Wuthering Heights Summary: Emily Brontë's Novel of Love and Revenge on the Moors
What Wuthering Heights is about
Published in 1847 under the pen name Ellis Bell, Wuthering Heights was Emily Brontë's only novel. It follows two landowning families on the West Yorkshire moors, the Earnshaws of Wuthering Heights and the Lintons of Thrushcross Grange, and the foster son who tears through both of them.
The story reaches us second hand, which is part of its strangeness. In 1801 a tenant called Mr Lockwood takes Thrushcross Grange and calls on his landlord, Heathcliff, at the bleak house up on the moor. Nobody there is welcoming. Snowed in overnight, Lockwood reads the old diary entries of a former occupant, Catherine Earnshaw, and then dreams that her ghost is begging to be let in at the window. His shouting wakes Heathcliff, who is shattered by what he hears.
Back at the Grange and ill, Lockwood asks his housekeeper Nelly Dean to explain. Nelly once served the Earnshaws, and her account takes the reader back thirty years. Mr Earnshaw returns from a trip to Liverpool carrying an orphan boy he names Heathcliff. He favours the child over his own children. His son Hindley beats the newcomer. His daughter Catherine becomes Heathcliff's inseparable companion out on the moors.
When Hindley inherits the house he pushes Heathcliff down into the position of a servant. Catherine, drawn into the softer, richer world of the Lintons next door, accepts a proposal from Edgar Linton. She tells Nelly she loves Heathcliff but cannot marry a man of such low social standing. Heathcliff overhears only part of this, misunderstands it, and vanishes. Three years later he comes back wealthy, and nobody is told how. The rest of the novel is what he does with that money and that grievance, and what it costs the next generation.
The main characters
Heathcliff is the engine of the book. Outsider, foundling, described as "like a gipsy", his origins are never settled; the novel floats the possibility that he was a Lascar or a castaway of Spanish or American parentage. He is wronged early and spends his adult life repaying it with interest, chiefly through property and marriage.
Catherine Earnshaw is wilful, passionate and divided. Her attachment to Heathcliff is presented as something closer to identity than romance, and her marriage to Edgar Linton does not dissolve it.
Around them: Hindley Earnshaw, a drunkard and gambler whose weakness hands Heathcliff a weapon; Edgar Linton, decent and outmatched; Isabella Linton, who mistakes Heathcliff's attention for love and suffers mental and physical abuse for it; Hareton Earnshaw, Hindley's son, raised ignorant on purpose; and Cathy Linton, Catherine's daughter, who inherits her mother's spirit without her mother's fatal hesitation. Nelly Dean narrates almost all of it, and Joseph, a sanctimonious and sour servant, presides over the household like weather.
The themes
Love in this novel is possessive rather than tender. Catherine and Heathcliff want to absorb each other, and the damage spreads outward to everyone in range.
Revenge is pursued methodically, through deeds, debts and marriages. Heathcliff does not simply strike back at Hindley and Edgar, he engineers the ruin of their children. That makes class the quiet poison of the book. Catherine refuses Heathcliff on grounds of status, and he answers by buying his way into the gentry and using its own laws of inheritance as the instrument.
Death and madness run through everything. Illness, starvation, alcoholism, graves opened, ghosts at windows. Brontë drew on Romanticism and on Gothic fiction, and the moorland setting works as more than scenery, a wild, exposed landscape that matches the behaviour of the people on it.
Why it still matters
Early reviews were sharply divided. The novel was attacked for its cruelty, its domestic violence and its refusal to flatter Victorian ideas about morality, religion and class. Emily Brontë died soon after publication, and Charlotte Brontë edited the second edition of 1850. Since then the judgement has reversed completely, and it is now counted among the greatest novels written in English, with adaptations across film, television, music and stage.
It lasts because it will not behave. There is no moral comfort offered, no obvious hero, and a narrator who may not understand what she is reporting.
How it ends, spoilers below
Lockwood returns eight months later and Nelly brings him up to date. Cathy and Hareton reconcile; she teaches him to read, and the friendship turns to love. Cathy confronts Heathcliff over his unlawful seizure of both estates. He is declining, obsessed with the dead Catherine, and avoids the young couple. He stops eating and is found dead in Catherine's old room. Hareton has Wuthering Heights back, Cathy owns the Grange, and the two plan to marry and move there. Locals say they have seen Catherine and Heathcliff together on the moors. Lockwood visits the three graves, Catherine, Edgar and Heathcliff, lying side by side.
