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Wuthering Heights

Emily brontë , richard j. dunn ( editor ) , charlotte brontë ( commentary ) ...more.

464 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1847

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Emily Brontë

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“People feel with their hearts, Ellen, and since he has destroyed mine, I have not power to feel for him.”

“Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.”

“If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger.”

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Monday, March 6, 2023

Book Review: ‘Wuthering Heights’

(Signet Classic)

By Umbreen Ali

Jan. 4, 2016 12:05 a.m..

Young adult fantasy author Lena Coakley will release “Worlds of Ink and Shadow” Tuesday, a fictional novel with historical characters: the Brontё siblings, classic literature authors. In Coakley’s new book, Charlotte, Emily, Branwell and Anne dive into a fictional world they created. Daily Bruin senior staff Umbreen Ali reviews both Coakley’s meta book and Emily Brontё’s classic, dark novel “Wuthering Heights.”

Reading “Wuthering Heights” filled me with so many emotions that, upon finishing the novel, I was left somewhat baffled about what exactly I had just experienced.

Initially published in 1847, Emily Brontё’s “Wuthering Heights” is referenced in countless books, movies and even anime. As a self-proclaimed classics lover and avid reader, I found it a little embarrassing that I had not yet read it. What better opportunity to rectify this regrettable situation than by reading it alongside “Worlds of Ink and Shadow” by Lena Coakley, a novel about Emily Brontё and her siblings?

“Wuthering Heights” tells of Heathcliff’s destructive love and passion for Catherine Earnshaw. Heathcliff was adopted by Catherine’s father as a child, but upon Mr. Earnshaw’s death, he is bullied by Catherine’s brother. Under the incorrect assumption that his love for Catherine is not returned, Heathcliff abruptly leaves the household only to return years later as a wealthy man, poised to exact his revenge for his previous suffering.

“Wuthering Heights” is a chaotic novel, beautiful in its complexity but terrible in its wickedness.

The novel is exceptional in that none of its characters are likable. From the narrator to the servants to the main characters, each is presented in a manner that highlights his or her faults. Somehow, the characters’ flaws draw the reader in. One cannot help but search for redemption to be found within the characters and, upon being disappointed, pity their existence.

By the end of the novel, I found myself wanting Heathcliff to die for all of the evils he had committed against those around him, like tricking a naïve girl into marrying him by pretending to care for her and then treating her cruelly after she has served her purpose. At the same time, the torment Heathcliff appears to suffer from is not pleasant to read about. Readers may wish the situation could be different, that Heathcliff could be kind and loved in return.

At first glance, “Wuthering Heights” appears to have no relatability to today’s UCLA student. It is set in late 18th century England and tells the story of a man who seems possessed. However, the story explores themes of revenge, obsession, passion and loneliness that are relevant to the experiences of college-aged students. Reading “Wuthering Heights” might be worthwhile to students who want a release for similar emotions of their own.

Reviewing “Wuthering Heights” with “Worlds of Ink and Shadow” in mind, the layered narration and alternating time frames of “Wuthering Heights” appear to have inspired the layered levels of reality found in “Worlds of Ink and Shadow.”

The chaotic nature of “Wuthering Heights” is reflected in Emily Brontë’s personality in “Worlds of Ink and Shadow.” In Coakley’s novel, Emily Brontё is portrayed as willful and passionate, just as “Wuthering Heights” could be described as a willful and passionate novel.

It is impossible to wholeheartedly say “Wuthering Heights” was an enjoyable read. The cruelty and lack of decorum displayed by many of the characters made the novel unlikable in retrospect, despite the characters’ allure as the story pans out.

“Wuthering Heights” is a brutish masterpiece that left me both impressed and appalled.

– Umbreen Ali

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Wuthering Heights is a masterpiece of literary genius that is incredibly unpleasant to read

What makes Emily Brontë’s novel great is the way it thinks about abuse.

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Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon in Wuthering Heights (1939)

The cliché about bookish women and the novels of the 19th century is that you have to pick from three authors, and you’re only allowed to love one of them: Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, or Emily Brontë — you have to have one favorite, and whichever one it is says something profound about you.

Of the canonical three, personally, I will go to bat for both Austen and for Charlotte Brontë — witty women and sad men having charged conversations in the drawing room, sign me up. But Emily Brontë — with her child ghosts sobbing at the window and her brutal, violent men; Emily Brontë, whose 200th birthday is Monday — I have never quite known what to do with her.

In part, that’s because Emily’s whole thing is to be elusive, to make you not know quite what to do with her. She left behind very little documentation of her life: there’s a novel, Wuthering Heights, that is considered to be one of the greatest in the English canon, some astonishingly brilliant poetry, and almost nothing else.

Our ideas about Emily that persist into the modern day mostly come from a few descriptions written by Charlotte, who depicted her sister as a wild spirit of the moors, and, more colorfully, from Charlotte’s biographer Elizabeth Gaskell. We have no way of knowing how true Gaskell’s ideas are, but they created the image of Emily that we tend to rely on today: that she beat her dog with her bare fists to discipline him; that when she was attacked by a rabid dog she cauterized the wound herself with a red hot poker.

The few concrete facts we have about Emily tend to center on how little of her there is. Her lifetime was little: She died young of tuberculosis, at just 30 years old. Her body was little: She was so emaciated when she died that her coffin was only 16 inches wide (although it’s unclear that 16 inches was really quite so small at the time as it seems to us now ). Her body of work is unfairly little: She had time to leave behind only Wuthering Heights and her poetry, plus the persistent, unconfirmed rumor that she was working on a second novel and that Charlotte burnt the manuscript after Emily died.

When we talk about Emily, then, we are left with the poetry and with Wuthering Heights to talk about. And of Wuthering Heights I can only say that it is a staggering literary accomplishment that I would be quite happy to never read again.

The genius of Wuthering Heights lies in the way it thinks about cycles of abuse

When I read Wuthering Heights for the first time in college, I read it under the belief that it was a romantic love story, and as such, I hated it.

That’s not to say that Wuthering Heights is not romantic, or that people who enjoy reading it as a love story are wrong; to an extent, this is a book that wants to be read as a love story. Heathcliff and Cathy are elementally connected: They scream each other’s names across the moors, and it’s all very wild and passionate. But I’ve never been able to root for the lovers to be happy, and when I try to read Wuthering Heights as though I should be rooting for them, I can’t stand anything about the book.

Heathcliff and Cathy are both such manifestly awful people — he tortures puppies and beats women and children; she plays elaborate intergenerational mind games — that I want them together only so that they will stop inflicting themselves on their friends and relations out of sheer spite. If Heathcliff and Cathy had the common decency to get married in Volume 1 like they clearly wanted to, they would have saved everyone around them a great deal of time and trouble for generations to come.

To appreciate the greatness of Wuthering Heights , I had to stop trying to read it as a love story. It’s when I began to read it instead as a story of intergenerational abuse, and how that abuse creates monsters, that I started to understand why it’s such a beloved book.

Wuthering Heights is widely considered to be a romantic novel because of Heathcliff and Cathy. Their semi-incestuous bond is the emotional core of the novel; the passages between them are forever throbbing with so much feeling that the only way for them to possibly express it is to refuse to marry and just spend their lives gazing longingly at each other across the moors while they ruin the lives of everyone around them.

The nightmarish quality of the world around Cathy and Heathcliff seems to be almost a consequence of their violently passionate love, not the other way around, and the pleasurable appeal of the fantasy that their love embodies — of someone loving you so deeply that all they can do is burn down the world in response — is hard to overstate.

But Brontë pays just as much attention to the nightmarish world around Heathcliff and Cathy as she does to their doomed, passionate love, and it’s because of that attention that Heathcliff is also the central monster of Wuthering Heights . As part of his plan to wreak revenge against his abusive adoptive brother Hindly, Heathcliff manages to do the following over the course of the novel: he ruins Hindley, marries and abuses Cathy’s sister-in-law, abuses the ensuing son, abuses Hindley’s son, and then forces his own son to marry Cathy’s daughter. Also he hangs a puppy with a handkerchief somewhere in there.

What makes Heathcliff psychologically compelling is that his monstrousness has a clear cause: He was abused by Hindley, whom he considered a brother for most of his childhood, and who forced him to live and work as a servant for the family as soon as he inherited the family home.

It is Hindley’s abuse that leads to Heathcliff’s abuse, and Heathcliff in turn creates his son Linton, the cruelest and most selfish of the novel’s younger generation. It is only the capacity of Cathy’s daughter, Young Catherine, and Hindley’s son, Hareton, to rise above the abuse showered upon them by the older generations that creates the possibility of redemption at the novel’s end.

As a portrait of the cycle of abuse, this is heady stuff. Wuthering Heights takes place in a viciously brutal world, one in which casual interfamily violence is the norm, and it is clear-eyed about the emotional dynamics that build such a world and allow it to flourish.

