In this blog post, I focused on how Emily Brontë’s ‘Wuthering Heights’ goes beyond a simple tragic love story to become a work in which class, gender, revenge, love, reality, and fantasy are intricately intertwined.

A Unique Novel Born of Isolation

While reading Emily Brontë’s ‘Wuthering Heights’, what first caught my attention was the author’s life as much as the work itself. The fact that the three Brontë sisters, who lived in a remote country parsonage in northern England, submitted their novel to a London publisher and brought it to the world was highly unusual even in the history of British fiction. Among them, Charlotte Brontë’s ‘Jane Eyre’ and Emily Brontë’s ‘Wuthering Heights’ eventually achieved classic status, but the two works were not received with the same acclaim from the start.
Unlike ‘Jane Eyre’, which received favorable reviews from the start and became a bestseller, the reviews of ‘Wuthering Heights’ at the time were not particularly favorable. While many acknowledged the work’s unique power, it was often criticized as rough and crude. However, considering that a second edition was published just two years later, it seems clear that, regardless of the critics’ opinions, the work possessed a power to strongly captivate readers from the very beginning.
Emily Brontë passed away before fame came her way. After being thoroughly drenched in the rain at her brother Branwell’s funeral, her tuberculosis rapidly worsened, and she died less than two months later. The following year, the youngest sister, Anne Brontë, also died of tuberculosis. Having lost their mother in childhood and raised with the help of their great-aunt, most of the Brontë siblings passed away around the age of thirty, and Charlotte herself did not live past forty. In such a short and isolated life, Emily left behind very few works. Although only two letters remain, ‘Wuthering Heights’ alone was enough to establish her as a towering figure in 19th-century British fiction.
Emily’s life was almost completely cut off from the outside world. The vicarage where she spent most of her life was located in a remote rural area, and it is said that whenever she left home, her health would deteriorate, forcing her to return. It is also said that for a time, she spoke to no one except her family and her maid. However, her isolated life did not mean a complete severance from the world. Rather, books served that purpose.
Her father, Patrick Brontë, came from the lower classes in Ireland. After holding various jobs, he taught himself to become a teacher, moved to England, graduated from Cambridge University, and became a clergyman. His library contained not only the works of Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, and Walter Scott, but also books and magazines such as ‘Aesop’s Fables’, ‘One Thousand and One Nights’, and ‘The Edinburgh Review’. Even if the rectory was their entire world, the world they encountered through books was boundless.
The Brontë siblings did not merely read books. In 1826, when Emily was eight years old, their father gave her older brother Branwell a set of wooden soldier figurines, and the siblings began naming the figurines and creating stories with them as the main characters. At first, they set their stories in a fictional country called Angria, and when Emily turned thirteen, she and Anne created a separate imaginary realm called Gondal to further develop their stories. This creative work continued even after they became adults. Although most of the manuscripts for the Gondal stories have been lost, it struck me that ‘Wuthering Heights’ was not a work that appeared out of nowhere, thanks to this long period of early creative practice.

Why It’s “Wuthering Heights” and Not “Stormy Heights”

Reading this work made me reconsider the title. While the title “Stormy Heights” has long been familiar to us, if we consider the original title, ‘Wuthering Heights’, literally, “Wuthering Heights” does not simply mean a hill battered by storms. In the novel, Wuthering Heights is the name of the house where the Earnshaw family lives. The name “Heights” was given because the house is situated on high ground with a good view, and “Wuthering” is a Yorkshire dialect term meaning that a house perched on a high hill is directly exposed to the turbulence of the atmosphere when storms rage.
Once I considered this, my perspective on the work shifted slightly. The title ‘Wuthering Heights’ naturally evokes images of fierce love and passionate romance. In fact, this work has long been read as the story of Heathcliff and Catherine’s passionate love, and through its film adaptations, it has solidified into an even more intense myth of love. In particular, the 1939 film directed by William Wyler cut out much of the novel’s latter half to focus on the tragic love between Catherine and Heathcliff, and Heathcliff, played by Laurence Olivier, was regarded as the very embodiment of romantic love.
However, reading the novel in its entirety reveals that ‘Wuthering Heights’ contains far too much to be called merely a romantic love story. This work is also the story of two families: the Earnshaws, who live at Wuthering Heights—a house on the hill—and the Lintons, who live at Thrushcross Grange, down the hill. I felt that the “heights” in the title should not overshadow the “house.” This is because the spaces in this work are not merely backdrops but crucial elements that reveal the characters’ relationships and class positions.
In fact, the novel’s story begins when Lockwood rents Thrushcross Grange. He visits Wuthering Heights to greet the owner, Heathcliff, and on his second visit, he spends the night on an oak bedstead. There, he discovers the names Catherine Earnshaw, Catherine Heathcliff, and Catherine Linton, and after falling asleep, he encounters a ghostly girl who introduces herself as Catherine Linton. Later, Lockwood hears the story of the two families spanning about twenty years from the housekeeper, Nelly Dean.
I felt that this frame narrative structure is also an element that makes this work unique. Through Lockwood’s account, we hear Nelly Dean’s story, and within that story, we encounter the past of the two families once again. However, the ghostly girl at the very center of the work is not fully explained through direct narration. It is ultimately left to the reader to connect the ghostly girl Lockwood first encountered with Mrs. Linton—whom he learns about through Nelly Dean’s story—and to make sense of the encounter with the ghost.

