Full Answer
We have Wuthering Heights, the land of storm; high on the barren moorland, naked to the shock of the elements, the natural home of the Earnshaw family, fiery, untamed children of the storm.
A powerful, fierce, and often cruel man, Heathcliff acquires a fortune and uses his extraordinary powers of will to acquire both Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange, the estate of Edgar Linton. Read an in-depth analysis of Heathcliff.
The guest was now the master of Wuthering Heights; he held firm possession, and proved it to the attorney who, in his turn, proved it to Mr. Linton that Earnshaw had mortgaged every yard of land he owned for cash to supply his mania for gambling.
Linton himself dies not long after this marriage. Catherine’s brother, and Mr. Earnshaw’s son. Hindley resents it when Heathcliff is brought to live at Wuthering Heights. After his father dies and he inherits the estate, Hindley begins to abuse the young Heathcliff, terminating his education and forcing him to work in the fields.
Mr. GreenMr. Green, the lawyer, shows up (a little late!) and has clearly let Heathcliff bribe him. Green orders everyone out of the Grange and fires all of the servants except Nelly. Cathy briefly recounts her escape from the Heights: she climbed out of her mother's bedroom window.
Edgar LintonJust as Isabella Linton serves as Catherine's foil, Edgar Linton serves as Heathcliff's. Edgar is born and raised a gentleman.
ZillahZillah: A servant to Heathcliff at Wuthering Heights during the period following Catherine's death. Although she is kind to Lockwood, she doesn't like or help Cathy at Wuthering Heights because of Cathy's arrogance and Heathcliff's instructions.
Catherine ended up trapped in a love triangle with Heathcliff and Edgar. Even though she had feelings for the former, she married the latter. This situation affected her health. That is why she died when giving birth to her daughter.
That Heathcliff should be given the name of an Earnshaw son who died in childhood confirms the impression of him being a fairy changeling—an otherworldly being that takes the place of a human child. Plus, he is never given the last name Earnshaw.
The name crops up a number of times in the novel: the deceased son, the foundling treated as a son, and as the last name for Heathcliff's only son (Linton Heathcliff))....Repetition of the Name.First Son (Deeased)Treated Like a Son by Mr. EarnshawHeathcliffHeathcliffNov 14, 2017
Joseph. A long-winded, fanatically religious, elderly servant at Wuthering Heights. Joseph is strange, stubborn, and unkind, and he speaks with a thick Yorkshire accent.
An Afro-Caribbean Heathcliff, a Caucasian anime hero and an all-black take on Tennessee Williams. How far can such 'race-bending, or 'race-lifting', go towards redrawing racial boundaries on film and stage? James Howson as Heathcliff in the new film version of Wuthering Heights.
Cathy Earnshaw is the younger sister of Hindley Earnshaw. Cathy and Hindley are born and raised at Wuthering Heights. The siblings are later joined by the foundling Heathcliff, who is adopted by Mr. Earnshaw during a trip to Liverpool.
Heathcliff tells Nelly that he persuaded the sexton to dig up Catherine's grave. He stares at her dusty corpse and bribes the sexton to put his body next to hers when he dies. He has no fear of disturbing the dead, he tells Nelly. Cathy has been haunting him for eighteen years.
But while she is being open and honest with Heathcliff, not once does she say she regrets marrying Edgar. Her comments about not being at peace and about Heathcliff's happiness when she is buried foreshadows her ghost walking the world for eighteen years, haunting Heathcliff.
Catherine was about eighteen or nineteen years old when she died in Wuthering Heights.
PR4172 .W7 2007. Text. Wuthering Heights online. Wuthering Heights is an 1847 novel by Emily Brontë, published under the pseudonym Ellis Bell. It concerns two families of the landed gentry living on the West Yorkshire moors, the Earnshaws and the Lintons, and their turbulent relationships with Earnshaw's adopted son, Heathcliff.
Marxist critic Arnold Kettle sees Wuthering Heights "as a symbolic representation of the class system of nineteenth-century England", with its concerns "with property-ownership, the attraction of social comforts", marriage, education, religion, and social status.
Heathcliff and Catherine spy on Edgar Linton and his sister Isabella, children who live nearby at Thrushcross Grange. Catherine is attacked by their dog, and the Lintons take her in, sending Heathcliff home.
