Wuthering Heights reads like a work of literary modernism embedded in the landscape of mid-nineteenth-century Yorkshire. It is fragmented, extreme, shuffles time, and includes an unreliable narrator. The story is shocking, grotesque, though always within the limits of human – if not humane – behaviour. It is the only novel by its young author (she was twenty-nine), and it is told through two characters alien to the often gruesome world which they soberly report: the impartial tenant Lockwood, and the intrepid, down-to-earth Ellen (‘Nellie’) Dean, a more important character in the story. These two narrators provide the sense and sanity without which the entangled and emotionally claustrophobic events would be difficult to follow or to bear.

The narrative is started by Lockwood, as if it were a report: ‘1801 – I have just returned from a visit to my landlord – the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with.’

Nellie Dean is not only a witness, but a loyal servant who ‘gathers intelligence’ for her employer and therefore keeps herself thoroughly well-informed. Her situation makes her strictly an unreliable narrator, but she is artless and proves to be totally honest, to the extent even of revealing her own dishonesty.

Most of the novel is told in the words – often reported by Lockwood – of Nellie, who is the housekeeper at Thrushcross Grange, a house once owned by her employers, the Lintons, but which in the course of the story becomes the property of a man who goes under the single name of Heathcliff, who originally rented it to Lockwood, and who thereby becomes Nellie Dean’s master.

After two disturbing encounters with Heathcliff at his ancient farmhouse, Wuthering Heights, some four miles across the moor from The Grange, Lockwood persuades Nellie Dean to tell him about his strange landlord. However, the novel is not all related in this way, nor is the story complete when Nellie’s account – like a cinematic flashback – ends.

Heathcliff first appears as a ‘dark-skinned’ foundling in Liverpool, probably about seven years old; Nellie Dean refers to him as ‘a gipsy brat’. Favoured by Mr Earnshaw, his adoptive father, and initially by Nellie too, he is treated brutally by Hindley Earnshaw, his adoptive brother, at the Earnshaw home, Wuthering Heights. His step-mother rejects him and dies two years after he enters the family. His protective step-father dies four years later, leaving the vindictive twenty-year-old Hindley as head of the family. Heathcliff is then thirteen. His brutal ‘step-brother’ marries and has a son, Hareton.

Heathcliff’s emotional disorientation leads him to behave erratically towards Catherine, his adoptive ‘more-than-sister’, a year older than him, who he loves, and who loves him.[*] They share a spirit of rebellion, adventures in the wild landscape, and a violent and often inexpressible passion for each other.

When Catherine begins to take an interest in the conventional, respectable, and wealthy Edgar Linton, clearly indicating her social preference for him, no matter how strong her private feelings for Heathcliff, the latter is deeply offended. He disappears, whereupon Catherine marries Edgar and becomes mistress of Thrushcross Grange, the house sheltered by a grove of trees four miles across the moors from Wuthering Heights.

Heathcliff returns three years later as a successful businessman, determined to take revenge on Edgar and Catherine. He elopes with Isabella Linton, Edgar’s sister, and marries her, not only as an act of revenge on both Lintons (he is sadistic to Isabella), but because – in doing so – he moves closer to Catherine (becoming her brother-in-law), and extends his power from Wuthering Heights to The Grange.

Catherine Linton (née Earnshaw), whose love for Heathcliff remains, dies after a tortured, passionate leave-taking from her ‘more-than-brother’, during which he remorselessly reminds her of her abandonment of him for Edgar. She dies immediately after giving birth to Edgar’s daughter, also named Catherine (‘Cathy’).

The book’s second half initially continues the dark tones of the first. The young Hareton Earnshaw had been in line to become the owner of Wuthering Heights, after his father Hindley’s death; however, Heathcliff had taken possession of that property, because Hindley – a gambler ­– had to mortgage it to him.

Heathcliff planned to dissolve the Earnshaw and the Linton family names (in his words, ‘to demolish the two houses’), and replace them with his own, by marrying his son Linton Heathcliff to the young Cathy Linton (thus retrospectively also appropriating her mother, ‘his’ Catherine). This marriage is brought about through violence, threat and kidnap, instigated by Heathcliff, and brings him ownership of The Grange as well. Indeed that is its chief purpose.

However, whereas Cathy has the strength of the Earnshaws, Linton has the weakness of the Lintons. He dies soon after the wedding, leaving the now forty-year-old Heathcliff, the young Cathy, and the still wild young Hareton Earnshaw at Wuthering Heights. It is at this juncture in the story that Lockwood, who has rented the now empty Thrushcross Grange, visits Heathcliff at Wuthering Heights, and subsequently asks Nellie Dean to tell him about his strange landlord. Thus, the novel begins when the story it tells is about to end.

The book’s final part is told mainly in the words of Lockwood and describes the softening, in the first place of Wuthering Heights (flowers from Thrushcross Grange replace its prickly shrubs) and, in the second place, of the angry Heathcliff himself, thanks to the young Cathy.

It is after the death of Heathcliff’s son – for which Heathcliff’s cruelty in forcing him to marry was largely responsible – that the reader experiences the possibility of Heathcliff’s own redemption (though it never takes place), through his experience of the young Cathy’s redemptive love for and eventual marriage to the hitherto uncouth and loutish Hareton Earnshaw, who not only reminds Heathcliff of himself, but in whom he finds a physical resemblance to ‘his’ Catherine, Hareton’s aunt.

Cathy’s love of Hareton is mediated through her teaching him to read. What is more, she does so in the kitchen-parlour of Wuthering Heights, witness to some of the book’s most brutal scenes. Both Hareton, and even Heathcliff, are effectively reborn, or are at least tamed and become more human through this process.

The ‘strange change approaching’ (the words are Heathcliff’s, spoken to Nellie Dean) can be interpreted as this redemption through Cathy’s love. It is too late for Heathcliff, because his damaged childhood deprived him of his natural partner, leading to his extreme misery and self-destruction. However, it is not too late for the reader. The book’s comforting, liberating, last paragraph, with its ‘moths fluttering among the heath, and hare-bells’ and ‘the soft wind breathing through the grass’, would not otherwise have such a strong resonance.

Note: ‘My more-than-sister’ is how Victor Frankenstein refers to his adoptive sister, Elizabeth Lavenza, in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, another novel by a young female author which shows the disastrous consequences of extreme psychological deprivation, suffered by both Frankenstein’s Monster and by Heathcliff.

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I am indebted to the Norton Critical edition of Wuthering Heights, edited by William M. Sale Jr. and Richard J. Dunn (New York/London: W.W Norton, 1990), in particular to its reprinting of Charles Percy Sanger’s ‘The structure of Wuthering Heights’, first published by The Hogarth Press, London, 1926.