Heathcliff, Who Shattered the Order of Both Families

Nelly Dean’s story begins with the scene in which Mr. Earnshaw names the mysterious child he brought back from Liverpool “Heathcliff.” Heathcliff is a character with no clear identity beyond his name. Speculation about his skin color and origins ranges from Irish, Spanish, Gypsy, Indian, and Chinese to even claims that he came from hell, but none of these can be definitively confirmed. In contrast, the Earnshaw family has owned land and farmed in North Yorkshire for centuries, while the Linton family belongs to the gentry—they do not farm the land themselves but lease it out—and own a manor house, hunting grounds, an arboretum, and orchards.
Viewed this way, the two families form a fairly symmetrical structure. The Unshaws have a son, Hindley, and a daughter, Catherine, while the Lintons have a son, Edgar, and a daughter, Isabella. However, the figure who shatters this symmetry is Heathcliff. As Heathcliff—a mysterious outsider—intrudes upon the established order of the two families, all their relationships begin to unravel.
Over the course of two generations, four marriages take place between the two families. Catherine Earnshaw marries Edgar Linton, while Heathcliff marries Isabella out of a desire for revenge. In the next generation, Linton—the son of Cathy and Heathcliff—marries Catherine, and after Linton’s death, Hareton—the son of Cathy and Hindley—marries Catherine. Ultimately, the symmetry shattered by Heathcliff’s arrival is restored through the marriage of Cathy and Hareton, who are both descendants of both families.
When viewed through the lens of Catherine and her daughter, Cathy, another intriguing structure emerges. In the mothers’ generation, the line moves from Catherine Earnshaw to Catherine Heathcliff and then to Catherine Linton; in the daughters’ generation, however, it moves from Catherine Linton to Catherine Heathcliff and then back to Catherine Earnshaw. If the shift in the mothers’ generation represents Heathcliff’s gradual loss of love, the shift in the daughters’ generation occurs as Heathcliff carries out his revenge. And a significant portion of the novel is devoted precisely to that process of revenge.

Is Heathcliff the embodiment of love, or the embodiment of revenge?

If we think of Heathcliff solely as a pure-hearted man who loved one woman even beyond death, this work can easily be dismissed as a romantic love story. However, his actions in the novel are not that simple. He uses the law to seize the fortunes of the Unshaws and the Lintons, and carries out an intelligent and ruthless plan to bring both families to ruin.
After gambling with Hindley and receiving the Unshaws’ house and land as collateral, Heathcliff uses his status as a creditor to seize Wuthering Heights following Hindley’s death. The process of seizing Thrushcross Grange is even more complex. His marriage to Isabella, who loved him, was not driven by love but by his desire to exploit the Linton family’s inheritance structure. When Catherine gave birth to a daughter and died, Isabella became a potential heir, and Heathcliff, as Isabella’s husband, moved into a position where he could claim the Linton family’s estate. He then exploited the marriage between his son Linton and Cathy, and by blackmailing his son into drafting a will that named him as the heir, he ultimately secured Thrushcross Grange as well.
Looking at this entire process, Heathcliff’s revenge is extremely meticulous and ruthless. He knew how to exploit loopholes in the law and thoroughly manipulated people’s emotions and relationships to achieve his goals. Furthermore, he subjected Isabella to physical and mental abuse and even showed a willingness to imagine horrific acts of violence against his own son and future daughter-in-law. Given these traits, I feel that viewing Heathcliff simply as the embodiment of romantic love is clearly limited to seeing only one side of the work.
Yet, strangely enough, I found it difficult to label Heathcliff as nothing but a villain. Even knowing that he seized the fortunes of both families and became a ruthless landowner, the reader eventually finds themselves siding with him. The reason is that his love for Catherine is so intense.
While Catherine was alive, Heathcliff lived for her; after her death, he lived with the single-minded determination to meet her, even if only as a ghost. To encounter Catherine’s ghost—whose presence he could sense but whose form remained invisible—he endured a life of agony for nearly twenty years. This is why I came to believe that his revenge was not merely revenge. For Heathcliff, who had connected with the world solely through Catherine, her absence meant the collapse of the world itself, and his revenge was his way of coping with that loss.
Ultimately, it is significant that Heathcliff failed to completely destroy both families in the end. Although he had made every preparation for revenge, at a certain point he declared that he did not even want to remove a single tile from the roof. It seems his true purpose was not revenge after all. When he finally becomes able to see Catherine’s ghost, he dies after going several days without eating or drinking, fearing that the ghost would vanish if he took his eyes off her. So perhaps it is only natural that what the reader ultimately remembers is his love rather than his revenge.

