Wuthering Heights

Opening (Chapters 1 to 3)

In 1801, Lockwood, a wealthy young man from the South of England who is seeking peace and recuperation, rents Thrushcross Grange in Yorkshire. He visits his landlord, Heathcliff, who lives in a remote moorland farmhouse, Wuthering Heights. There Lockwood finds an odd assemblage: Heathcliff seems to be a gentleman, but his manners are uncouth; the reserved mistress of the house is in her mid-teens; and a young man who seems to be a member of the family, yet dresses and speaks as if he is a servant.

Snowed in, Lockwood is grudgingly allowed to stay and is shown to a bedchamber where he notices books and graffiti left by a former inhabitant named Catherine. He falls asleep and has a nightmare in which he sees the ghostly Catherine trying to enter through the window. He cries out in fear, rousing Heathcliff, who rushes into the room. Lockwood is convinced that what he saw was real. Heathcliff, believing Lockwood to be right, examines the window and opens it, hoping to allow Catherine's spirit to enter. When nothing happens, Heathcliff shows Lockwood to his own bedroom and returns to keep watch at the window.

At sunrise, Heathcliff escorts Lockwood back to Thrushcross Grange. Lockwood asks the housekeeper, Nelly Dean, about the family at Wuthering Heights, and she tells him the tale.

Heathcliff's childhood (Chapters 4 to 17)

Thirty years earlier, the owner of Wuthering Heights is Mr. Earnshaw, who lives with his son Hindley and younger daughter Catherine. On a trip to Liverpool, Earnshaw encounters a homeless boy, described as a "dark-skinned gypsy in aspect". He adopts the boy and names him Heathcliff. Hindley feels that Heathcliff has supplanted him in his father's affections and becomes bitterly jealous. Catherine and Heathcliff become friends and spend hours each day playing on the moors. They grow close.

Hindley is sent to college. Three years later Earnshaw dies and Hindley becomes the landowner; he is now master of Wuthering Heights. He returns to live there with his new wife, Frances. He allows Heathcliff to stay but only as a servant, and regularly mistreats him.

A few months after Hindley's return, Heathcliff and Catherine walk to Thrushcross Grange to spy on Edgar and Isabella Linton, who live there. After being discovered they try to run away but are caught. Catherine is injured by the Lintons' dog and taken into the house to recuperate, while Heathcliff is sent home. Catherine stays with the Lintons. The Lintons are landed gentry and Catherine is influenced by their fine appearance and genteel manners. When she returns to Wuthering Heights her appearance and manners are more ladylike, and she laughs at Heathcliff's unkempt appearance. The next day, knowing that the Lintons are to visit, Heathcliff, upon Nelly's advice, tries to dress up, in an effort to impress Catherine, but he and Edgar Linton get into an argument and Hindley humiliates Heathcliff by locking him in the attic. Catherine tries to comfort Heathcliff, but he vows revenge on Hindley.

The following year, Frances Earnshaw gives birth to a son, named Hareton, but she dies a few months later. Hindley descends into drunkenness. Two more years pass, and Catherine and Edgar Linton become friends, while she becomes more distant from Heathcliff. Edgar visits Catherine while Hindley is away and they declare themselves lovers soon afterwards.

Catherine confesses to Nelly that Edgar has proposed marriage and she has accepted, although her love for Edgar is not comparable to her love for Heathcliff, whom she cannot marry because of his low social status and lack of education. She hopes to use her position as Edgar's wife to raise Heathcliff's standing. Heathcliff overhears her say that it would "degrade" her to marry him (but not how much she loves him), and he runs away and disappears without a trace. Distraught over Heathcliff's departure, Catherine makes herself ill. Nelly and Edgar begin to pander to her every whim to prevent her from becoming ill again.

Three years pass. Edgar and Catherine marry and go to live together at Thrushcross Grange, where Catherine enjoys being "lady of the manor". Six months later, Heathcliff returns, now a wealthy gentleman. Catherine is delighted, but Edgar is not. Edgar's sister, Isabella, soon falls in love with Heathcliff, who despises her, but encourages the infatuation as a means of revenge. One day, he embraces Isabella, leading to an argument with Edgar. Upset, Catherine locks herself in her room and begins to make herself ill again.

