The half-wild foundling Heathcliff, introduced as a child into the Earnshaw family, falls in love with Cathy Earnshaw as they grow up but any chance of future happiness together is thwarted by Cathy’s own ambivalent feelings (she is strongly attracted to Heathcliff yet feels that marriage to him would be socially impossible) and by the fierce antagonism of Hindley, Cathy’s brother. Heathcliff chooses exile rather than the humiliation of staying at Wuthering Heights and disappears abroad. When he returns, he discovers that Cathy has married a neighbor, Edgar Linton.

 The rest of the novel chronicles Heathcliff’s terrible vengeance on the Earnshaws and the Lintons for the wrongs he believes they have done him, a vengeance that echoes down the generations, long after Heathcliff himself is dead. Cathy dies in childbirth, driven to despair by the consequences of her choice of social convention over passion when she married Linton rather than Heathcliff, and by the mental torment, Heathcliff inflicts on her. Isabella Linton, Edgar’s sister, falls in love with Heathcliff and marries him but he uses her only as a means of gaining power over the rest of her family. Hindley succumbs to drink and dissipation and Wuthering Heights, which he had inherited from his father, falls into Heathcliff’s hands. 

The next generation (Hindley’s son Hareton, Catherine’s daughter and Linton, Heathcliff’s, and Isabella’s child) have the sins of their fathers and their mothers visited upon them and struggle to escape the consequences.

 Contemporaries were astonished and disconcerted by the raw emotion of Emily Brontë’s novel when it first appeared in 1847, the year before her early death from TB, and it has continued to enthral readers in the century and a half since that first publication. Melodramatic and wildly romantic the doomed love story of Cathy and Heathcliff may be but it has lost none of its power to stir the imagination.

Wuthering Heights (Merle Oberon as Cathy and Laurence Olivier as Heathcliff, 1939); Wuthering Heights (Juliette Binoche as Cathy and Ralph Fiennes as Heathcliff, 1992)

R.D. Blackmore, Lorna Doone; Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall; Daphne Du Maurier, My Cousin Rachel; >> Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles