Short Summary of Wuthering Heights
Wuthering Heights is Emily Brontë’s only novel, published in 1847 under the masculine pseudonym Ellis Bell. It is considered a classic of English literature.
The story takes place in the bleak Yorkshire moors in northern England in the late 18th and early 19th century. The narrator, Mr. Lockwood, rents the estate Thrushcross Grange from the surly owner Heathcliff, who lives at the nearby Wuthering Heights farmhouse.
During a visit to Wuthering Heights, Lockwood has strange supernatural experiences and finds the occupants rude and unwelcoming. He learns their history from the housekeeper, Nelly Dean.
Years earlier, Mr. Earnshaw returned from a trip with a neglected orphan he named Heathcliff and raised with his own children Hindley and Catherine. After Mr Earnshaw dies, Hindley mistreats Heathcliff, but he remains very close to Catherine. Although Catherine loves Heathcliff, she marries Edgar Linton, a gentleman from Thrushcross Grange, for his wealth and status.
Heathcliff disappears and returns three years later a rich gentleman. Bent on cruel revenge, he marries Edgar’s sister Isabella, takes over the debt-ridden Wuthering Heights after Hindley dies, and vows to destroy those who prevented him from marrying Catherine.
When Catherine dies after childbirth, Heathcliff longs to be reunited with her spirit. Years later, Heathcliff’s dying son Linton marries Catherine’s daughter Cathy to gain control over her inheritance from Edgar. Heathcliff keeps Cathy prisoner until he dies. He is buried next to Catherine to be with her in death.
The obsessive and haunting love between Heathcliff and Catherine destroys both their lives and the lives of the next generation. The story ends with no heirs left to inherit Wuthering Heights or Thrushcross Grange.
The main themes of Wuthering Heights are all-encompassing but ultimately destructive love and revenge. An idiosyncratic structure relates events non-chronologically through Lockwood’s narrative frame hearing past events from Nelly.
Emily Brontë brought unprecedented levels of passion and naturalism to her atmospheric depiction of the self-destructive extremes of romance among the haunted Yorkshire moors. She transcended Victorian literary conventions with her stark vision of raw elemental emotions pitted against society’s rules.