Heathcliff takes up residence at Wuthering Heights and spends his time gambling with Hindley and teaching Hareton bad habits. Hindley dissipates his wealth and mortgages the farmhouse to Heathcliff to pay his debts. Heathcliff elopes with Isabella Linton. Two months later, they return to Wuthering Heights. Heathcliff hears that Catherine is ill and, with Nelly's help, visits her secretly. However, Catherine is pregnant. The following day she gives birth to a daughter, Cathy, shortly before dying.

After Catherine's funeral, Isabella leaves Heathcliff, takes refuge in the South of England and gives birth to a son, Linton. Hindley dies six months after Catherine, and Heathcliff thus finds himself master of Wuthering Heights.

Heathcliff's maturity (Chapters 18 to 31)

Twelve years pass. Catherine's daughter Cathy has become a beautiful, high-spirited girl. Edgar learns that his sister Isabella is dying, so he leaves to retrieve her son Linton in order to adopt and educate him. Cathy, who has rarely left home, takes advantage of her father's absence to venture further afield. She rides over the moors to Wuthering Heights and discovers that she has not one but two cousins: Hareton, in addition to Linton. She also lets it be known that her father has gone to fetch Linton. When Edgar returns with Linton, a weak and sickly boy, Heathcliff insists that he live at Wuthering Heights.

Three years pass. Walking on the moors, Nelly and Cathy encounter Heathcliff, who takes them to Wuthering Heights to see Linton and Hareton. Heathcliff hopes that Linton and Cathy will marry, so that Linton will become the heir to Thrushcross Grange. Linton and Cathy begin a secret friendship, echoing the childhood friendship between their respective parents, Heathcliff and Catherine.

The following year, Edgar becomes very ill and takes a turn for the worse while Nelly and Cathy are out on the moors, where Heathcliff and Linton trick them into entering Wuthering Heights. Heathcliff keeps them captive to enable the marriage of Cathy and Linton to take place. After five days, Nelly is released and later, with Linton's help, Cathy escapes. She returns to the Grange to see her father shortly before he dies.

Now master of both Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange, Cathy's father-in-law, Heathcliff, insists on her returning to live at Wuthering Heights. Soon after she arrives Linton dies. Hareton tries to be kind to Cathy, but she withdraws from the world.

At this point, Nelly's tale catches up to the present day (1801). Time passes and, after being ill for a period, Lockwood grows tired of the moors and informs Heathcliff that he will be leaving Thrushcross Grange.

Ending (Chapters 32 to 34)

Eight months later, Lockwood returns to the area by chance. Given that his tenancy at Thrushcross Grange is still valid, he decides to stay there again. He finds Nelly living at Wuthering Heights and enquires what has happened since he left. She explains that she moved to Wuthering Heights to replace the housekeeper, Zillah, who had left.

Hareton has an accident and is confined to the farmhouse. During his convalescence, he and Cathy overcome their mutual antipathy and become close. While their friendship develops, Heathcliff begins to act strangely and has visions of Catherine. He stops eating and, after four days, is found dead in Catherine's old room. He is buried next to Catherine.

Lockwood learns that Hareton and Cathy plan to marry on New Year's Day. As he gets ready to leave, he passes the graves of Catherine, Edgar and Heathcliff and pauses to contemplate the quiet of the moors.

Characters

Key:

Themes

Author Joyce Carol Oates sees the novel as "an assured demonstration of the finite and tragically self-consuming nature of 'passion'."

Gothic novel

Ellen Moers, in Literary Women, developed a feminist theory that connects women writers, including Emily Brontë, with the gothic fiction. Catherine Earnshaw has been identified by some critics, as a type of gothic demon, because she "shape-shifts" in order to marry Edgar Linton, by assuming a domesticity, which is contrary to her true nature. It has also been suggested that Catherine's relationship with Heathcliff conforms to the "dynamics of the Gothic romance, in that the woman falls prey to the more or less demonic instincts of her lover, suffers from the violence of his feelings, and at the end is entangled by his thwarted passion."

