Wuthering Heights

It begins, oddly, at the end. Lockwood arrives at Wuthering Heights in 1801, a stranger renting the neighbouring estate, and finds a household that feels like the aftermath of something. Heathcliff is there, older now, and there is a young woman and a rough young man and a tension in the rooms that no one explains. Lockwood is snowed in one night and sleeps in an old bed and is woken by a child's hand scratching at the window. Let me in, it says. I've been wandering for twenty years. He is so frightened he rubs the wrist against the broken glass until it bleeds. In the morning Heathcliff is at the window, weeping. This is how Nelly begins to tell the story. From the very beginning, from the night Mr Earnshaw came home with a foundling. We watch Heathcliff arrive and be resented. We watch Catherine and him become inseparable, two wild things on the same stretch of moor. We watch Catherine go to Thrushcross Grange and come back a little softer, a little more interested in being a lady, a little further from him. We watch Heathcliff listen at a door and leave without waiting for the sentence to finish. We feel the absence he leaves behind, which is bigger than a person ought to be. When he returns, he is unreadable. Catherine is both desperate to see him and unable to bear it. She keeps both men close and it destroys her. Heathcliff marries Isabella not out of desire but out of calculation, and treats her with a cruelty he doesn't bother to conceal. Edgar forbids Catherine from seeing Heathcliff. Catherine responds by refusing to eat, as if she can starve her way out of the situation. She cannot. Their last meeting is the heart of the book. She is already ill, already barely there. He holds her and she accuses him and he accuses her and neither of them can let go. He tells her she has killed herself and asks why. She tells him she is dying and he should not be glad of it. They are both right. They are both to blame. She dies that night and Heathcliff spends it outside in the garden in the rain, and when he prays for her to haunt him it doesn't sound like madness. It sounds like the only thing left.

Twelve years pass. Young Cathy grows up at the Grange, curious and kind, knowing nothing of Wuthering Heights except that her father doesn't speak of it. Then she finds her way there and meets Hareton, who is her cousin and doesn't know it, rough and illiterate, raised to be beneath everyone's notice. She doesn't understand him. He doesn't know how to be understood. Heathcliff has a plan for both of them. Linton Heathcliff arrives, his son, pale and petulant and frightened of his own father. Cathy, who has a generous heart and not enough information, becomes fond of him. Heathcliff maneuvers them toward a marriage with a patience that is almost impressive if you forget what it costs. Linton dies shortly after. Cathy is a widow at seventeen, trapped at Wuthering Heights with a man who views her as collateral damage and a cousin she doesn't know what to do with. But something shifts. Cathy starts teaching Hareton to read. He is proud at first, then grateful, then something warmer. They become gentle with each other in the middle of a house that has never been gentle with anyone. Heathcliff watches them and starts to look tired. Not regretful exactly. Tired. He stops eating. He walks the moors at night. He tells Nelly he feels a change coming and cannot explain it. He says that looking at Hareton is like looking in a mirror, and the reflection has stopped meaning what he wanted it to mean. One morning Nelly finds him in his room, the window open, rain on the sill, dead with his eyes open and that strange small smile. Whether it is peace or madness or reunion the novel will not say. The villagers say they have seen him walking the moors with a woman. Hareton and Cathy plan to leave the Heights and move to the Grange. A new year is coming. The moors are as they always were, indifferent and open and there.