Wuthering Heights
Wuthering Heights opens in 1801 as Mr. Lockwood, a new tenant at Thrushcross Grange, calls on his brooding landlord, Heathcliff, at the storm-battered farmhouse that gives the novel its name. Curious about the household's strange tensions, Lockwood draws out the story from the housekeeper, Nelly Dean. She recounts how Heathcliff, a foundling raised at Wuthering Heights, fell into a fierce, doomed love with Catherine Earnshaw. When Catherine marries the genteel Edgar Linton instead, Heathcliff disappears, then returns transformed and bent on revenge, methodically ruining both families across two generations before the cycle finally relents.
Emily Brontë's only novel is a wild, structurally daring tale of passion, obsession, and vengeance set against the bleak Yorkshire moors. It probes the destructive power of love, the long reach of cruelty and grief, and the porous line between civility and savagery. Once thought too coarse and strange, it is now recognized as one of the great achievements of English literature.
How it begins
1801—I have just returned from a visit to my landlord—the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with. This is certainly a beautiful country! In all England, I do not believe that I could have fixed on a situation so completely removed from the stir of society. A perfect misanthropist’s Heaven—and Mr. Heathcliff and I are such a suitable pair to divide the desolation between us. A capital fellow! He little imagined how my heart warmed towards him when I beheld his black eyes withdraw so suspiciously under their brows, as I rode up, and when his fingers sheltered themselves, with a jealous resolution, still further in his waistcoat, as I announced my name. “Mr. Heathcliff?” I said. A nod was the answer. “Mr. Lockwood, your new tenant, sir. I do myself the honour of calling as soon as possible after my arrival, to express the hope that I have not inconvenienced you by my perseverance in soliciting the occupation of Thrushcross Grange: I heard yesterday you had had some thoughts—” “Thrushcross Grange is my own, sir,” he interrupted, wincing. “I should not allow any one to inconvenience me, if I could hinder it—walk in!” The “walk in” was uttered with closed teeth, and expressed the sentiment, “Go to the Deuce!
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain.