This is a meek tale spun about several things: a vain girl, a brother and his painfully innocent sister, a large haunted house, a few servants, and a selfish love. Everything in this novel seems to come together simply to fall apart. It starts in the hands of the rugged narrator, Mr. Lockwood, who simply exists as a passageway for the reader into a servant woman’s story about several corrupted families.


Catherine Earnshaw knows nothing but herself and perhaps that is the lesson that Wuthering Heights teaches us—not to be so irrevocably involved in ourselves. To Catherine life is a matter of parties and finding a man that will make you the queen of social status. She, however, finds herself so in love with her father’s foster child Heathcliff. As temperamental and beautiful as the moors Catherine loves, she cares for him in turn until the day comes where she must become a proper lady and marry. Edgar Linton steps into the picture wielding a marriage proposal and a life of gold and finery that Catherine just can’t resist. it is then that Catherine realizes that she simply destroys everything that she loves and that is just the horrid way that she is. Heathcliff falls down the narrow rabbit hole of revenge against the Linton family only to find himself married to Edgar’s sister and tormenting Catherine’s drunken brother in a way of wasting time. That is, until Catherine becomes sickened and dying after her daughter, ironically named Catherine also, comes into the world. Heathcliff, horribly plagued by this woman that will never love him in turn, is forced to sit outside in the downpour of rain while she perishes in another man’s arms.


Emily Bronte’s tangle of love and deception does not simply stop at Catherine’s death, but plunges into Young Catherine’s life where she is held hostage by her mother’s once love, Heathcliff. Wuthering Heights is a tragic fairytale that will hold onto your heart and twist until you are the characters and you find yourself, like Edgar Linton’s sister (Isabella), so entranced by what is beautiful and broken.