But that world is a nightmare. It’s an undeniably well-crafted nightmare of deep psychological resonance, and it is rich and immersive, so that when you read it, you feel that you are trapped on the moors and there are people screaming all around you. It’s an incredible literary effect and Emily Brontë was probably a genius to achieve it, and holy god I want no part in it .

So on Emily Brontë’s 200th birthday, here’s to the monumental achievement of a woman who left very little behind. Wuthering Heights is one of the only windows we have available to the interior life of its fiercely private author, and it is a staggering accomplishment.

Please never force me to read it again.

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Book Review: Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

Quick Review (read on for full review)

An engaging, captivating read, one of wildness and the dark, destructive side of love. 5 / 5

Summary (from Goodreads)

In 1801, Lockwood, a wealthy man from the South of England who is seeking peace and recuperation, rents Thrushcross Grange in Yorkshire. He visits his landlord, Heathcliff, who lives in a remote moorland farmhouse, Wuthering Heights. There Lockwood finds an odd assemblage: Heathcliff seems to be a gentleman, but his manners are uncouth; the reserved mistress of the house is in her mid-teens; and a young man seems to be a member of the family, yet dresses and speaks as if he is a servant.

Snowed in, Lockwood is grudgingly allowed to stay and is shown to a bedchamber where he notices books and graffiti left by a former inhabitant named Catherine. He falls asleep and has a nightmare in which he sees the ghostly Catherine trying to enter through the window. He cries out in fear, rousing Heathcliff, who rushes into the room. Lockwood is convinced that what he saw was real. Heathcliff, believing Lockwood to be right, examines the window and opens it, hoping to allow Catherine’s spirit to enter. When nothing happens, Heathcliff shows Lockwood to his own bedroom and returns to keep watch at the window.

At sunrise Heathcliff escorts Lockwood back to Thrushcross Grange. Lockwood asks the housekeeper, Nelly Dean, about the family at Wuthering Heights, and she tells him the tale.

Favourite Quote

I narrowed it down to my two favourites:

“He’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.”

“Alas, for the effects of bad tea and bad temper.”

I read this as part of The Very Informal Classic Reads Book Club Challenge 2021 , Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte being April’s selection. And, just a quick word of warning: my review contains the word “wildness” so many times I lost count 😉

Where to begin? Wuthering Heights is an epic of a book. It is a book of wildness. Wildness seeps into everything. Untamed personalities, who love wildly, who behave wildly, unsocially, acting like a force of nature, whenever the mood takes them. It is a book on the wildness of nature, and the wildness of human nature.

The landscape plays a big part in the telling of this story, in a similar way that Bodmin Moor plays a significant role in Daphne du Maurier’s Jamaica Inn. We see the changes in the landscape through the changing seasons, we are told what birds are where and when, what is in bloom, what grows up on the moor, told of the power of the wind and of the barren, stark landscape.

But this untameable wildness seeps into everything, creeping across the empty landscape, a space of isolation and limited civilisation. Houses are like islands, cut off from other houses and villages and towns by this harsh but beautiful expanse of moor. It, this wildness, creeps under doorways, and over thresholds, and takes hold of those who dwell within.

For me, Wuthering Heights is a story of the destructive, dark side of love. Of course, it’s melodramatic, and the majority of the characters are not nice, nor do they necessarily behave in a socially-accepted way. And, the wildness found within the characters varies by degrees. Isabella Linton suffers greatly for a rather short moment of wildness, in which she succumbs to her foolish feelings for Heathcliff, and the latter uses them to his best advantage. Heathcliff, on the other hand, has his wildness nurtured and encouraged by Cathy and her own wildness as a child, and this seems to take on a life of its own, growing as he grows until it almost encompasses his entire life and governs every choice, every decision he makes.

It also depicts the cyclitic form of nature, of life. Consequences follow actions. How a thing is nurtured will be reflected in how it grows. And yet, these cycles are not closed and doomed to repeat themselves in an endless round of repetition. Cycles can be broken. Good can come from the bad. Natures once wild can be tamed, as we see in the closing pages of the book.

For me, Wuthering Heights is a story of wildness, perhaps even the story of wildness. It is raw, it is savagely, intensely romantic, it is dark. It is a story of love, a story of a lack of love, a story of one soul inhabiting two beings. It is the story of the wind howling on the moor, rattling at the windows, whispering of the wildness of the human spirit, of the untameable power of love.