Thirty years earlier, the Earnshaws live at Wuthering Heights with their children, Hindley and Catherine, and a servant — Nelly herself. Returning from a trip to Liverpool, Earnshaw brings a young orphan whom he names Heathcliff and treats as his favourite. His own children he neglects, especially after his wife dies.
In 1801, Mr Lockwood, the new tenant at Thrushcross Grange in Yorkshire, pays a visit to his landlord, Heathcliff, at his remote moorland farmhouse, Wuthering Heights. There he meets a reserved young woman (later identified as Cathy Linton); Joseph, a cantankerous servant; and Hareton, an uneducated young man who speaks like a servant. Everyone is sullen and inhospitable. Snowed in for the night, he reads some diary entries of a former inhabitant of his room, Catherine Earnshaw, and has a nightmare in which a ghostly Catherine begs to enter through the window. Woken by Lockwood's fearful yells, Heathcliff is troubled.
However, its structure does not match that of the farmhouse described in the novel. High Sunderland Hall, near Law Hill, Halifax where Emily worked briefly as a governess in 1838, now demolished, has also been suggested as a model for Wuthering Heights. However, it is too grand for a farmhouse.
The original text as published by Thomas Cautley Newby in 1847 is available online in two parts. The novel was first published together with Anne Brontë's Agnes Grey in a three-volume format: Wuthering Heights filled the first two volumes and Agnes Grey made up the third.
Mr. Lockwood. Mr. Lockwood is the second-hand narrator of Wuthering Heights. In fact, the novel consists of his diary entries during a period as Heathcliff’s tenant, which derive from the accounts given to him by Nelly—in fact, he mostly acts like a passive listener.
Linton Heathcliff is the product of the unhappy union of Heathcliff and Isabella Linton. Raised for his first 12 years by his mother, he is taken to the Heights after her death. Despite his physical weakness, he has a cruel streak, and he acts out of self-preservation because he is terrified of his father.
Edgar Linton is Catherine Earnshaw’s husband, and, contrary to Heathcliff and Cathy herself, he is soft and effeminate. He suffers through her rages and illnesses, and when she dies, he resigns himself to an isolated life devoted to his daughter. He has a gentle, timorous nature, which contrasts entirely with vengeful Heathcliff’s passion. As a form of revenge, Heathcliff decides to kidnap his daughter, and this devastates Edgar to the point that he soon dies of grief.
Hindley Earnshaw. Hindley is Cathy’s older brother and Heathcliff’s sworn enemy. He has been jealous of Heathcliff since he was a child and tries to ruin him once he becomes master of Wuthering Heights. He reduces Heathcliff to abject poverty, but soon falls into bad ways himself after his wife dies.
Catherine (Cathy) Earnshaw. Passionate, beautiful, and destructive, Catherine Earnshaw is the heroine of the first half of Wuthering Heights. She grew up with Heathcliff, an adopted gypsy child, forging a strong friendship that strengthened during the adolescence they spent under the rule of her tyrannical elder brother.
Catherine Linton. Catherine Linton is Edgar's and Cathy’s daughter and the heroine of the second half of the novel. She inherited her gentleness from her father and her willfulness from her mother, which manifests itself during her enforced residence at the Heights.
Heathcliff is the dark, brooding, and vengeful hero of Wuthering Heights. Despite the fondness Mr. Earnshaw professes towards him as a child, he is treated as an outcast due to his mysterious origin (he is an adopted gypsy). This, in turn, creates a stoical, calculating temperament.
Heathcliff had been mortgagee in possession of Wuthering Heights for eighteen years, but this was not long enough to obtain an absolute title by adverse possession. Hareton, as Hindley's heir, would be entitled to the equity of redemption.
Wuthering Heights was written in the eighteen-forties. It was published in 1847. But the period of the tale is from 1771 to 1803. The Inheritance Act of 1834, the Wills Act of 1837, and, I think, the Game Act of 1831, had changed the law.
In case of a conflict between them, rule (3) prevails. A tenant in tail of full age in possession could by means of a fictitious action (for which a deed was substituted by the Fines and Recoveries Act, 1833) bar the entail and obtain the fee-simple, which practically amounts to absolute ownership.
