Wuthering Heights
A farmhouse on the moor, an orphan boy taken in, and the love between him and Catherine that outlasted them both
Page 1
High on the Yorkshire moors stands a lonely stone farmhouse called Wuthering Heights, so named for the wild winds that beat against it all year. One evening old Mr. Earnshaw came home from a journey to Liverpool, tired and without the gifts he had promised his children. Instead he carried a ragged, dark-haired boy he had found starving in the streets there, and on a sudden kindness had decided to bring him home. He named the boy Heathcliff, after a son of his own who had died young. Catherine Earnshaw, only a little girl, looked at the strange silent boy and liked him at once, and before long the two of them were never apart. But Hindley, her older brother, hated the newcomer from that very first night, and the hatred between them only grew as the years went by.
Page 2
As the years passed, Catherine and Heathcliff grew wilder and closer. While Hindley was away at school and old Mr. Earnshaw grew weak and cross, the two of them escaped onto the moor every chance they had, running for miles over the heather with no one to call them back. They climbed Penistone Crags, waded through the becks, and lay in the bracken watching the clouds go by, caring nothing for lessons or shoes or Sunday manners. To Catherine, Heathcliff was not a servant's boy or a stranger's orphan — he was the one person in the world who understood her completely, and she told him so again and again. He never doubted her, and never wanted anything else from life but to be wherever she was. It was the happiest either of them would ever be.
Page 3
One dark evening Catherine and Heathcliff wandered farther than usual and found themselves outside Thrushcross Grange, the grand house of the Linton family. Through a lit window they saw a warm, soft parlour, thick carpets, a crackling fire, and two children, Edgar and Isabella Linton, sitting in a comfort neither of them had ever known. Heathcliff thought the Lintons looked spoiled and silly. But before they could slip away, the Grange's great bulldog caught Catherine by the ankle and would not let go, and she was carried inside crying with pain while Heathcliff was driven off and sent home alone. Catherine stayed at the Grange for five weeks to mend. When she finally came home, she was no longer the wild, barefoot girl who had run the moor with Heathcliff. She returned in a fine new dress, with careful new manners, and a quiet, uneasy distance had opened between them that neither of them spoke of.
Page 4
Old Mr. Earnshaw died, and Hindley came home from school to take his place as master of Wuthering Heights. He had never forgiven Heathcliff for being loved, and now that he had the power, he used it. Hindley turned Heathcliff out of the family and into the farm's servants' quarters, stopped his lessons, and set him to work in the fields and stables like any hired hand. Heathcliff was given rough clothes, rough food, and rougher words, and told plainly that he was no longer anyone's son but a laborer who happened to live under their roof. He bore it without complaint in front of Hindley, working from dawn to dark, but something in him hardened through those years that never softened again. Only Catherine still sought him out, sneaking down to the kitchen to sit with him after everyone else was asleep, the one thread still joining the wild children they had been.
Page 5
Catherine grew into a young woman torn between two worlds. She loved Heathcliff as she loved no one else, but he was poor and rough and had no place among people like the Lintons, while Edgar Linton was gentle, well-off, and asked for her hand. One evening at the Grange, not knowing that Heathcliff had slipped in and was listening in the shadow of the kitchen passage, Catherine told the Lintons' housekeeper that she had decided to marry Edgar — and that it would lower her to marry Heathcliff now, whatever she felt for him in her heart. Heathcliff heard every word of it. He did not wait to hear the rest, where Catherine spoke of loving him more than anything in the world. He walked straight out of Wuthering Heights that same night, taking nothing with him, and no one saw or heard from him again for three long years.
Page 6
Three years passed, and Catherine married Edgar Linton and went to live as a fine lady at Thrushcross Grange. Then one evening, without warning, Heathcliff came back. He was no longer the ragged farm boy who had vanished into the night — he had made himself rich somehow, in ways he never fully explained, and he had come home taller, harder, and dressed like a gentleman, but with the same dark, unreadable eyes. Catherine was overjoyed to see him and could not hide it, which troubled Edgar deeply. Heathcliff settled close by, and before long he was deliberately drawing both Hindley and Isabella into his plans. He gambled with Hindley night after night, taking the Heights itself from him debt by debt, and he let Isabella, Edgar's foolish young sister, fall in love with him, though he felt nothing for her beyond the use she could be to him. Everyone around him became a piece on a board only he could see.
Page 7
Catherine's health failed quickly after Heathcliff's return, worn down by the strain of loving two men she could not reconcile in her life. As she lay dying in her room at Thrushcross Grange, Heathcliff came to her one last time, climbing in through the window so that Edgar would not find him there. The two of them held each other and wept, each accusing the other of breaking their own heart, neither able to let go even now. Catherine told him she would not rest easy in the grave if he forgot her, and Heathcliff swore that he never could, not for a single hour of his life. Edgar returned and found them together, but it no longer mattered — Catherine was fading fast. She gave birth to a daughter, also named Catherine, and died that same night, leaving Heathcliff outside in the dark, alone with a grief so total he said aloud that he could not live without her, that he had never been able to.
Page 8
Years passed. Hindley drank himself into an early grave, and Heathcliff, who had won every debt and mortgage against him, became master of Wuthering Heights as well as everything else he had set out to take. He raised Hindley's son, Hareton, exactly as Hindley had once raised him — as an unschooled servant in his own home, kept rough and ignorant on purpose, out of pure spite for the father. Meanwhile Edgar and Catherine's daughter, young Cathy, grew up gentle and sheltered at the Grange, knowing nothing of any of it. But when Edgar's health began to fail, Heathcliff saw his chance to seize the Grange too. He lured young Cathy to Wuthering Heights, kept her there against her will, and forced her into marriage with his own sickly son, Linton, so that when Edgar died, everything the Lintons owned would pass through the marriage straight into Heathcliff's hands. It was the last and cruelest piece of his revenge, and it worked exactly as he had planned it.
Page 9
In the years after young Cathy's forced marriage, Heathcliff seemed to lose all interest in the revenge he had spent his whole life building. He had everything he set out to take, and none of it meant anything to him anymore. He grew more and more certain that Catherine's spirit was near him, out on the moor, at the window, just out of reach, and he stopped eating properly and stopped sleeping in any ordinary way, wandering the house at night and talking to no one. He asked to be given the old box-bed in Catherine's childhood room, the one with the window looking straight out over the moor, and he spent his last nights there with the window open to the night air, whatever the weather. One morning he was found there at last, lying by the open window, his eyes still open and fixed on the moor outside, his hand resting on the sill, gone quietly in the night he had been waiting for.
Page 10
In time, young Cathy began teaching Hareton to read, and slowly, patiently, something gentler grew between them than anything either house had known in a generation — not built on debt or spite, but on simple kindness. Heathcliff did not live to stop it, and once he was gone, the two of them were free to care for each other without anyone standing in the way. They planned to marry and to live together at Thrushcross Grange, leaving Wuthering Heights to stand empty on its hill. Heathcliff was buried, as he had asked to be, right beside Catherine, with Edgar's grave close by on her other side — the three of them together at last on the edge of the moor they had all loved and lost each other over. People in the village still said that on wild nights you could see Heathcliff and Catherine walking the moor together, hand in hand, but Hareton and Cathy, standing quietly by the graves, found it hard now to believe the dead could ever be anything but at rest.
About this story
- Audience: general readers
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