Wuthering Heights

Mr Lockwood rents Thrushcross Grange and, curious about his landlord Heathcliff, gets the story from Nelly Dean, the housekeeper who has served both houses. Everything the reader learns is Nelly telling Lockwood.

The story covers two generations: Heathcliff's arrival as a foundling, his bond with Catherine Earnshaw, her marriage elsewhere, and the long campaign of revenge he conducts against two families and their children.

Every event reaches you through a housekeeper telling a stranger, and she is not neutral.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

The double frame is the novel's most underrated feature. Nelly is a participant with her own interests, and Lockwood is obtuse, so the reader is receiving a partial account from an unreliable teller through a foolish listener.

The chronology is exact — Brontë tracks dates and ages with unusual precision — which makes the structural coldness more striking against the emotional extremity.

It is not a romance, and reading it as one produces an incoherent book. Heathcliff and Catherine's bond is presented as destructive to everyone including themselves, and the novel's second half is entirely about the damage inflicted on the next generation.

Contemporary reviewers found it brutal and morally shocking, which is a more accurate reading than the popular one.

The novel's second half exists to show what the famous first half did to everyone else's children.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

Dismissed or bewildered at publication and now among the most studied English novels, partly for the narrative architecture and partly for Heathcliff, whose racial ambiguity and class position the text keeps deliberately unresolved.

Charlotte Brontë's 1850 preface, apologising for her sister's roughness, is itself a document worth reading.

Everything reaches the reader through Lockwood, an outsider who understands almost nothing, relaying Nelly Dean, a servant with forty years of involvement and her own interests. Nothing in the novel is witnessed directly. The structure is the reason the central relationship can be read as transcendent or as monstrous — the text never speaks for itself.

There is no neutral account anywhere in this book. There is only Nelly, and Nelly was involved.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

Half the novel takes place after the famous characters are dead, following their children. Readers who expect it to end with the first generation frequently find the second half a disappointment; it is in fact the argument, showing damage repeating and then, unusually for Brontë, being interrupted.

The plot is driven by inheritance law, entailment, marriage settlements and who holds the deeds to two houses. Heathcliff's revenge is conducted almost entirely through acquisition and legal manoeuvre rather than violence, and the novel is far more interested in title deeds than its reputation suggests.

Heathcliff is found on the streets of Liverpool, a slaving port, and is described in terms that mark him as racially other without ever specifying what he is. That deliberate blank has generated substantial scholarship, and it is inseparable from how the household treats him from the first day.

The relationship at the centre involves cruelty to animals, children, servants and each other, and neither principal is presented as admirable. Readers arriving from the novel's cultural reputation as a great love story are routinely shocked, and the shock is the correct response rather than a misreading.

Published under a male pseudonym, it was widely found brutal and coarse, and Charlotte's preface to the posthumous edition partly apologised for her sister. Its elevation to the canon took decades, and the softening in adaptations largely postdates that — the original was never intended to be comfortable.