Wuthering Heights review – Emma Rice’s audacious riff on Emily Brontë’s classic

Bristol Old Vic Retelling the gothic novel with intelligently charming humour and a live band, this is a bold and ingenious production

E mma Rice calls Wuthering Heights a tragedy in this show’s programme, but her production could easily be classed as a comedy or pastiche of Emily Brontë’s brooding novel – or even a folk musical, with its live band and sudden bursts of song. Either way, the book’s dark, gothic heart has been extracted and in its place is audacious theatricality and raging camp.

It could, in fact, all be a theatrical wind-up, from the moment Lockwood is tossed by a storm to the foot of Wuthering Heights, in remotest Yorkshire, with the help of a hand-held tree, actors screeching the sound effects of the wind and a back projection of a gloomy sky (video design by Simon Baker).

Rice’s adaptation is characteristically meta in its display of artifice: the facade of Wuthering Heights is just that, a flat moved around by backstage staff (set design by Vicki Mortimer). The Yorkshire moors are human – fittingly for a story in which they are such an animate feature – and appear as a Greek chorus led by Nandi Bhebhe, fresh from Rice’s Bagdad Cafe , who wears shrubbery in her hair and is marvellously arch.

In childhood, Heathcliff, Cathy and Hindley are puppets. Lucy McCormick then plays Cathy as a knotty-haired rebel in Doc Martens who twitches, growls and laughs manically. She breaks into “rock chick” mode at one point with a mic and wind machine, part singing, part yodelling, while the live band (Sid Goldsmith, Nadine Lee and Renell Shaw) creates heavy metal sounds.

Lockwood (Sam Archer) is a posh southerner in wellies, while Isabella (Katy Owen) and Edgar Linton (Archer, doubling up), from the well-to-do Thrushcross Grange, are dressed in foppish outfits and twizzle around their living room as if their life is one long ball, with Isabella speaking fabulous lines like: “Sometimes I like to slide down the banister because it tickles my tuppence.”

Owen also plays young Linton (Heathcliff’s son by Isabella), who is the incarnation of Walter the Softy from the Beano. She is a standout comic force in both roles along with Tama Phethean, who plays Hindley and Hareton with a mix of physical comedy, pathos and kookiness.

It all seems ingenious and faintly ridiculous, like a postmodern literary satire or an especially outré episode of Inside No 9 and risks having nowhere to go beyond tripping one-liners and theatrical navel-gazing. But it builds its world, albeit a conspicuously artificial one, and holds us in it with an intensity of its own, and there is beauty, with the vast backdrop of sky changing from black cloud to haze and then to soft, bouncing blue.

Some innovations feel sacrilegious; the all-consuming love between Cathy and Heathcliff – the beating heart of Brontë’s novel – is neutered here and when Cathy says “Heathcliff is more myself than I am”, it does not seem powered by passion but theatricality.

Heathcliff (Ash Hunter) does not smoulder, but he does skulk and seems like the only character being played straight. He is emphatically an outsider, speaking with a Caribbean accent and told to “Go back where you came from” by Hindley, his words carrying all their modern-day connotations. He grows more vicious too, and with this the drama manages to capture some of the dark energy of the book in its presentation of cruelty, grudge-bearing and beatings. Heathcliff’s physical and emotional abuses appear shocking and destructive, even in this landscape of whimsy.

Ultimately, the show succeeds because it is not just very funny, but both charming and intelligent in its humour. If this is unfaithful storytelling, it is exquisitely pulled off.

At Bristol Old Vic until 6 November. Live-streamed on 4-6 November. Then touring until 28 May .

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Book review: “Wuthering Heights” by Emily Brontë

This is only known novel by the middle of the three celebrated Brontë sisters, who died at age 30 only a year after it was published in 1847. The rumor that Emily was putting final touches on a second novel adds a tragic mystery to the world of arts and letters, right up beside Beethoven’s Tenth Symphony and the lost episodes of Doctor Who . This is especially frustrating since Wuthering Heights has been argued more and more to be the greatest of the seven novels completed by the Brontë sisters, Jane Eyre notwithstanding. It has been the subject of three operas, a graphic novel, and numerous film adaptations, including versions set in Mexico, Japan, and a California high school.

My advice, however, is to accept no substitute for the Yorkshire moors of the original. No other setting could so perfectly embody the haunting, horrifying, operatically tragic destiny of nearly every speaking character in this book. In the opening paragraphs, the author explains the meaning of the word “wuthering” as a reference to the violent atmospheric disturbances among the high, heather-tufted moors, where a dark figure like Heathcliff can well be imagined roaming in the night, tormented by his doomed love for the headstrong Cathy, a torment which finally proves to be the only—and I mean only —redeeming feature of an otherwise scandalously cruel and almost unremittingly vicious monster. It is a setting ripe for a tale of ruined hopes, restless ghosts, perverted passions, fevers that prey on body and mind, and Calvinistically merciless manners and sentiments. It is the only conceivable site for a story in which the near-complete destruction of two generations of a pair of families can arise inevitably from one eavesdropping youth overhearing but the first half of a conversation, before slipping off into the night with unjust bitterness poisoning his heart.

And it is an astonishing work of literary genius, considering that its author was outlived by her masculine pen-name Ellis Bell, so short was her life and career. Despite this, the middle Brontë sister told her tale by way of a daring yet strikingly successful experiment in narrative structure. If, like me, you take in an audio-book edition of this novel, you will immediately understand. The version I listened to required two narrators, one of each sex. This is because the first-person narrative by Mr. Lockwood provides only an introduction, a few transitional passages, and a conclusion. Under this proscenium arch, if I may speak so—and this book is nothing if not an exquisite piece of theater—the main part of the drama unfolds in the words of co-narrator Ellen “Nelly” Dean, who bears a complex relationship to the characters in her tale and even, in her well-meaning way, may have influenced their fates. Be her account as reliable or unreliable as it may, it also encloses passages narrated to her (either orally or in writing) by at least two other characters. Emily B. could have continued this experiment in nesting narrators, like matryoshka dolls, to any number of levels, had she wished. Fussy book-editors may despair of ever getting the number of quotation marks right, but when read aloud (especially by one male and one female actor), it seems altogether clear. And somehow, by howsoever many narrators the events may be removed from us, the whole gut-twisting, hair-pulling, hand-wringing awfulness of the tale seems always to be immediately before the reader, or as close as any drama can be whose actors face us across the gulf of death.

All you need to know about what happens in the book is that rough-and-tumble Heathcliff (that’s his whole name, by the way) conceives a hopeless love for his foster-sister Cathy Earnshaw, of the Wuthering Heights Earnshaws, and runs away when he realizes that she can never marry him even if she loves him back. Instead, Cathy marries nice guy Edgar Linton, the heir of the hard-to-pronounce Thrushcross Grange ( you try saying it without pausing to aim the “sh” at the right syllable), who loves her tenderly but lacks half the manliness of, well, his wife. When Heathcliff comes back from wherever he’s been, the bad blood between him and Edgar vexes Cathy so much that she dies of it, leaving both men heartbroken and a baby daughter motherless. Through one fiendish scheme after another—or rather, all of them at once—Heathcliff contrives to: (a) steal the heart of Edgar’s sister Isabella, whom he violently abuses until she runs away; (b) prey on Cathy Sr.’s brother Hindley until Wuthering Heights, complete with Hindley’s heir Hareton, belongs to Heathcliff body and soul; (c) terrorize his delicate, weak-willed son to death; (d) coerce Cathy Jr. into marrying Heathcliff Jr. so that he can gain control of the Linton estate; and (e) rule his household in such a way as to reduce Hareton and Cathy Jr.—the last surviving Earnshaw and Linton, respectively—to a state of inhuman savagery. From Lockwood’s point of view, he isn’t a very genial landlord either.

Whether Heathcliff finally succeeds in all of his grim aims hardly matters, since he succeeds in enough of them to make this book one all-but-ceaseless parade of misery, ruin, and death. One would think it impossible to sympathize with a character like that. Yet, from an early enough page that the narrator’s voice belongs to Lockwood, one is also captivated by the tragic aspect of Heathcliff’s character, expressed in the unforgettable scene where, believing himself unobserved, the gruff villain leans out the window of Cathy’s girlhood bedroom and pleads with her ghost:

“Come in! come in!” he sobbed. “Cathy, do come. Oh, do—once more! Oh! My heart’s darling, hear me this time—Catherine, at last!”

Somehow, in spite of all the fear and loathing on the high moors, this story comes across as one of the great love stories—a heartstring-tugging potboiler in which the most potent female presence spends the majority of the book in her grave, while another generation works out what might have been between her and the wicked, doomed, vile, yet ultimately pitiable Heathcliff. That such a story idea could actually work, and even become one of the great works of English literature, seems so improbable that I wouldn’t blame you for doubting my word. Read it to believe it!

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Wuthering heights.

