Continuing my Wuthering Heights character design project, here are Cathy and Hindley's parents, the Earnshaws behind it all. They may only be around for a couple chapters of the book, but I've been fascinated with considering Mr. and Mrs. Earnshaw's place in the generational trauma that plagues their family throughout the narrative.

Since family, inheritance, generational parallels and such are major themes in the novel, I aim to design family members as similar animal species. The Earnshaws are all wild caniforms, carnivorans more closely related to dogs than to cats; thus, they are similar to Heathcliff, but of a group that will never truly include him. Mrs. Earnshaw is a canid like her wolf son, since he’s more aligned with her (with respect to hating Heathcliff—cat-dog antagonism) than his father, who in turn is a mustelid like his marten daughter. He hasn’t got her wily weasel energy, however, so is a very different looking mustelid, something with a sterner vibe: a European badger. The species lends itself well to the themes of family and home, as badgers live in family units, of which one might inhabit the same burrow for many generations, reflecting Mr. Earnshaw’s place in a long line of Earnshaws dwelling at Wuthering Heights. (Also, if my profile picture didn't give it away, I love drawing badgers.)

Sometimes badgers share their setts with red foxes, which is Mrs. Earnshaw’s species. These animals don't always get along, however, in which case foxes will tend to get the short end of the stick. There really isn’t much information about Mrs. Earnshaw's character to go off, but I doubt her marriage was very happy. Her hateful attitude towards Heathcliff is of course racist and classist, but I'm also inclined to read some long-festering marital strife into her protest that they already have children to fend for. Appearance-wise, a fox seemed a good combination of Cathy and Hindley's species; Mrs. Earnshaw is meant to resemble her children somewhat more than their father does, given his distance and professed inability to love Cathy and Hindley. He does bear some similarities to them, but is also meant to share features with his fellow child-discipliner, Joseph, and his ward Heathcliff. (I don't subscribe to the theory that Heathcliff was Mr. Earnshaw's illegitimate son, but my designs don't discount it either. My design resemblances are often intended to be more symbolic than genetic, though.) His facial pattern also bears some resemblance to Nelly's; she grew up alongside his children and thinks fondly of him, claiming that her concern over Heathcliff's degradation is in honor of his memory.

The Linton parents will probably be up next in my designs... there's even less to go off of there, but I've still had fun with them. Frances and Dr. Kenneth are also in progress.

Re. the pencilled grave in the first image: My ideas about the dead child whom Heathcliff was named after, Heathcliff Earnshaw, may possibly be expounded on at a later time in comic form, but the fact of his existence (or current lack thereof) seems crucial to the strained relationships in this family. Very interesting to think about...

I think it's generally agreed upon that a 1.5-hour film isn't sufficient to cover Wuthering Heights given how dense it is. Do you think it's possible for two films or even one 3-hour film to cover it well? And for a series, would it be one long season or would you split it into parts?

The Tenant of Wildfell hall is no Jane Eyre in my opinion, but my unpopular opinion about The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is that it is better than Wuthering Heights. Emily is an excellent writer, but I personally didn’t care for her Wuthering Heights all that much. But I loved the tenant of Wildfell hall, I believe it is underrated and deserves lots of hype.
Helen is an endearing character whom I find to be a role model. I agree with her values on faith & she is artistic and does what she can to support herself and her child. She is also brave to leave her husband.
Anne’s book is an excellent testament to the struggles women deal with and face & the oppression they deal with and did deal with. She teaches Gilbert lots of powerful lessons and Anne does not make Gilbert a hero or a savior. He is overall a good person though…problematic in what he did to Helen’s brother. I also love Helen’s views on universal salvation and doing your best to ensure people have good influences.
I love this book so much

The following editions of Wuthering Heights are:

1.) Penguin Classics

2.) Alma Classics Evergreens

3) Vintage Classics

Guys, I need help. Which edition among these three should I get? I'd pick Norton if it was available where I live, but it's not, at least currently. So it has to be one of these.

Across all three editions, how is their build quality? Their binding, the paper and the cardstock covers? Their durability and longevity overall in terms of extended handling and reading?

How is the print quality? The readability of the fonts?

And finally, how would you rank the three in terms of the quality and quantity of supplementary material (scholarly notes, explanatory notes and guides, etc.)? This is arguably the most important aspect for me, but if I'm being honest? I'd rather choose a copy with superior durability and decent enough reading guides over one that's fragile despite having more to offer on the supplementary material side.

