his own son; after the father's death the boy Heathcliff is degraded to the fields by the jealous Hindley, but stays bound to Earnshaw's daughter Catherine in a wild, pre-social childhood on the moors. Catherine is then "transformed" — Brontë's word, and the novel's hinge — by a five-week convalescence at the gentler Linton estate of Thrushcross Grange, returning so refined that the dirty, ragged Heathcliff refuses to greet her. From that gap between the moor and the drawing-room everything terrible follows. Catherine accepts Edgar Linton's proposal for status and comfort while confessing to the housekeeper Nelly Dean that her soul and Heathcliff's are identical; Heathcliff overhears the part where she says marriage to him would "degrade" her, and vanishes into a storm that splits a tree. He returns three years later a hardened gentleman with money of unexplained origin and a single purpose: to ruin everyone who stood between himself and Catherine, and then their children. The plot is a revenge tragedy wearing the clothes of a regional family chronicle.

What raises this above melodrama is the architecture. Brontë does not narrate the passion directly — she cannot, and the novel half-admits she should not. Instead she builds a Chinese box of frames. The outermost layer is Lockwood, a vain, self-described misanthropist from London who has rented the Grange in 1801 and who blunders into the household's wreckage without understanding any of it. His curiosity, sharpened by a feverish night in the forbidden oak-panelled bed where a child-ghost claws at the window crying "Let me in," prompts him to extract the family history from Nelly Dean, the foster-sister and servant who has watched both generations from inside the house. Nelly's oral narration is the second frame, and inside it Brontë embeds still further documents: Catherine's childhood diary scrawled in the margins of a Testament, Isabella's long letter of flight, the dying Linton's monitored love-letters, Zillah's third-hand report of Catherine's mistreatment. Every passion in the book reaches us at two or three removes, filtered through narrators who are interested parties. This is not decoration. It is the novel's central method and its deepest argument: that an absolute passion of the kind Catherine and Heathcliff claim may be precisely the thing that cannot be truthfully witnessed by anyone who is not inside it — and that we, reading, are therefore being asked to credit a metaphysical claim on the testimony of a self-justifying housekeeper and a fool.

Nelly is the most underrated achievement of the book. It would have been easy to make her a neutral conduit; Brontë makes her a participant who repeatedly intervenes, withholds, and confesses her own complicity — she carries Heathcliff's letter to the dying Catherine, she burns young Cathy's notes, she betrays the girl's secret visits to the dying Edgar. Her voice is morally cautious, conventional, faintly smug, and it functions as the skeptical ground against which the Gothic excess is measured. When Heathcliff tells her he has been haunted "night and day, through eighteen years," we hear it through a woman who plainly thinks he is either lying or mad, and the novel never overrules her. The supernatural in Wuthering Heights is always reported by someone who doubts it, which is exactly why it keeps its grip. Brontë understood something that lesser Gothic writers did not: a ghost believed by the narrator is a special effect, but a ghost believed only by the haunted, and described by a skeptic, is a question about the human mind.

The close reading rewards attention to how carefully Catherine's great confession in Chapter IX is staged. She does not say she loves Heathcliff more than Edgar; she draws a distinction in kind. "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." The Edgar-love is seasonal, pleasurable, mutable — a thing one has. The Heathcliff-bond is geological, joyless, and structural — a thing one is. And then the line that detonates the plot: "I am Heathcliff! He's always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being." It is essential that she explicitly denies this is pleasure. The novel's most quoted love speech is a description of something that gives no delight and cannot be escaped — and Heathcliff, overhearing only the earlier remark about degradation, leaves before the declaration that would have told him the truth. The tragedy is built on partial hearing, which is the same flaw the frame narration enacts at the level of form: nobody in this book ever gets the whole testimony.