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Classic story of love and revenge still captivates.

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Based on 6 reviews

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The parents' guide to what's in this book.

What Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Wuthering Heights is a gorgeous, epic novel of love and revenge, full of passion and unforgettable characters. The novel bears little resemblance to familiar film versions in which Heathcliff is interpreted as a misunderstood romantic. Heathcliff's pride and suffering make him cruel, menacing, and his and Cathy's end is not the stuff of fairy tales. However, the novel is thrilling, and it is full of its own kind of romance. It's also worth noting that there are almost certainly ghosts in this book, though Bronte leaves it up to the reader whether or not to believe.

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Magical but cruel, what's the story.

A lodger who has rented a manor house in Yorkshire becomes acquainted with his aloof, surly landlord, Heathcliff, and his family. The lodger, Mr. Lockwood, is forced to spend a night at his landlord's residence, called Wuthering Heights, and he is frightened by what he witnesses in the house, making him curious about the landlord and his lovely, silent daughter-in-law, Catherine. When Lockwood becomes ill, he asks his housekeeper, Ellen Dean, to tell him Heathcliff and Catherine's history, and Mrs. Dean obliges him with a detailed account of Heathcliff's great, star-crossed love, and how Catherine became part of his household.

Is It Any Good?

WUTHERING HEIGHTS is a poetic masterpiece of love and revenge. Every emotion felt by the characters is so high, or so low, their feelings alone make the novel a thrilling ride. The book is unconventional in a sense, in that there are arguably no real heroes or heroines, but the story is a serious page-turner, and the characters' feelings take on a riveting life of their own.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about what events shape Heathcliff's character. Why does he become so cruel?

The one character Heathcliff seems to retain some sympathy for is Hareton Earnshaw. Why do you think that is the case?

Many readers are curious about Bronte's choice of Ellen Dean as the narrator of the novel. Do you think she is a reliable narrator? Why do you think Bronte has her tell the story?

Why do you think this book is considered a classic of English literature?

Book Details

Our Editors Recommend

Drama based on classic novel is moody, complex.

Strength of character triumphs in Bronte's masterpiece.

Wuthering Heights (1939)

Best version of the Gothic-romance revenge tale.

For kids who love romance

Common Sense Media's unbiased ratings are created by expert reviewers and aren't influenced by the product's creators or by any of our funders, affiliates, or partners.

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Book Review: Wuthering Heights , by Emily Brontë

Apr. 8th, 2011 at 8:23 PM

Wuthering Heights", Emily Brontë's only novel, is one of the pinnacles of 19th-century English literature. It's the story of Heathcliff, an orphan who falls in love with a girl above his class, loses her, and devotes the rest of his life to wreaking revenge on her family.

Remember the name 'Ellis Bell' if you're ever on 'Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?'

This is not a love story

‘And at the end of it to be flighted to death!’ he said, opening his great-coat, which he held bundled up in his arms. ‘See here, wife! I was never so beaten with anything in my life: but you must e’en take it as a gift of God; though it’s as dark almost as if it came from the devil.’ We crowded round, and over Miss Cathy’s head I had a peep at a dirty, ragged, black-haired child; big enough both to walk and talk: indeed, its face looked older than Catherine’s; yet when it was set on its feet, it only stared round, and repeated over and over again some gibberish that nobody could understand. I was frightened, and Mrs. Earnshaw was ready to fling it out of doors: she did fly up, asking how he could fashion to bring that gipsy brat into the house, when they had their own bairns to feed and fend for? What he meant to do with it, and whether he were mad? The master tried to explain the matter; but he was really half dead with fatigue, and all that I could make out, amongst her scolding, was a tale of his seeing it starving, and houseless, and as good as dumb, in the streets of Liverpool, where he picked it up and inquired for its owner. Not a soul knew to whom it belonged, he said; and his money and time being both limited, he thought it better to take it home with him at once, than run into vain expenses there: because he was determined he would not leave it as he found it. Well, the conclusion was, that my mistress grumbled herself calm; and Mr. Earnshaw told me to wash it, and give it clean things, and let it sleep with the children.

‘“What culpable carelessness in her brother!” exclaimed Mr. Linton, turning from me to Catherine. “I’ve understood from Shielders”’ (that was the curate, sir) ‘“that he lets her grow up in absolute heathenism. But who is this? Where did she pick up this companion? Oho! I declare he is that strange acquisition my late neighbour made, in his journey to Liverpool—a little Lascar, or an American or Spanish castaway.”