Wuthering Heights

Mr Earnshaw comes home one evening with a child he found on the streets of Liverpool. No explanation, no warning. Just a dark-haired boy with no name and nowhere to go. He calls him Heathcliff. He puts him in the middle of a family that did not ask for him, and then, a few years later, dies and leaves him there.

Hindley, the son, never forgives his father for bringing the boy home. The moment he inherits the house he strips Heathcliff of everything, his education, his status, his place at the table. He makes him a servant and waits for him to disappear. But Catherine, the daughter, is a different matter. She and Heathcliff grow up running wild on the moors together, and somewhere in all that wildness they become something to each other that neither of them has words for. Not friendship exactly. Not love exactly. Something more like the same person split into two bodies.

Then Catherine meets the Lintons. Edgar is handsome and gentle and everything Heathcliff is not, which is to say he is safe. Catherine falls for him the way practical people fall for safe things, and she agrees to marry him. She tells Nelly she loves Edgar. She tells Nelly her soul and Heathcliff's are the same thing. She seems to think both can be true at once. Heathcliff overhears the first part and not the second, and one night he simply leaves. No note, no goodbye, no word of where he's going.

He comes back three years later and no one knows what happened to him in between. He has money now, and a stillness about him that is more unsettling than any anger. He moves back into Wuthering Heights by lending Hindley money at interest and waiting for Hindley to drink himself into debt. He befriends Edgar's sister Isabella, who mistakes his intensity for passion and runs away with him, a decision she regrets almost immediately. He is working methodically, patiently, and he is not done.

Catherine, caught between the husband she chose and the person she never stopped being half of, starts to come apart. She stops eating. She stops sleeping. She works herself into a fever that the doctors cannot explain because it is not really an illness, it is grief wearing the body down. She and Heathcliff have one last meeting, furious and desperate, each of them blaming the other for everything. She dies that night giving birth to a daughter. Heathcliff finds out in the morning and his response is not to weep but to beg. Haunt me, he says, do not leave me in this abyss. It is the most honest thing he says in the entire novel.

The second half of the story belongs to the wreckage. Young Cathy grows up at Thrushcross Grange, sheltered and bright, knowing nothing of what came before her. Hareton, Hindley's son, grows up at the Heights, deliberately kept ignorant by Heathcliff as a form of revenge on the father. Linton Heathcliff, Heathcliff's own son by Isabella, arrives sickly and frightened and is used as a pawn to secure Thrushcross Grange. Heathcliff engineers a marriage between him and young Cathy, inherits the estate when Linton dies, and finds himself in possession of everything he ever wanted to destroy.

It doesn't feel the way he thought it would. With both houses in his hands, he starts to lose his appetite for the game. He sees Catherine's face in Hareton's features. He sees her everywhere. He stops eating. He starts spending nights outside on the moors, coming back with his coat wet and his eyes strange. One morning Nelly finds him dead by an open window, a small smile on his face. Whether Catherine came back for him or whether he simply willed himself toward her is not a question the novel answers. Brontë leaves the window open.