From Catherine's death the novel becomes an anatomy of vengeance, and here Brontë is at her coldest and most original. Heathcliff's revenge is not a hot-blooded rampage but a patient, decades-long campaign conducted largely through the instruments of property and inheritance law — debt, marriage settlements, a bought lawyer named Green, a will. He ruins the gambling Hindley and reduces Hindley's son Hareton, the rightful heir of the Heights, to an illiterate farm-labourer who can barely spell his own name carved over the door. He marries Edgar's sister Isabella purely to wound, and Isabella's arc is one of the book's most bracing correctives to its own romanticism: she elopes infatuated with the Byronic image of Heathcliff and flees, bleeding into the snow, having learned she married "a monster, and not a human being." Brontë lets the romantic hero be exactly as dangerous as Catherine warns Isabella he is — "he's a fierce, pitiless, wolfish man... he'd crush you like a sparrow's egg." The novel adores Heathcliff's passion and never once asks us to forgive his cruelty, and it is the refusal to reconcile those two judgments that keeps him from collapsing into either a hero or a villain. He remains, structurally, both.

The second generation is where the book's design becomes an argument rather than a plot. Brontë doubles everything. Heathcliff manoeuvres the orphaned young Cathy — Edgar and the dead Catherine's daughter — into nursing his own sickly, peevish son Linton, then traps both women at the Heights and coerces a marriage so that, when Edgar dies, the Grange will pass to Heathcliff's line. Edgar dies blissfully murmuring that he goes "to her," a gentle man's faith in reunion set as a deliberate rhyme against Heathcliff's ferocious one. Linton, terrorized into betraying Cathy, dies within months, having served his only purpose as his father's disposable tool. By this point Heathcliff possesses both houses and has destroyed or outlived nearly everyone who wronged him. And it is here, at the moment of total victory, that the novel springs its real surprise — not a ghost, but an emptiness. Watching the imprisoned, embittered Cathy slowly soften toward Hareton, teaching the illiterate young man to read and sealing a peace with a kiss, Heathcliff confesses to Nelly that he has the "levers and mattocks to demolish the two houses" but that the will to lift a single slate has vanished. "I have lost the faculty of enjoying their destruction." Vengeance, fully achieved, turns out to be indistinguishable from defeat.

The genius of the Cathy-and-Hareton plot is that it is not a sentimental palliative tacked onto a dark book — it is the novel's controlled experiment. Heathcliff brutalized Hareton precisely as Hindley once brutalized Heathcliff, on the explicit theory that degradation is destiny, that one tree will grow as crooked as another with the same wind to twist it. Hareton is the test of that theory, and he fails it in the redemptive direction: his innate generosity survives, and — pointedly — he is the only true mourner at Heathcliff's corpse. Brontë makes literacy the concrete medium of the reversal. The dispossessed heir who burned his secret books in shame at Cathy's mockery learns to read "Con-trary" from her wrapped gift, and in restoring his letters she restores the "ancient stock" to dignity and converts her own scorn into love. The first generation's love destroyed; the second generation's love repairs — and the difference is not temperament but cultivation, the thing Heathcliff's brutality tried and failed to extinguish. The same machinery that twisted the pampered Linton into a coward and a traitor produced strength in Hareton, which is Brontë's quiet, devastating point about whether suffering ennobles: it depends, and the book will not give us a rule.

Set against its traditions, the novel is a hybrid that should not work. It belongs squarely to the Gothic — the foundling of mysterious origin, the haunted panelled bed, the storm-blasted house, the exhumed coffin (Heathcliff has Catherine's coffin-side removed so their dust may mingle), the rain-washed corpse found with an exultant sneer. It belongs equally to Romanticism, locating ultimate value in untamed nature, in childhood, and in an absolute passion that overrides social, legal, and religious order. But Brontë grafts both onto an unsparing realism of the Yorkshire "northern farmer" world — dated weather-reports, the secular grammar of debt and entail, Joseph's broad-dialect Calvinist damnation-talk, the precise economics of who inherits what. The Dissenting-Protestant substrate runs deep: Joseph's relentless Bible-quoting, the absurd dream-sermon of Jabez Branderham's "Seventy Times Seven," Nelly's urgings to repent, all of it framing a moral universe that Heathcliff's private heaven of reunion simply ignores. The cross-references the text itself reaches for are telling — Scripture and the Book of Common Order, Bunyan's Slough of Despond, the ballad Chevy Chase that Cathy mocks Hareton for misreading, the folk-tale of the Fairy Cave under Penistone Crags. This is a book that braids the high Gothic with hymn-book, ballad, and almanac, and the friction between registers is what makes the supernatural land: a ghost-child crying at the lattice is far more frightening when the surrounding prose is busy counting sheep and quoting the dialect for porridge.

There is also a feminist charge running beneath the romance that the book's reputation as a love story tends to bury. The mechanism of Heathcliff's revenge is, repeatedly, the law of marriage and property as it bore on women. Isabella is legally trapped by a husband who terrorizes her; young Cathy is imprisoned, struck, coerced into a marriage, widowed, and stripped of her own inheritance — all entirely within the bounds of what the law allowed a man to do. Brontë does not editorialize, but she does not need to: the plot is the argument. The same legal machinery that the era's domestic-didactic fiction treated as the safe harbour of womanhood is shown here as the precise instrument of female ruin. That the redemption plot then runs through a woman's pedagogy — Cathy teaching Hareton to read, reversing dispossession with a book — gives the novel's faith in cultivation a specifically female agent, even as the parallel ruin of the pampered Linton complicates any tidy faith that education simply reforms character.

It would be dishonest to call the book flawless, and the structure that is its greatest strength is also the source of its real strains. The frame narration that makes the supernatural credible also asks us to accept some implausibly perfect recall — Nelly reproduces, verbatim and at length, conversations and letters she witnessed decades earlier, including private exchanges she could not have heard, and Lockwood transcribes Nelly with a fluency no diarist could manage. Brontë largely brazens this out, and the sheer momentum of the storytelling carries it, but the seams show. The young Linton is less a character than a function — a peevish, self-pitying invalid built solely to be his father's lever — and the novel's interest visibly drops whenever he is on the page. More substantively, the middle of the second volume, with its forced marriages and intercepted letters and imprisonments, can feel like the machinery of revenge grinding mechanically toward a foregone conclusion; the plotting there is more dutiful than inspired, the engineering more visible than the passion. And readers looking for moral clarity will leave unsatisfied by design — the text supplies ample evidence that Heathcliff is a wronged victim and ample evidence that he is a calculating destroyer, and it flatly declines to adjudicate. Whether that irresolution is the book's profoundest feature or an evasion is a question each reader has to answer alone; I take it as feature, but I understand the complaint.

The ending earns the ambiguity. Heathcliff stops eating, gazes rapt at something no one else can see, and announces in his last days that "Last night I was on the threshold of hell. To-day, I am within sight of my heaven... hardly three feet to sever me" — three feet being the depth of a grave. He dies with a ghastly, exultant smile in the same panelled bed and at the same open lattice where Lockwood's ghost-child first scratched, the circle of haunting closing on the exact threshold between living and dead he longed to cross. And then Brontë gives the final word not to him but to Lockwood, who walks past the three graves under a "benign sky" and wonders "how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth." It is a deliberately false note of reassurance — false because Nelly has just told him the country folk swear Heathcliff and a woman still walk the moor, and Lockwood's bland rationalism ("idle tales, you'll say, and so say I") is precisely the voice the novel has spent thirty-four chapters teaching us not to trust. The book ends by setting its skeptic's complacency against its mourners' testimony and refusing to break the tie. Whether the dead rest, whether the young lovers' reconciliation truly cancels the old violence or merely paves over it, whether soul-fusion is heaven or hell — Brontë holds every one of these open and lets the reader close them at her peril.

Who is this book for? Not the reader who wants the love story the marketing promises, and certainly not the one who wants justice — Heathcliff is never punished except by the success of his own revenge, which is the cruellest punishment Brontë could devise. It is for the reader willing to sit inside an unresolved argument about whether the most intense love a person can feel is a window onto something eternal or a sickness that consumes everyone it touches. What the novel gets right is almost everything that matters: the structural daring of the nested unreliable frames, the refusal to sentimentalize a passion it nonetheless renders overwhelming, the cold patience of its anatomy of revenge, and the genuine moral seriousness of testing, through Hareton, whether cruelty must reproduce itself. What it gets wrong is comparatively minor — a thin villain, a baggy middle, a recall too perfect to believe. A century and a half of readers have mistaken it for a romance and found themselves disturbed; that disturbance is the book working exactly as designed. It is one of the strangest and most rigorously built novels in English, and it remains so unsettling because it never once lets you decide whether Catherine and Heathcliff have found their heaven or earned their hell.