Wuthering Heights

The story reaches the reader at two removes. Mr. Lockwood, a city visitor who has taken Thrushcross Grange, calls on his strange landlord at Wuthering Heights and is so unsettled by the brooding household, the snarling dogs, and a ghostly child at the window in the night that he asks his housekeeper to explain them. Nelly Dean, who has served both houses since childhood, then tells the long family history that fills most of the book.

Years before, the elder Earnshaw brought home from Liverpool a dark, ragged, parentless child and named him Heathcliff. The boy and Earnshaw's daughter Catherine become inseparable, running wild together on the moors, while her brother Hindley hates the intruder. When the father dies, Hindley reduces Heathcliff to a servant. Catherine, drawn by a stay at the genteel Grange, agrees to marry the mild, well-bred Edgar Linton even as she tells Nelly that it is Heathcliff who is more herself than she is. Hearing only that marrying him would degrade her, Heathcliff vanishes.

He returns after some years, no longer a servant but a hard, moneyed gentleman with a single aim: to ruin everyone who wronged him. He encourages Hindley's gambling and drinking until the Heights falls into his hands, and he marries Edgar's sister Isabella only to punish the Lintons. Catherine, caught between the two men and her own divided nature, breaks down; she and Heathcliff have a last, violent reunion of love and accusation, and she dies giving birth to a daughter, leaving him begging her spirit to haunt him so long as he lives.

Heathcliff's revenge then reaches into the next generation. He seizes the children as instruments: his own sickly son Linton, Hindley's neglected son Hareton whom he keeps ignorant and rough, and Edgar's daughter Cathy, whom he forces into marriage with the dying Linton so that both estates pass to him. By the time Lockwood first arrives, Heathcliff owns everything, Edgar and Hindley are dead, and the young people live under his thumb in the bleak house on the hill.

When Lockwood returns months later, the household has changed. Heathcliff, finding the living world fading beside his memory of Catherine, loses the will to destroy what is left and dies strangely glad, hoping to rejoin her. In his shadow, the widowed Cathy has begun teaching the proud, unlettered Hareton to read, and their growing affection repairs what the old hatred broke. The two are to marry and leave the Heights, and Nelly trusts the dead are at peace, though country people still claim to see Heathcliff and his Catherine walking the moor.