Wuthering Heights

The night the window rattled

Lockwood, snowed in at the Heights, spends the night in a dead woman’s bed and dreams — or does not dream — that someone is at the window. It is the most famous ghost scene in English fiction, and it is over before anyone agrees it happened — Lockwood wakes, the house wakes, and Heathcliff throws the window open to beg the thing to come back.

The scandal of 1847

It arrived in December 1847 under a fake name — “Ellis Bell,” because a woman’s name would have sunk it — and the reviews read like incident reports. Critics granted its power and recoiled from everything else: coarse, brutal, morally unaccountable. One American magazine managed the century’s most quotable pan: “How a human being could have attempted such a book… without committing suicide before he had finished a dozen chapters, is a mystery. It is a compound of vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors.” Reviewers also could not believe the three Bell “brothers” were separate people, and half-suspected this one was the author of Jane Eyre in a fouler mood.

Emily Brontë died almost exactly a year later, at thirty, having refused a doctor until the morning of her last day. She never saw the book taken seriously. The strangest document in its afterlife is the 1850 preface written by her own sister: Charlotte, republishing the novel after Emily’s death, spent it half defending and half apologizing — “Whether it is right or advisable to create beings like Heathcliff, I do not know: I scarcely think it is.” The book’s first great doubter was family. It took another two generations for critics to reverse the verdict entirely; it is now routinely ranked among the greatest novels in the language, ahead of books its first reviewers preferred, and the “depraved” parts are precisely the ones taught.

What readers still fight about

Is Heathcliff a romantic hero or a horror villain? This is the fight every generation restages — the 2026 film adaptation split audiences over exactly this, as its predecessors did. The romance case rests on the most famous declaration in English fiction: Catherine’s “I am Heathcliff — he’s always, always in my mind.” The horror case rests on what the man actually does across thirty-four chapters: he marries Isabella to hurt her and hangs her dog on the way out, wrecks Hindley and then raises Hindley’s son as an illiterate servant on purpose, imprisons a teenage girl until she agrees to marry his dying son, and bribes the sexton to open Catherine’s coffin. Emily Brontë presents all of it without a word of authorial verdict — the book simply refuses to tell you how to feel, which is why the argument has outlived every reviewer who wanted it burned.

Can you trust the person telling you the story? Nothing in this book is witnessed directly: it reaches you through Lockwood, a city tenant who misreads everything he sees, retelling what the housekeeper Nelly Dean told him — and Nelly was a participant in half the disasters she narrates. She carries messages she should have burned, keeps secrets that kill, and always comes out of her own story blameless. One notorious mid-century essay went as far as naming her the true villain of the book. You don’t have to go that far to feel the ground move: reread any scene asking what Nelly leaves out, and the novel changes shape.

And the half everyone cuts. Most adaptations — including the beloved 1939 film — end at Catherine’s death and simply delete the second generation. The case for cutting: the first half is the lightning. The case against is the book itself: the second half is where the children of the wreckage — Hareton and the younger Cathy — slowly undo it, and the novel ends not in a storm but in books, gardens, and “quiet earth.” Read whole, it is not a story about a great love but about whether damage has to be inherited. The family tree lays out both generations — the shape of the repair is visible right in the diagram.