Emily Brontë · 1847
Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights is the strangest of the major Victorian novels — formally innovative in ways its contemporaries found incomprehensible, narratively brutal, philosophically unsentimental. Brontë published it under the pseudonym Ellis Bell and died the year after; she never saw it recognised as one of the canonical English novels. Reading it now means working through its layered narration, its tightly structured family genealogy, and its refusal to deliver the moral comfort the Victorian novel was expected to provide.
The novel is a sophisticated frame narrative. Lockwood, a city gentleman who has rented Thrushcross Grange, narrates the outer frame. He hears the inner story from Nelly Dean, the housekeeper, who tells him about the Earnshaw and Linton families. Inside Nelly's narration, other characters give nested first-person accounts — Heathcliff quoting Catherine, Catherine's diary read by Lockwood, Isabella's letter recounting her marriage.
The layering is not decorative. Every event we learn about has been filtered through multiple consciousnesses, each with its own biases (Lockwood is bewildered; Nelly is judgmental). The novel does not provide an authoritative voice. The reader has to work out what happened from the partial accounts.
Both narrators have their blind spots. Lockwood is a fop, an outsider who consistently misreads situations (his opening encounter with Heathcliff, his interpretation of the dream of Catherine's ghost). Nelly is a participant in events she also narrates; she has interests, dislikes, judgments. Her description of Heathcliff as a child shapes our view of him in ways we should be suspicious of.
The novel's formal sophistication is in this distance between narration and event. Whatever happened at the Heights happened; what we get is filtered, partial, distorted. The deepest claims about the characters — what Catherine and Heathcliff actually were to each other — are made through gaps in the available evidence.
The novel is built around the symmetrical doubling of two houses, two families, two generations:
The novel's first generation marries across the houses (Catherine to Edgar, Heathcliff to Isabella, in his vengeance). The second generation marries across again (the younger Catherine to Linton Heathcliff, then to Hareton Earnshaw). The geometry of the novel is precise. Brontë's structural imagination — the symmetry of names, marriages, deaths, the mirror-arrangement of the family trees — is one of the most striking architectural features of any English novel.
Heathcliff is one of the great antiheroes in English fiction — compelling, dangerous, charismatic, and cruel. He revenges himself on the Earnshaw and Linton families with patient, methodical violence: he beggars Hareton, abuses his own son Linton to maturity, orchestrates the marriage of his son to the younger Catherine, and treats his wife Isabella with such sustained cruelty that she escapes.
The reader is asked to feel his attractiveness alongside his brutality. The novel does not resolve this. Critics still divide between those who read Heathcliff as a Byronic Romantic protagonist whose violence is the cost of his intensity, and those who read the novel as a sustained critique of that Romantic figure. Both readings have support in the text.
Catherine's famous speech to Nelly — "I am Heathcliff" — is one of the most quoted lines in English literature. Critics have variously read it as the deepest romantic statement in the language, as the cry of a particular kind of childhood-formed identification that the adult world cannot accommodate, and as the novel's argument that the love it depicts is not really romantic but something stranger: a kind of mutual identity that the categories of love and friendship don't fit.
Notice that the bond is not consummated. Catherine marries Edgar; Heathcliff marries Isabella. The relationship between the two of them is the novel's gravitational centre and its constant absence; it never quite happens in any conventional sense.
The Yorkshire moors are not background. They are the novel's fundamental motif — the landscape that produces the kind of people the Earnshaws are, the place Catherine and Heathcliff escape to as children, the ground Heathcliff cannot leave even after Catherine's death. The moors' weather, their indifference, their refusal of cultivation, are all the novel's argument about what kind of moral universe the Heights inhabits. Compare to the manicured grounds of Thrushcross Grange and you have the novel's geography of feeling in one image.
The novel's second half — often skipped by readers in love with the first half — is critical. The younger Catherine and Hareton's slow movement toward each other is the novel's only sustained healing arc. Where Catherine and Heathcliff destroyed each other, the younger generation repairs the damage their parents made. The structural rhyme is the novel's tentative hope: the second generation may not be doomed to repeat the first.
Heathcliff dies in a posture of strange ecstasy, after months of refusing food. The novel suggests, without ever quite saying, that he has joined Catherine's ghost on the moors. Lockwood, returning to visit the graves at the close, "wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth." The line is the novel's final ambiguity. The earth is quiet; the sleepers are quiet; but the novel has just told us a story in which the dead would not stay buried.
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