Wuthering Heights is a stormy love-and-revenge novel set on the Yorkshire moors, told through a frame story. A city gentleman, Mr. Lockwood, rents Thrushcross Grange and meets the grim landlord, Heathcliff, at nearby Wuthering Heights. Curious about the hostility in the house, Lockwood asks the housekeeper, Nelly Dean, to explain, and she tells a decades-long history that begins when Mr. Earnshaw brings home a dark, orphaned boy—Heathcliff—who bonds fiercely with Earnshaw’s daughter, Catherine. Their attachment is raw and absolute, but class, pride, and social pressure pull them apart. Catherine marries the refined Edgar Linton; Heathcliff disappears and returns transformed, wealthy, and intent on settling scores.
The second half shows the fallout across the next generation—Cathy Linton, Hareton Earnshaw, and Linton Heathcliff—who inherit old grudges they never chose. Weather, architecture, and landscape mirror the people: the Heights is harsh and wind-scoured; the Grange is sheltered and polished. Brontë keeps the book’s deeper reveals under wraps through layered narration and withheld motives, but the emotional core is clear: love without balance can turn possessive and ruinous, and revenge corrodes the one who clings to it. Across both generations, the moors witness obsession, cruelty, tenderness, and—finally—glimmers that cycles can change.
Be with me always—take any form—drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you!
fromWuthering HeightsbyHe shall never know how I love him; and that, not because he’s handsome, Nelly, but because he’s more myself than I am.
fromWuthering HeightsbyIf all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and, if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger.
fromWuthering HeightsbyTreachery and violence are spears pointed at both ends; they wound those who resort to them worse than their enemies.
fromWuthering HeightsbyI have dreamt in my life, dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they’ve gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind.
fromWuthering HeightsbyI have not broken your heart—you have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine.
fromWuthering HeightsbyThe tyrant grinds down his slaves, and they don’t turn against him; they crush those beneath them.
fromWuthering HeightsbyI’m now quite cured of seeking pleasure in society—be it country or town. A sensible man ought to find sufficient company in himself.
fromWuthering HeightsbyRough as a saw-edge, and hard as whinstone! The less you meddle with him the better.
fromWuthering HeightsbyMy love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods; time will change it, I’m well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath—a source of little visible delight, but necessary.
fromWuthering HeightsbyI certainly esteem myself a steady, reasonable kind of body… I have undergone sharp discipline, which has taught me wisdom; and then, I have read more than you would fancy, Mr. Lockwood.
fromWuthering Heightsby