Wuthering Heights

A little about the story

A newcomer renting a house on the Yorkshire moors becomes curious about his unsettling landlord and the household at nearby Wuthering Heights. The stories he hears lead back to Heathcliff, a child brought into the Earnshaw family, and to the fierce attachment between him and Catherine Earnshaw. Differences of status, injured pride, and competing ideas of security begin to turn their closeness into something that the surrounding households cannot easily contain.

Emily Brontë tells this history through narrators who are also participants and interpreters, so readers must consider how much each speaker understands. The landscape’s exposure and the houses’ confined relationships give the novel its distinctive atmosphere. Love is inseparable from resentment, property, and power, and the consequences of earlier choices extend into another generation. This is not a reassuring portrait of a perfect romance, but an intense examination of people who struggle to distinguish attachment from possession, and of the stories that survive after their actions have altered other lives.

Things You May Not Know About Wuthering Heights

• Published under another name. The 1847 first edition appeared under the name Ellis Bell, the pseudonym Emily Brontë used for her novel.
• An unusual three-volume package. The original publication combined Wuthering Heights in two volumes with Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey as the third volume.
• Two houses organize the story. Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange are social worlds as well as locations, linking the Earnshaw and Linton families.
• The narrative has layers. Lockwood’s account contains Nelly Dean’s recollections, which in turn report the speech and experiences of other characters.
• A name describes the weather. The opening explains wuthering as a local expression associated with the turbulent weather to which the house is exposed.