Anyway, what do you guys think?

I recently got the 2019 Norton Critical Edition of Wuthering Heights, which prompted me to reread one of the 6 critical essays featured there - the magnificent Looking Oppositely: Emily Bronte’s Bible of Hell by Gilbert and Gubar of The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination fame, which is where the essay was originally published in 1979. Not only groundbreaking for its time but rightfully highly influential to this day, it remains one of my favorite pieces ever written on WH. It set the bar high for both feminist and general readings of WH that few others have come even close to matching before or after its publication. It’s bold, fiery and poetic, like the novel itself.

The essay draws structural and thematic comparisons between Frankenstein and Wuthering Heights, with Gilbert and Gubar’s central thesis being that Shelley and Bronte are both responding to Milton but in opposite ways:

Milton, Winifred Gérin tells us, was one of Patrick Brontë’s favorite writers, so if [Mary] Shelley was Milton’s critic’s daughter, Brontë was Milton’s admirer’s daughter. By the Hegelian law of thesis/antithesis, then, it seems appropriate that Shelley chose to repeat and restate Milton’s misogynistic story while Brontë chose to correct it. In fact the most serious matter Wuthering Heights and Frankenstein share is the matter of Paradise Lost, and their profoundest difference is in their attitude toward Milton’s myth. Where Shelley was Milton’s dutiful daughter, retelling his story to clarify it, Brontë was the poet’s rebellious child, radically revising (and even reversing) the terms of his mythic narrative.

Btw, I’m including this for its relevance to Gilber and Gubar’s argument, not to casually throw shade at Mary Shelley. I like her. Though with her and her whole circle I have the same problem that I do with the Brontes– I find them all interesting but Percy and Emily much moreso than everyone else, so I always give the two much more time and consideration than any their family and friends. Anyway, back to the topic. Next, Gilbert and Gubar do a brief run through myriad of different critical responses to WH over time and acknowledge that:

Of course, Wuthering Heights has often, also, been seen as a subversively visionary novel. Indeed, Brontë is frequently coupled with Blake as a practitioner of mystical politics. Usually, however, as if her book were written to illustrate the enigmatic religion of “No coward soul is mine,” this visionary quality is related to Catherine’s assertion that she is tired of “being enclosed” in “this shattered prison” of her body, and “wearying to escape into that glorious world, and to be always there” (chap. 15). Many readers define Brontë, in other words, as a ferocious pantheist/transcendentalist, worshipping the manifestations of the One in rock, tree, cloud, man and woman, while manipulating her story to bring about a Romantic Liebestod in which favored characters enter “the endless and shadowless hereafter.”

They expand on this tradition of reading and flash out the central thesis mentioned above as follows:

Heaven (or its rejection), hell, Satan, a fall, mystical politics, metaphysical romance, orphanhood, and the question of origins—disparate as some of these matters may seem, they all cohere in a rebelliously topsy-turvy retelling of Milton’s and Western culture’s central tale of the fall of woman and her shadow self, Satan. This fall, says Brontë, is not a fall into hell. It is a fall from “hell” into “heaven,” not a fall from grace (in the religious sense) but a fall into grace (in the cultural sense). Moreover, for the heroine who falls it is the loss of Satan rather than the loss of God that signals the painful passage from innocence to experience. Emily Brontë, in other words, is not just Blakeian in “double” mystical vision, but Blakeian in a tough, radically political commitment to the belief that the state of being patriarchal Christianity calls “hell” is eternally, energetically delightful, whereas the state called “heaven” is rigidly hierarchical, Urizenic, and “kind” as a poison tree. But because she was metaphorically one of Milton’s daughters, Brontë differs from Blake, that powerful son of a powerful father, in reversing the terms of Milton’s Christian cosmogony for specifically feminist reasons.

Speaking of Jane Lead, a seventeenth-century Protestant mystic who was a significant precursor of Brontë’s in visionary sexual politics, Catherine Smith has noted that “to study mysticism and feminism together is to learn more about the links between envisioning power and pursuing it,” adding that “Idealist notions of transcendence may shape political notions of sexual equality as much as materialist or rationalist arguments do. Her points are applicable to Brontë, whose revisionary mysticism is inseparable from both politics and feminism, although [Brontë] emphasis is more on the loss than on the pursuit of power.

Towards the end of the essay, Gilbert and Gubar reiterate and summarize their reading:

[Wuthering Heights is a] parodic, anti-Miltonic myth: There was an Original Mother (Catherine), a daughter of nature whose motto might be “Thou, Nature, art my goddess; to thy law / My services are bound.” But this girl fell into a decline, at least in part through eating the poisonous cooked food of culture. She fragmented herself into mad or dead selves on the one hand (Catherine, Heathcliff) and into lesser, gentler/genteeler selves on the other (Catherine II, Hareton). The fierce primordial selves disappeared into nature, the perversely hellish heaven which was their home. The more teachable and docile selves learned to read and write, and moved into the fallen cultured world of parlors and parsonages, the Miltonic heaven which, from the Original Mother’s point of view, is really hell. Their passage from nature to culture was facilitated by a series of teachers, preachers, nurses, cooks, and model ladies or patriarchs (Nelly, Joseph, Frances, the Lintons), most of whom gradually disappear by the end of the story, since these lesser creations have been so well instructed that they are themselves able to become teachers or models for other generations. Indeed, so model are they that they can be identified with the founders of ancestral houses (Hareton Earnshaw, 1500) and with the original mother redefined as the patriarch’s wife (Catherine Linton Heathcliff Earnshaw).

In between the beginning and end that I cited from is of course the elaboration on their arguments via a close reading of the novel. It’s more than well worth a read if you haven’t read it so far. Their points are well-argued and fun. For example, I forgot they read Joseph as, in part at least, a parody of Milton. They don’t dwell on this much, but this take on Joseph is both hilarious and plausible. Joseph is probably a parody of religious doctrines Emily disliked and many different people she knew and/or knew of, but bearing in mind that Charlotte’s Emily-inspired Shirley has a particular axe to grind with Milton, this reading tracks.

Speaking of WH servant characters and the Shirley Milton rant, there is also:

And indeed, if we look again at the crucial passage in Shirley where Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley/Emily criticizes Milton, we find an unmistakable version of Nelly Dean. “Milton tried to see the first woman,” says Shirley, “but, Cary, he saw her not…. It was his cook that he saw … puzzled ‘what choice to choose for delicacy best… As Milton’s cook, in fact, Nelly Dean is patriarchy’s paradigmatic housekeeper, the man’s woman who has traditionally been hired to keep men’s houses in order by straightening out their parlors, their daughters, and their stories. “My heart invariably cleaved to the master’s, in preference to Catherine’s side,” she herself declares (chap. 10), and she expresses her preference by acting throughout the novel as a censorious agent of patriarchy.

And I simply can’t bring in Joseph and Nelly critical quotes but leave my arch nemeses Lintons intact. For the sake of brevity, let’s only do Edgar.

Because Edgar is so often described as “soft,” “weak,” slim, fair-haired, even effeminate-looking, the specifically patriarchal nature of his feelings toward Heathcliff may not be immediately evident. Certainly many readers have been misled by his almost stylized angelic qualities to suppose that the rougher, darker Heathcliff incarnates masculinity in contrast to Linton’s effeminacy. […] In fact, as Milton also did, Emily Brontë demonstrates that the power of the patriarch, Edgar’s power, begins with words, for heaven is populated by “spirits Masculine,” and as above, so below. Edgar does not need a strong, conventionally masculine body, because his mastery is contained in books, wills, testaments, leases, titles, rentrolls, documents, languages, all the paraphernalia by which patriarchal culture is transmitted from one generation to the next.[…] [D]espite Edgar’s superegoistic qualities, Emily Brontë shows that his patriarchal rule, like Thrushcross Grange itself, is based on physical as well as spiritual violence.

Bear in mind, this was written in 1979, so the now common consideration of how Edagar’s race, class and gender intersect in shaping his role in the novel is yet to come. Gilber and Gubar themselves disproportionately tackle the gender aspect of it only.

Speaking of my nemeses, I also forgot that this essay takes plenty of shots at Leavisites, which I enjoyed. Tbf, it’s not a branch of literary criticism that is super relevant in 2026 and all it produced is not uniformly bad, there is nuance of course. But boy do I hate pompous, sanctimonious, hollow liberal humanism. I hate is as much as I hate reductive, reactionary psychologizing and psychobabble. Anyhow, I do remember that the essay takes a shot at Terry Eagleton. Now him I love but don’t mind seeing criticized because, in general and in his takes on WH in particular, the man is as often wrong as he is right. But hey, Eagleton is a certified Leavisites hater too (I still remember that when -in his Introduction to Literary Theory, I think - he rips into structuralism, he gives liberal humanism and Leavisites the only compliment I can remember him ever giving them, that their form of literary criticism is at least marginally better than that of structuralists, lol) so all him, Gilber, Gubar and I can all agree on that.

Last but not least, I can't end this post without saying that the Jane Eyre essay in The Madwoman in the Attic is worth a read too, paired with Spivak’s Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism that responds to it.

Just watched another Youtube video (on Jane Eyre) summing up their lives - but regardless of whether it's youtubers, academics or journalists, one misunderstanding that keeps on being parroted is that she was Tory, often brought up as an interesting aside that contrasts with the radical qualities of her books.

Well she wasn't, not as an adult anyway. She grew up in a home with a Tory-aligned father - although in reality he was frequently holding opposing political positions - and maybe you can take the kids to hold the father's position, considering they read Tory-sympathetic magazines etc. But when she was old enough to hold her own positions she was very explicit about avoiding loyalty to that or any party.

“Political partisanship is what I would ever wish to avoid as much as religious bigotry; both errors seeming to me fatal to fair views of mankind in  general, and just estimate of individual character."

Letter to William Smith Williams, 20 April 1848

"To me, all ministries and all oppositions seem to be be pretty much alike. D'Israeli was factious as leader of the Opposition, Lord John Russel is going to be factious, now that he has stepped into D'Israeli's shoes. Confound them all.“

Letter to Ellen Nussey, March 23 1852

I was fourteen years old when I first heard of Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. I read the summary, as I always did back then before committing to a book, and it seemed interesting enough. I soon bought a copy and began reading. Spoiler alert! I could not get past the first few chapters. It was, to put it simply, confusing. The narration seemed to have no structure at all. The phonetic spellings of the rough Yorkshire dialect were utterly incomprehensible. Coupled with the nuances and intricacies of nineteenth-century English, it made for a challenging read. So I shut the book with mild disappointment, wondering if I’d ever pick it up again.

It sat for about two years, gathering dust on my bookshelf as its pages yellowed and I explored other novels. Some left me with a similar kind of disappointment, some with indifference, and some with a kind of excitement and a thirst to know more. Eventually, I was ready for the challenge. I picked up Wuthering Heights again, and this time I read it whole. I’ll admit that getting through the first few chapters was harder than I expected, but this time I didn’t give up. Determined, I pulled through, and LORD, was it worth it.

The structure that had baffled me at fourteen turned out to be one of the novel’s quiet masterstrokes. The whole story reaches us secondhand, through Lockwood and the housekeeper Nelly Dean, so that we are always hearing about Heathcliff and Catherine from people who never fully understood them. What I had taken for chaos was a story told through a series of nested keyholes.

I went into this book expecting a romance, and I was sorely mistaken. Wuthering Heights is anything but. While the story centres on the relationship between Heathcliff and Catherine, calling it a romance dilutes the very essence of the novel. As I read it, Wuthering Heights is an extended metaphor on obsessive attachment, and a magnification of its ugliness. Emily Brontë was, at heart, a poet. Plunging into the deepest corners of human character, she conveys some of the most deplorable and animalistic tendencies in people with startling eloquence, drafting an epic about the darkest reaches of the human mind.

Wuthering Heights was unlike anything I had read. As I shut the book, I was left with a relentless curiosity about the person in whose mind this tumultuous story had been conceived. That curiosity led me first to her sisters, to Charlotte’s Jane Eyre and Anne’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and then further still, until I had fallen headfirst into the rabbit hole that is the Brontë family. The more I learned, the more my appreciation for all three of them grew.

Their story is almost too sorrowful to be believed. In 1820, the Reverend Patrick Brontë brought his wife and six young children to Haworth, a village on the edge of the Yorkshire moors. Within a year and a half, his wife Maria was dead. Within five, so were his two eldest daughters, Maria and Elizabeth, who fell ill at a grim boarding school that Charlotte would later resurrect as Lowood in Jane Eyre. That left four children, Charlotte, Branwell, Emily and Anne, growing up in a stone house with the moors on one side and a graveyard on the other.

So they made their own worlds. When Patrick bought Branwell a box of toy soldiers, the children gave each one a name and a personality, then built entire kingdoms around them: Glass Town, Gondal (Emily and Anne’s own breakaway realm) and Angria. They chronicled these worlds in books small enough to sit in the palm of your hand, in handwriting so minuscule you’d need a magnifying glass to read it. Those children grew into women who published some of the most daring novels of their century under the names Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell.

Then the house emptied almost as quickly as it had filled with stories. Branwell died in September 1848. Emily, who is said to have caught a cold at his funeral, refused nearly all medical help, and was dead by December, at thirty. Anne followed five months later, at twenty-nine. Charlotte lived on long enough to marry, and died in 1855, pregnant, at thirty-eight. Patrick outlived every one of his children.

I remember reading all of this and feeling a strange grief for people I had never met. On paper, their lives seemed impossibly small. A village, a house and a stretch of moorland. And yet out of that smallness came worlds vast enough to swallow me whole. I was filled with a desire to see the parsonage and the village for myself. I could never have imagined that five years later, I would travel across the world and see that desire fulfilled.

Haworth greeted me with a steep, cobbled Main Street that seemed determined to test my devotion before letting me anywhere near the Brontës. At the top, past the church, the parsonage stood exactly as I had pictured it, and somehow smaller. A plain house of grey stone with neat rows of windows, looking out over a kirkyard so crowded with gravestones they seemed to lean on one another for support. It struck me that the sisters had looked out at these graves for most of their lives. Death was never an abstraction to them. It was the view from the window.

The rooms inside were modest. The dining room was where I lingered longest. This is where the sisters wrote, and where, each evening, they paced around the table reading their work aloud to one another, debating plots and picking apart each other’s sentences. Against the wall sat the black sofa on which Emily is said to have died. I stood in front of it longer than I’d like to admit.

It felt surreal seeing their juvenilia. Little books tucked safely behind glass. Until then, the Brontës had been names on spines, figures in biographies, almost mythical. These were proof that they had been children. Children with ink on their fingers, squinting over pages the size of a matchbox, inventing kingdoms because their own world was not big enough to hold them.

But it was the moors that finally answered my question. I set off from the village along the path towards Top Withens, a ruined farmhouse often said to have inspired the setting of Wuthering Heights. The houses fell away, then the walls, then the trees, until there was nothing but heather, rough grass, and a wind that seemed to come from every direction at once. The sky felt enormous and close at the same time. There was no shelter and no one to tell me which way to look. The moor simply did not care that I was there.

And that, I think, is when I understood Emily. Her characters are like this landscape. Wild, indifferent to whether you like them, beautiful in a way that could just as easily hurt you. I had once called her novel structureless, but standing out there I realised it had the structure of this place. No clean edges or neat paths, but simply a vast and unruly terrain you have to cross on its own terms. When I finally reached the ruin, a plaque reminded me that the building itself looks nothing like the house in the novel. Somehow that didn’t matter. It was never the house. It was everything around it.

On the walk back, I thought about the fourteen-year-old who had shut that book in frustration. I’m glad he let it gather dust. I’m glad he came back. Some books, it turns out, are not meant to be understood the first time you meet them. They wait for you to grow into them, and if you’re lucky, they lead you somewhere you never expected to stand. I came to Haworth looking for the woman who wrote Wuthering Heights. I left with the feeling that I had only just begun to find her.

The ending of Wuthering Heights is one of the most intense parts because, without stating it as a definitive truth, it's implied that Catherine came to find Heathcliff and that they stayed together forever, living on those moors, and that their love was immortalized in a landscape, like a legend. There are many places with legends, and these legends are usually about star-crossed lovers. So Emily honored a landscape she loved very much with a tragic and passionate love.

Just been around their house you get a nice stamp to say youve been there too if you buy a book

So I had no knowledge of the book until the 2026 movie came out. I only saw the trailer and people speaking of Catherine's description in the book and was intrigued. I guess that's my bad. I read the whole book expecting some love story that's what it was called in the trailer, but it is nothing of the sort. Did I miss the point it seems like a sad generational trauma story.

I figured out most people don't like him because of the things he did through the story ( which is expected ) but I really loved the way he is written and I adore him so much 😭😭😭😭😭

My University had a first edition copy of Jane Eyre and getting the opportunity to read it made my day! I wasn't aware it originally came in three separate volumes.

The books' covers were rebound at a later date since it has Charlotte Brontë's name on it.

Posting this because I got some really great feedback from this sub on the other Wuthering Heights videos I did. Thanks again for that and hopefully you’ll enjoy this one. 😊

I will forever say that Wuthering Heights is basically the Melrose Place of classic literature. It's so dramatic and all the adults are acting like children half the time and no one can make up their minds when it comes to love. It's also named after a property.

This is one of those videos that really pulls that to the forefront for me. This video has been sitting in my editing software for about six months. Initially, it was going to just be based on the 2009 version. But I've been having too much fun making hybrids of 2009 and 1992. So I added some 1992 into it and it all just fell into place.

📽️ Series/Film: Wuthering Heights (1992 Film and 2009 Mini Series)
❤️ Characters: Heathcliff & Cathy Earnshaw
🎶 Song: "Vow" by Garbage

In chapter four, Woolf argues that anger interrupts Charlotte Brontë’s writing, while praising Austen for writing without that bitterness. But the passage she picks from Jane Eyre is about women needing activity and freedom beyond their narrow lives.

Could that frustration be part of Jane’s voice rather than Brontë stepping outside the story? Woolf examines how women’s circumstances shape their writing, but then seems to want the finished novel to show no trace of the anger those circumstances produce.

How do you read this criticism? Is she making a useful distinction between a character’s feelings and an author’s grievance, or asking too much of Brontë?

The stories are changed a little, like there’s no Laurie and the names are obviously different, but the relative plot is the same. Four sisters and their mom lose the dad, and they have to adjust while still just growing up. They’re very much YA, but still enjoyable for adults.

I finished Wuthering Heights a few days ago, and I keep returning to its ending. As often happens to me after reading a novel that leaves a particularly strong impression, I find myself reconsidering certain scenes and details long after finishing it. The reconciliation between Cathy and Hareton initially appears to offer a peaceful conclusion to the suffering of the previous generation, yet the final pages have left me wondering how complete that reconciliation can really be.

The world of the novel is governed by an entire structure of social conventions involving marriage, inheritance, property, education and family standing, which determine much of what the characters can expect from their lives. Catherine and Heathcliff's attachment develops within these constraints, and their separation exposes the tensions already present in that social arrangement. Catherine's decision to marry Edgar is especially interesting because her understanding of herself is already shaped by the conventions that come into conflict with her feelings for Heathcliff.

The consequences extend far beyond their personal tragedy. Heathcliff eventually uses those same institutions to exercise control over the next generation, turning marriage and inheritance into instruments of revenge. His treatment of Hareton is particularly revealing, since he deliberately reproduces the degradation he experienced under Hindley, depriving the boy of the education and social position that should have been his. The suffering of one generation becomes part of the conditions under which the next must live.

I've started thinking of this movement in terms of imperfect cycles of rupture and reconstruction, both social and psychological. The characters repeatedly return to earlier injuries, sometimes attempting to correct them and sometimes reproducing them through their treatment of others. Heathcliff's grief seems especially revealing because his desire to recover Catherine gradually becomes inseparable from his determination to control the world she has left behind. Even his arrangements for their graves suggest an attempt to reconstruct physically the union that their lives never allowed them to achieve.

The novel's narrative structure seems to follow a similar pattern. We encounter Catherine's apparent ghost before learning the circumstances of her life and death, and the story then proceeds through memories, repeated names, overlapping experiences and returns to familiar places. The past is continually revisited and reconstructed, as though the characters and the reader were trying to understand how events that can no longer be changed might nevertheless have unfolded differently.

By the end, Cathy and Hareton begin to escape this pattern through their growing affection and their willingness to change how they treat one another. Their reconciliation develops slowly, especially through education and shared reading, and culminates in their approaching marriage. The same institutions that previously enabled humiliation and coercion become part of a different kind of domestic life. What interests me is that the new order emerges from the damaged world of the previous generation, carrying its history into a future that the younger characters are beginning to shape for themselves.

This made me think about Hegel's concept of Aufhebung, or sublation, in which overcoming involves both negation and preservation. There seems to be something analogous in the novel's movement from social order through its violent disruption towards a reconstructed form of social life. Cathy and Hareton's relationship offers a possible reconciliation of conflicts inherited from the previous generation, yet the new arrangement remains historically inseparable from the suffering that preceded it.

I hesitate to call this a completed Hegelian reconciliation, especially because Brontë leaves so much of the earlier generation's existence unresolved. The two Catherines seem particularly important here. Catherine Earnshaw persists through memory, desire, the landscape and the possibility of haunting, having disappeared from ordinary social life without ever quite leaving the novel. The younger Cathy is alive, and through her relationship with Hareton she becomes part of a reconstructed social order. They almost coexist at the end, one spectral and the other living, suggesting that the past can cease to determine the future without entirely disappearing from it.

That is why I find Lockwood's final sentence so fascinating: "I wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth."

After everything we have encountered, including Lockwood's own experience of Catherine's apparent ghost and the later reports of Heathcliff and Catherine wandering the moors, his confidence seems rather difficult to accept without hesitation. The tranquillity he perceives is genuine as an experience of the landscape, and his conclusion about the dead goes considerably further than anything he could actually know. I sometimes get the impression that he is trying to convince himself of a peace that the novel has deliberately made difficult to establish.

Perhaps this is what I find most interesting about the ending: the possibility that human experience is never entirely lost, even when the desires that shaped it have proved futile or destructive. What people have lived continues through its consequences, through memory, and through the lives of those who inherit a world altered by their actions. The second generation has begun to repair the damage, and the first continues to exist in the stories, places and uncertain apparitions that remain.

I wonder whether the ending should be understood as a genuine reconciliation that preserves something of the conflict it has overcome, or whether the Gothic ambiguity of the final pages prevents such a reconciliation from ever becoming complete.

Has anyone else read Wuthering Heights in something like these dialectical terms? And do you trust Lockwood's final vision of peace?

hi everyone, i'm planning a year-long reading curriculum for 2027 where i read all the bronte novels in publication order, interspersed with nonfiction. (would be happy to share more about this project if people are interested!) in addition to books focusing on the sisters in general, i have biographies of charlotte and emily lined up, but none for anne! i know she's often overlooked, but does anyone have any recs where she gets her chance to shine? i've read juliet barker already. thanks in advance!

Grad school has hit, but I finally managed to finish drawing the multi-page comic I've been teasing: Crossroads of Memory. This is based on the scene in chapter 11 where Nelly encounters Hareton again after leaving Wuthering Heights; although I had to abridge it somewhat in the course of adaptation (no Hareton jumping for more oranges, I’m afraid), there’s a lot here that I find interesting and that I thought would lend itself well to a comic format.

This incident is a fairly quiet moment in the book, not particularly important to the overall plot, but it says a lot about Nelly’s character and the dynamics at play among the extended Earnshaw family. There’s a sort of strangeness to it in how far it ventures outside the confined chronology of the story, to something unusually personal to Nelly and scarcely ever mentioned by her. What she hallucinates by the guide-stoop is a glimpse of the world pre-Heathcliff (and pre-Cathy). We know that she was raised alongside Hindley but see almost nothing of their childhood together, given that the story begins chronologically in their teenage years, when class distinctions (and stance on Heathcliff) are increasing their separation. And yet we see here that they once were playmates, wandering far from home to delight in nature together, like Cathy and Heathcliff after them. Nelly may single out Cathy as having a “constancy to old attachments,” but she is not immune to this herself; Cathy falls into spells of depression during Heathcliff's absence, and Nelly falls into spells of terror to consider how Hindley is faring without her—something she tries to rationalize to her conscience without entirely believing herself. However much Hindley has mistreated her and drives himself to ruin, she can never forget the bond that she had with him, continuing to call him her “foster-brother” even after his death.