1847 edition

The original text, as published by Thomas Cautley Newby in 1847, is available online in two parts. The novel was first published together with Anne Brontë's Agnes Grey in a three-volume format: Wuthering Heights occupied the first two volumes, while Agnes Grey made up the third.

1850 edition

In 1850, when a second edition of Wuthering Heights was due, Charlotte Brontë edited the original text, altering punctuation, correcting spelling errors and making Joseph's thick Yorkshire dialect less opaque. Writing to her publisher, W.S. Williams, she mentioned that "It seems to me advisable to modify the orthography of the old servant Joseph's speeches; for though, as it stands, it exactly renders the Yorkshire dialect to a Yorkshire ear, yet I am sure Southerns must find it unintelligible; and thus one of the most graphic characters in the book is lost on them." An essay written by Irene Wiltshire on dialect and speech in the novel examines some of the changes Charlotte made.

Inspiration for locations

There are several theories about which real building or buildings (if any) may have inspired Wuthering Heights. One common candidate is Top Withens, a ruined farmhouse located in an isolated area near the Haworth Parsonage, although its structure does not match that of the farmhouse described in the novel. Top Withens was first suggested as the model by Ellen Nussey, a friend of Charlotte Brontë, to Edward Morison Wimperis, an artist who was commissioned to illustrate the Brontë sisters' novels in 1872.

The second possibility is High Sunderland Hall, near Halifax, now demolished. This Gothic edifice was located near Law Hill, where Emily worked briefly as a governess in 1838. While it was perhaps grander than Wuthering Heights, the hall had grotesque embellishments of griffins and misshapen nude males similar to those described by Lockwood in Chapter 1 of the novel.

The inspiration for Thrushcross Grange has long been traced to Ponden Hall, near Haworth, which is very small. Shibden Hall, near Halifax, is perhaps more likely. The Thrushcross Grange that Emily describes is rather unusual. It sits within an enormous park, as does Shibden Hall. By comparison, the park at Chatsworth (the home of the Duke of Devonshire) is over two miles (3.2 km) long but, as the house sits near the middle, it is no more than a mile and a half (2.4 km) from the lodge to the house. Considering that Edgar Linton apparently does not even have a title, this seems unlikely. There is no building close to Haworth that has a park anywhere near this size, but there are a few houses that might have inspired some elements. Shibden Hall has several features that match descriptions in the novel.

Early reviews (1847–1848)

Early reviews of Wuthering Heights were mixed in their assessment. Whilst most critics at the time recognised the power and imagination of the novel, they were also baffled by the storyline and found the characters extremely forward and uninhibited. Published in 1847, at a time when the background of the author was deemed to have an important impact on the story itself, many critics were also intrigued by the authorship of the novels. Henry Chorley of the Athenæum said that it was a "disagreeable story" and that the "Bells" (Brontës) "seem to affect painful and exceptional subjects".

The Atlas review called it a "strange, inartistic story," but commented that every chapter seems to contain a "sort of rugged power." Atlas summarised the novel by writing: "We know nothing in the whole range of our fictitious literature which presents such shocking pictures of the worst forms of humanity. There is not in the entire dramatis persona, a single character which is not utterly hateful or thoroughly contemptible ... Even the female characters excite something of loathing and much of contempt. Beautiful and loveable in their childhood, they all, to use a vulgar expression, "turn out badly"."

Graham's Lady Magazine wrote "How a human being could have attempted such a book as the present without committing suicide before he had finished a dozen chapters, is a mystery. It is a compound of vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors."

The American Whig Review wrote "Respecting a book so original as this, and written with so much power of imagination, it is natural that there should be many opinions. Indeed, its power is so predominant that it is not easy after a hasty reading to analyze one's impressions so as to speak of its merits and demerits with confidence. We have been taken and carried through a new region, a melancholy waste, with here and there patches of beauty; have been brought in contact with fierce passions, with extremes of love and hate, and with sorrow that none but those who have suffered can understand. This has not been accomplished with ease, but with an ill-mannered contempt for the decencies of language, and in a style which might resemble that of a Yorkshire farmer who should have endeavored to eradicate his provincialism by taking lessons of a London footman. We have had many sad bruises and tumbles in our journey, yet it was interesting, and at length we are safely arrived at a happy conclusion."

Douglas Jerrold's Weekly Newspaper wrote "Wuthering Heights is a strange sort of book,—baffling all regular criticism; yet, it is impossible to begin and not finish it; and quite as impossible to lay it aside afterwards and say nothing about. In Wuthering Heights the reader is shocked, disgusted, almost sickened by details of cruelty, inhumanity, and the most diabolical hate and vengeance, and anon come passages of powerful testimony to the supreme power of love – even over demons in the human form. The women in the book are of a strange fiendish-angelic nature, tantalising, and terrible, and the men are indescribable out of the book itself. Yet, towards the close of the story occurs the following pretty, soft picture, which comes like the rainbow after a storm ... We strongly recommend all our readers who love novelty to get this story, for we can promise them that they never have read anything like it before. It is very puzzling and very interesting, and if we had space we would willingly devote a little more time to the analysis of this remarkable story, but we must leave it to our readers to decide what sort of book it is."

New Monthly Magazine wrote "Wuthering Heights, by Ellis Bell, is a terrific story, associated with an equally fearful and repulsive spot ... Our novel reading experience does not enable us to refer to anything to be compared with the personages we are introduced to at this desolate spot – a perfect misanthropist's heaven."

Tait's Edinburgh Magazine wrote "This novel contains undoubtedly powerful writing, and yet it seems to be thrown away. Mr. Ellis Bell, before constructing the novel, should have known that forced marriages, under threats and in confinement are illegal, and parties instrumental thereto can be punished. And second, that wills made by young ladies' minors are invalid. The volumes are powerfully written records of wickedness and they have a moral – they show what Satan could do with the law of Entail."

Examiner wrote "This is a strange book. It is not without evidences of considerable power: but, as a whole, it is wild, confused, disjointed, and improbable; and the people who make up the drama, which is tragic enough in its consequences, are savages ruder than those who lived before the days of Homer."

Literary World wrote "In the whole story not a single trait of character is elicited which can command our admiration, not one of the fine feelings of our nature seems to have formed a part in the composition of its principal actors. In spite of the disgusting coarsness of much of the dialogue, and the improbabilities of much of the plot, we are spellbound."

Britannia called it a "strangely original" book that depicts "humanity in this wild state." Although mostly hostile, it notes that the book is "illuminated by some gleams of sunshine towards the end which serve to cast a grateful light on the dreary path we have traveled."

Adaptations

The earliest known film adaptation of Wuthering Heights was filmed in England in 1920 and it was directed by A. V. Bramble. It is unknown if any prints still exist. The most famous was 1939's Wuthering Heights, starring Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon and directed by William Wyler. This acclaimed adaptation, like many others, eliminated the second generation's story (young Cathy, Linton and Hareton) and is rather inaccurate as a literature adaption. It won the 1939 New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Film and was nominated for the 1939 Academy Award for Best Picture.

In 1967 the BBC produced a dramatisation starring Ian McShane and Angela Scoular.

The 1970 film with Timothy Dalton as Heathcliff is the first colour version of the novel, and gained acceptance over the years though it was initially poorly received. The character of Hindley is portrayed much more sympathetically, and his story-arc is altered. It also subtly suggests that Heathcliff may be Cathy's illegitimate half-brother.

In 1978 the BBC produced a five-part TV serialisation of the book starring Ken Hutchinson, Kay Adshead and John Duttine with music by Carl Davis; it is considered one of the most faithful adaptations of Emily Brontë's story.

There is also a 1985 French film adaptation Hurlevent by Jacques Rivette.

