NovelVictorian · 1847Study guide · no full textDemanding

Wuthering Heights

A story told at two removes — through a housekeeper and a tenant — so that the cruellest events arrive as gossip. Watch how the second generation repeats the first, and how the moors are never just scenery.

Love Nature Class Mortality

Study guide

This work is still in copyright, so there is no full text on the page. What you get instead: the context, the cast, the ideas and the themes — enough to read it well, and to know exactly what to watch for in the first thirty pages.

“Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.”

The cast, in the Character Atlas →Literary devices →Where it sits in time →

Go deeper

Class — how other works handle it →Love — how other works handle it →Mortality — how other works handle it →

The castFull atlas →

Heathcliff

Foundling, then owner of both houses

Wuthering Heights · Emily Brontë

Wants: Catherine, in a sense that has no equivalent in ordinary language.
Undone by: He converts grief into a system of inherited cruelty.

Catherine Earnshaw

Daughter of the Heights, then mistress of the Grange

Wuthering Heights · Emily Brontë

Wants: To be respectable and to remain herself — two things the novel will not allow together.
Undone by: She believes she can choose a marriage without choosing a self.

Now read the first page with all of this in mind.

The notes here are the map; the book is the journey.

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