In his 1926 essay "The Structure of Wuthering Heights", C P Sanger examined the legal aspects of Wuthering Heights and how Heathcliff is able to gain possession of both the Heights and Thrushcross Grange. The relevant extract is reproduced below.
Ellen Dean says that he claimed and kept the Thrushcross Grange estate in his wife's right and in his son's also. She adds: "I suppose, legally at any rate, Catherine, destitute of cash and friends, cannot disturb his possession.". She is quite right in her suspicions.
The marriage of Heathcliff to Isabella Linton, and that of Linton Heathcliff to Cathy Linton. Heathcliff's gaining possession of Thrushcross Grange. There are also some questions she leaves unanswered. The obvious one is whether or not Heathcliffs possession of Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange is legal.
Certainly Heathcliffs possession of the Grange was wrong. It would suffice for Catherine to prove this, and to claim the Grange. Since there was just a period of around one year between Heathcliffs taking possession of the Grange and his death, there would be no question of his claiming adverse possession.
The law says that this contemptible creature, Linton, is right. This scene is a definite criticism of Eng land before the Married Women's Property Acts . Heathcliff, of course, succeeds in a more contemptible greed. On Linton's death, he claims Thrushcross Grange.
The obvious one is whether or not Heathcliffs possession of Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange is legal. The second is less obvious, and possibly more tragic. At the end of the book, it appears that Cathy and Hareton, as a married couple, shall be in possession of Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange.
(Contemporary audiences, for example, easily relate to issues of child abuse and alcoholism.) In fact, Wuthering Heights cannot be easily classified as any particular type of novel — that is the literary strength that Brontë's text possesses.
About. Wuthering Heights. Although Wuthering Heights received neither critical praise nor any local popularity during its initial publication, the reading public has changed substantially since 1847, and now both critical and popular opinion praise Emily Brontë's singular work of fiction.
Readers must therefore look not only to social class when judging and analyzing characters; they must determine what decisions are made by members of a certain class and why these characters made the decisions they did. On the surface, Wuthering Heights is a love story.
• Heathcliff is a foundling from Liverpool, who is taken by Mr Earnshaw to Wuthering Heights, where he is reluctantly cared for by the family, and spoiled by his adopted father. He and Catherine Earnshaw grow close, and their love is the central theme of the first volume. His revenge against the man she chooses to marry and its consequences are the central theme of the second volume. Heathcliff has been considered a Byronic hero, but critics have pointed out that he reinvents him…
The original text as published by Thomas Cautley Newby in 1847 is available online in two parts. The novel was first published together with Anne Brontë's Agnes Grey in a three-volume format: Wuthering Heights filled the first two volumes and Agnes Grey made up the third.
In 1850 Charlotte Brontë edited the original text for the second edition of Wuthering Heights and also provided it with her foreword. She addressed the faulty punctuation and orthography but als…
The original text as published by Thomas Cautley Newby in 1847 is available online in two parts. The novel was first published together with Anne Brontë's Agnes Grey in a three-volume format: Wuthering Heights filled the first two volumes and Agnes Grey made up the third.
In 1850 Charlotte Brontë edited the original text for the second edition of Wuthering Heights and also provided it with her foreword. She addressed the faulty punctuation and orthography but als…
Early reviews of Wuthering Heights were mixed in their assessment. Most critics recognised the power and imagination of the novel, but were baffled by the storyline, and objected to the savagery and selfishness of the characters. In 1847, when the background of an author was given great importance in literary criticism, many critics were intrigued by the authorship of the Bell novels.
Most of the novel is the story told by housekeeper Nelly Dean to Lockwood, though the novel uses several narrators (in fact, five or six) to place the story in perspective, or in a variety of perspectives. Emily Brontë uses this frame story technique to narrate most of the story. Thus, for example, Lockwood, the first narrator of the story, tells the story of Nelly, who herself tells the story of another character. The use of a character like Nelly Dean is a literary device, a well-know…
Brontë possessed an exceptional classical culture for a woman of the time. She was familiar with Greek tragedies and was a good Latinist. In addition she was especially influenced by the poets John Milton and William Shakespeare. There are echoes of Shakespeare's King Lear and Romeo and Juliet in Wuthering Heights. Another major source of information for the Brontës was the periodicals that their father read, the Leeds Intelligencer and Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. Bl…