The 1992 film Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights starring Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche is notable for including the oft-omitted second generation story of the children of Cathy, Hindley and Heathcliff.

More recent film or TV adaptations include ITV's 2009 two-part drama series starring Tom Hardy, Charlotte Riley, Sarah Lancashire, and Andrew Lincoln, the 2011 film starring Kaya Scodelario and James Howson and directed by Andrea Arnold; and the forthcoming 2016/17 film, directed by Elisaveta Abrahall and starring Paul Eryk Atlas and Sha'ori Morris, in a version that includes both generations and is presently filming in the UK.

Adaptations which reset the story in a new setting include the 1954 adaptation retitled Abismos de Pasion directed by Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel set in Catholic Mexico, with Heathcliff and Cathy renamed Alejandro and Catalina. In Buñuel's version Heathcliff/Alejandro claims to have become rich by making a deal with Satan. The New York Times reviewed a re-release of this film as "an almost magical example of how an artist of genius can take someone else's classic work and shape it to fit his own temperament without really violating it," noting that the film was thoroughly Spanish and Catholic in its tone while still highly faithful to Brontë. Yoshishige Yoshida's 1988 adaptation also has a transposed setting, this time in medieval Japan. In Yoshida's version, the Heathcliff character, Onimaru, is raised in a nearby community of priests who worship a local fire god. In 2003, MTV produced a poorly reviewed version set in a modern California high school.

The 1966 Indian film Dil Diya Dard Liya is based upon this novel. The film is directed by Abdul Rashid Kardar and Dilip Kumar. The film stars the thespian Dilip Kumar, Waheeda Rehman, Pran, Rehman, Shyama and Johnny Walker. The music is by the legendary composer Naushad. Although it did not fare as well as other movies of Dilip Kumar, it was well received by critics.

The novel has been popular in opera and theatre, including operas written by Bernard Herrmann, Carlisle Floyd, and Frédéric Chaslin (most cover only the first half of the book) and a musical by Bernard J. Taylor.

In 2011, a graphic novel version was published by Classical Comics, and stays close to the original novel. It was adapted by Scottish writer Sean Michael Wilson and hand painted by comic book veteran artist John M Burns. This version received a nomination for the Stan Lee Excelsior Awards, voted by pupils from 170 schools in the United Kingdom.

Works inspired

Kate Bush's song "Wuthering Heights" is most likely the best-known creative work inspired by Brontë's story that is not properly an "adaptation." Bush wrote and released the song when she was eighteen and chose it as the lead single in her debut album (despite the record company preferring another track as the lead single). It was primarily inspired by the Olivier–Oberon film version which deeply affected Bush in her teenage years. The song is sung from Catherine's point of view as she pleads at Heathcliff's window to be admitted. It uses quotations from Catherine, both in the chorus ("Let me in! I'm so cold!") and the verses, with Catherine's admitting she had "bad dreams in the night." Critic Sheila Whiteley wrote that the ethereal quality of the vocal resonates with Cathy's dementia, and that Bush's high register has both "childlike qualities in its purity of tone" and an "underlying eroticism in its sinuous erotic contours." Pat Benatar covered this song on her 1980 album Crimes of Passion, and so did Angra on their 1993 debut Angels Cry.

Wind & Wuthering (1976) by English rock band Genesis alludes to the Brontë novel not only in the album's title but also in the titles of two of its tracks, "Unquiet Slumbers for the Sleepers..." and "...In That Quiet Earth". Both titles refer to the opening and closing lines of the novel, respectively.

The song "Cath" by indie rock band Death Cab for Cutie was inspired by Wuthering Heights.

The poem "Wuthering" (2017) by Tanya Grae uses Wuthering Heights as an allegory.

Mizumura Minae's A True Novel (Honkaku shosetsu, published in 2002 by Shinchosha; English translation by Juliet Winters Carpenter published by Other Press in 2013) is inspired by Wuthering Heights and might be called an adaptation of the story in a post-World War II Japanese setting.