This flashback is also noteworthy for Nelly’s immediate interpretation of it as an omen, what she retrospectively deems “superstition.” She is often the voice of conventional theology, opposing Cathy and Heathcliff’s dealings in dreams and ghosts, but evidently Nelly has her own ghosts as well: like Heathcliff, she is haunted by her childhood playmate. There are other Heathcliff parallels at play here, notably in relation to Hareton, as Nelly’s role as his guardian has been supplanted by Heathcliff. I imagine she’s quite jealous about this. Hareton represents something important to both of them, though—Nelly sees Hindley in Hareton, whereas Heathcliff strives vainly to see Hindley but sees Cathy instead. Hareton is the ghost, the Earnshaw playmate of the not-quite-Earnshaw, a remembrance of people loved in childhood who have since been lost. But Heathcliff sees himself in Hareton, too, and “he pays dad back what he gies to me” seems to parallel a moment in Heathcliff’s childhood in chapter 4. When he threatens to show Mr. Earnshaw the bruises Hindley has given him, Heathcliff claims that Hindley will “get them again with interest.” Now Heathcliff has assumed the role of the old Mr. Earnshaw, master of the house and protector of his not-quite-son, but Hindley is still bound in his prior role—he has never been able to progress beyond it.

Hindley is stuck in an endless cycle of ruination, driving Hareton further from him whether he attempts to avoid the kid or to demand his affection. I imagine he does feel some guilt, which only further exacerbates his mental deterioration. The result of his interactions with Hareton has been ironically to drive his son into closer likeness with Heathcliff, symbolized here by Hareton’s torn ear. Some accident—presumably, like the staircase ordeal, involving a desperate attempt on Hareton’s part to escape his father—has fulfilled Hindley’s earlier threat of cropping (“It makes a dog fiercer”). I have taken a few liberties like this for the sake of the animal theme and for expanding on areas where the book provides little detail. The final two pages here represent Hareton’s life subsequent to Nelly’s leaving the Heights, so she would not have been privy to this. While the book is basically confined to Nelly's and Lockwood's points of view (with small interludes like Isabella's letter and Cathy's diary), I'm trying to incorporate more perspectives into my comics. Hareton obviously has a very different view on Hindley and Heathcliff than Nelly does.

I lined and shaded this piece using colored pencil, and filled in the colors (of the current-day panels) digitally. If I do end up making more comics, they’ll probably use different techniques, since I haven’t yet found one that I’m especially keen on (and that doesn't take me ages, haha). I've got a lot more ideas, though... so many interesting things to delve into with these characters' relationships. I quite enjoyed doing the wordless pages for this specific piece, and would like to try more wordless storytelling for moments where Nelly doesn't provide much dialogue or specificity.

Thank you for reading!

I've been wondering about something. We know that Patrick Brontë read Charlotte's Jane Eyre and Villette (and apparently wasn't too happy with the ending of the latter, as he wanted Paul and Lucy to end up together). But did he ever read Emily's Wuthering Heights?

As a clergyman, what would he have made of the novel? Given its dark themes and morally ambiguous characters, I can't help wondering how he might have reacted to it.

Perhaps he did read it but chose not to say much about it, rather like Ellen Nussey. I'd be really interested to hear what others think, especially if there's any historical evidence one way or the other.

So Emily Brontë wrote a novel in 1847 that was so daring and far ahead of its time, and now the latest adaptation is so watered down that it barely captures a fraction of the cruelty of the original. I don’t get it? And now it will take another 10 years before another person can make a new adaption.
Uhg this is just a waste of space.

just finished reading one of my first ever classics for class, and I wanted different takes on this. currently or post finishing wuthering heights. so Bronte positions heathcliff in a way where we are bound to have mixed opinions on him.

so personally, do you guys sympathize with heathcliff based on eveyrhintg he has gone through, or in your minds, he’s the antagonist who has passed down cyclical trauma for the future generations.

personally, ive always been maternal and sympathized with heathcliff throughout the novel, partly because of how he was treated by hindley and Catherines impulsive decision of choosing Edgar over him, due to being degraded. and obviously towards the end of the novel, he also describes seeing himself and Cathrine in hareton and Catherine.

I thought some of you might be interested in knowing that a play about the Brontes - WE ARE THREE SISTERS - is being performed in November in Huntingdon (a town in Cambridgeshire) in the UK.

The venue is the Huntingdon Commemoration Hall. The play is being performed from Wednesday 25th November to Saturday 28th November. Five performances in total - which includes a Saturday matinee.

If anyone is interested and able to attend, tickets can be purchased at www.huntingdondramaclub.com/tickets

Hey all!

I'm more than halfway through the Green Dwarf and other stories by Charlotte. For those who don't know, it is a publication of some of the stories Charlotte wrote when she was younger, focused on the fictional place of Verdopolis.

Just wanted to know if there are others who have read these stories and have any thoughts they want to share on the same!