Was Catherine Really a Betrayer of Love?

I believe Catherine Earnshaw is a character even more prone to misunderstanding than Heathcliff. This is because the more one empathizes with Heathcliff’s love, the easier it is to harbor resentment toward Catherine. In particular, when one sees Catherine accepting Edgar Linton’s proposal, it is easy to dismiss her as a woman who betrayed Heathcliff’s love in order to gain social status and privilege.
Moreover, Nelly Dean’s narration further reinforces that judgment. Nelly Dean feels pity for Heathcliff when he is mistreated by Hindley, and she is someone who has the courage to stand up to the violent Hindley. Therefore, readers tend to trust her judgment. However, it is worth reconsidering whether the Catherine portrayed by Nelly Dean truly represents the whole of Catherine.
As a child, Catherine Earnshaw was a very strong and spirited girl. She expressed her thoughts and feelings honestly and did not readily accept her father’s authority. She was bold and resilient enough to take the lead even when roaming the moors with Heathcliff. She can be seen as a character who rejected the fragility expected of women at the time.
However, after Heathcliff ran away and she fell ill, and after she became Mrs. Linton, she displays a completely different side. She exhibits symptoms such as hysteria and anorexia and gradually wastes away. There is a clear break between the Catherine of the past and the Catherine of the future. The decisive turning point was the incident where they were discovered peering through the window of Thrushcross Grange together: Catherine was welcomed into the house, while Heathcliff was cast out.
The seeds of their separation had already been sown long before that. After Hindley became the master of Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff was driven from the oak bed where he had slept with Catherine and reduced to the status of a servant. Nevertheless, the bond between the two grew even stronger, but with the intervention of Thrushcross Grange, Catherine became aware of the class divide for the first time. A social taboo arose: she could not marry Heathcliff.
Catherine believed that her association with the Linton family would not affect her relationship with Heathcliff, but in reality, she began to feel an increasing disconnect between her feelings and her actions. It became difficult for her to maintain her original candor, and she found herself in a situation where she had to separate her feelings for the two men. It was particularly striking that it was only after she continued her relationship with Edgar Linton and accepted his proposal that she came to realize her feelings for Heathcliff even more clearly.
I believe Catherine’s confession to Nelly Dean is one of the most important parts of this work. For Catherine, her love for Edgar Linton was something that could change over time, but her love for Heathcliff was the very essence of her being. She does not view Heathcliff merely as a person separate from herself. He is already a part of her, and she feels that if Heathcliff were to disappear, the very universe in which she lives would become a foreign place.
At this point, it struck me that Catherine’s choice was not simply a matter of choosing between two men. From Nelly Dean’s perspective, it may have seemed like a choice between practical considerations and love, but to Catherine, Heathcliff was more than just a partner for marriage or daily life—he was the person who made her very existence possible. The practical life she would lead with Edgar Linton and her fundamental bond with Heathcliff were, for her, mutually exclusive.
So, upon hearing Catherine say she could not marry him, Heathcliff leaves the house. He does not hear her final words that she could never abandon him. After Heathcliff’s departure, Catherine falls ill but recovers, and it is not until nearly three years later that she marries Edgar Linton. After her marriage, Catherine is no longer as lively as she once was; she sinks into melancholy and silence. Nelly Dean believes the Lintons’ happiness has deepened, but she fails to understand that Catherine’s inner world is crumbling as she has lost her reason for living.

