Is the housekeeper the real villain of Wuthering Heights?
Almost everything we learn about Heathcliff and Catherine comes from Nelly Dean, a servant who talks to a sick tenant. In 1958 the critic James Hafley argued she steers the whole disaster by choosing what to reveal and hide, and ends the book quietly in charge of both houses.
Emily Brontë published her only novel in 1847 as Ellis Bell. The publisher Thomas Newby accepted it alongside Agnes Grey by her sister Anne, yet Charlotte's Jane Eyre reached print first. Reviews split sharply. Readers were unsettled by scenes of domestic abuse and by the book's challenge to Victorian ideas of religion, morality and class, and only later did it come to be ranked among the greatest English novels. After Emily's death Charlotte edited a second edition in 1850.
The structure is nested. In 1801 a new tenant, Mr Lockwood, calls on his landlord at a bleak moorland farm, is snowed in, reads a dead girl's diary and dreams of her ghost begging at the window. Recovering at Thrushcross Grange, he hears the backstory from Nelly. Decades earlier Mr Earnshaw came home from Liverpool with an orphan of unclear origins, named him Heathcliff and favoured him over his own children. Catherine becomes his inseparable companion, but chooses to marry the refined Edgar Linton because Heathcliff lacks status. Heathcliff overhears only part of that confession and vanishes.
He returns three years later, rich and versed in law, and turns both against the families who humbled him. He elopes with Edgar's sister Isabella, feeds Hindley Earnshaw's gambling until he holds the mortgage, and later forces his sickly son Linton to marry Catherine's daughter Cathy so he can seize the Grange. Even his name marks his outsider status: Heathcliff serves as first name and surname at once. Some critics see him as a Byronic hero, while others note he keeps reinventing himself, and Emily's troubled brother Branwell Brontë may have been one inspiration.
Revenge finally burns out. Cathy and Hareton, Hindley's neglected son, fall in love while she teaches him to read, and Heathcliff, obsessed with the dead Catherine, stops eating and dies in her old room. Locals claim to see the two ghosts walking the moors together.
Source: Wuthering Heights
