Wuthering Heights

Characters · Wuthering Heights

The cast — who they are, and what they carry.

1. 01

   Heathcliff

   Protagonist

   A foundling with no origin and no last name. Brought to Wuthering Heights as a boy and resented almost immediately by everyone except the one person who mattered. He loves Catherine with the kind of totality that leaves no room for anything else, including decency. When she chooses someone else he doesn't cry. He leaves, comes back harder, and spends years methodically dismantling the world that kept them apart. By the end he has everything he wanted and cannot remember why he wanted it.

2. 02

   Catherine Earnshaw

   Heroine

   Wild, selfish, magnetic, and more self-aware than she gets credit for. She knows she loves Heathcliff in the deepest possible sense and marries Edgar anyway because she understands, practically, what love alone cannot provide. This is not weakness exactly. It is the choice that breaks everything. She spends the rest of her short life caught between two worlds she created for herself and belonging fully to neither.

3. 03

   Edgar Linton

   Husband

   Husband Gentle, principled, and quietly impossible to fault. He loves Catherine genuinely and gives her a good life and is still no match for what she carries inside her. He is not a villain. He is simply not Heathcliff, which in this novel amounts to the same thing.

4. 04

   Nelly Dean

   Narrator

   The housekeeper who tells the story. She was there for almost all of it, which makes her the most reliable narrator available and also, quietly, one of the most partial. She has opinions about everyone. She makes decisions that change the course of events and then describes those events as if she were only watching. Worth reading carefully.

5. 05

   Hindley Earnshaw

   Antagonist

   Catherine's brother. Resents Heathcliff from the moment he arrives and never stops. After their father dies he takes everything from Heathcliff that he can and drinks himself into ruin. He is small where Heathcliff is large, and the novel treats him accordingly.

6. 06

   Isabella Linton

   Victim

   Edgar's sister. She falls for Heathcliff the way inexperienced people fall for intensity, mistaking it for depth. He marries her for her connections and makes no secret of not caring for her. She eventually escapes. Her letters home are some of the most vivid writing in the book.

7. 07

   Young Cathy

   Inheritor

   Catherine's daughter and, in some ways, her softer echo. She has her mother's brightness without her mother's recklessness. She ends up at Wuthering Heights against her will and finds, improbably, something worth staying for.

8. 08

   Hereton Earnshaw

   Redeemed Hindley’s son

   Raised deliberately ignorant by Heathcliff as revenge on the father. Rough, proud, and humiliated by his own illiteracy. When Cathy starts teaching him to read, something in the novel quietly shifts. He is the one character who gets something resembling a fair chance at the end.

9. 09

   Linton Heathcliff

   Pawn

   Heathcliff's son by Isabella. Sickly, frightened, and used entirely as a tool by his father. He does not survive the novel. He is not meant to.

10. 10

    Mr. Earnshaw

    Catalyst

    The man who started everything. He brought Heathcliff home on a whim, loved him perhaps too openly, and died before he could see what that decision would cost everyone. The whole novel is downstream of one choice he made on a road in Liverpool.

11. 11

    Lockwood

    Outsider

    The stranger who rents Thrushcross Grange and prompts Nelly to tell the story. He understands very little of what he is told and finds it all rather dramatic. He is, in some ways, the reader.