What Does the Ghost of the Girl Reveal?

When Heathcliff returns, Catherine welcomes him with wild joy, but she can no longer return to being the Catherine Earnshaw she once was. When Edgar demands that she choose between him and Heathcliff, Catherine ultimately chooses death. And by doing so, she attempts to return to the Catherine Earnshaw she was before she knew Thrushcross Grange, but she cannot completely shed the name Catherine Linton. Thus, she becomes a ghostly girl, wandering the moors.
When viewed this way, the ghostly girl whom Lockwood encounters in the novel’s opening scene takes on even greater significance. This is because ‘Wuthering Heights’ is not only a story of Heathcliff’s love and revenge but also a story that illustrates how Catherine’s very being becomes fragmented and destroyed.
It is particularly interesting that the protagonist of the Gondal stories—which Emily had been creating since childhood—was a woman with intense charisma. Queen Augustine Geraldine Almeda of Gondal was the daughter of a poor country pastor; she can be seen as a character who embodies the fantasy of a woman with almost no options other than marriage or becoming a governess. By transplanting that fantasy into the real world, Emily presented a woman capable of being a passionate love interest on par with Heathcliff. Yet at the same time, her willingness to confront the reality that such a woman is ultimately doomed to be shattered within the constraints of her given reality reveals Emily Brontë’s excellence as a novelist.
Ultimately, what is remarkable about ‘Wuthering Heights’ is that reality and fantasy are not separate from one another. On the surface, Lockwood’s encounter with a ghost upon entering Wuthering Heights—a place he believed to be the farthest removed from the world’s turmoil—appears to be a surreal event detached from reality. Yet, as one follows that ghost, one eventually arrives at the reality of class and gender in nineteenth-century England. Entering the haunted house actually becomes an encounter with reality.
That is why I feel this work is more romantic than any romance novel, while at the same time being as closely attuned to concrete reality as any realist novel. This is because, through the unrealistic presence of a young girl’s ghost, it actually reveals even more clearly the trajectory of life shaped by the real coordinates of class and gender. If the primary raison d’être of a novel is to uncover what only a novel can reveal, then I believe ‘Wuthering Heights’ brilliantly fulfills that role by offering a fresh perspective on reality through the lens of a haunted house.

‘Wuthering Heights’ Re-read Beyond the Myth of Love

After reading ‘Wuthering Heights’, it is difficult to remember only the love between Heathcliff and Catherine. Of course, the intense love between the two lies at the heart of the novel, and Heathcliff’s inability to forget Catherine even until his death is enough to ensure the work is remembered as a romantic love myth. However, underlying that love are complexly intertwined issues: class differences, conflicts over property, the limited choices available to women, and the ways in which family and society define an individual’s life.
After losing the one he loved, Heathcliff devoted his life to revenge, but his revenge was ultimately a reaction to the loss of Catherine. Catherine, too, while loving Heathcliff, could not turn a blind eye to the reality she had to live in, and she was torn between that reality and her own existence. It felt as though the tragedy of these two characters was not simply the result of their love going unfulfilled, but was deepened by their inability to fully choose between the order of reality surrounding their existence and their love.
Thus, ‘Wuthering Heights’ struck me as a work far greater than the passionate love story suggested by its title. As we follow the house on the hill and the house below it—the symmetrical order of the two households, Heathcliff who shatters that order, and Catherine who loses herself in the midst of it all—we naturally come to realize that this novel is not merely a romance.
Most striking of all was the presence of the ghost that links the beginning and end of the novel. Wuthering Heights, which at first seemed like a strange and unfamiliar haunted house, transforms as the story unfolds into a real-world space shaped by class, gender, love, and desire in 19th-century British society. The ghost was not a presence that drove one away from reality, but rather one that compelled a deeper examination of it.
That is why I do not wish to read ‘Wuthering Heights’ merely as the story of Heathcliff’s love. While Heathcliff’s love is undeniably intense, I felt that the true scope of this work is revealed only when we also consider the world that both enabled and ultimately destroyed that love. The way love and revenge, class and gender, reality and fantasy are intertwined—keeping the reader captivated until the very end—is surely one of the reasons ‘Wuthering Heights’ has remained a classic for so long.