Wuthering Heights Look Inside

Contents Introduction v Wuthering Heights

Volume I Chapter 1 1 Chapter 2 7 Chapter 3 18 Chapter 4 33 Chapter 5 41 Chapter 6 46 Chapter 7 54 Chapter 8 66 Chapter 9 77 Chapter 10 95 Chapter 11 114 Chapter 12 127 Chapter 13 142 Chapter 14 156 Volume II Chapter 1 168 Chapter 2 177 Chapter 3 183 Chapter 4 202 Chapter 5 213 Chapter 6 218 Chapter 7 225 Chapter 8 244

Chapter 9 251 Chapter 10 260 Chapter 11 272 Chapter 12 277 Chapter 13 282 Chapter 14 296 Chapter 15 304 Chapter 16 311 Chapter 17 318 Chapter 18 325 Chapter 19 338 Chapter 20 348 Glossary 362 Appendix: Preface to the 1850 edition 377

by Charlotte BrontĂŤ

Introduction ‘I wonder what we shall be like and what we shall be and where we shall be’ writes a sixteen-year-old Emily Brontë in one of her few surviving journal entries in 1834.1 In her diary three years later, she repeats the same question and then, finally, aged 27, she states (rather unconvincingly) that she has learned to ‘long for the future with the figetiness that I cannot do all I wish’.2 Emily’s youthful wonder and understandable longing: for the promise of the future, for something – anything – new to happen, is what seems to feed into her only novel, Wuthering Heights. Is this why the story captivates readers who first come to it as teenagers or young adults? It is certainly there in Emily’s diaries and brought to life, albeit in much darker ways, through the novel’s characters, who all yearn terribly for something: for adventure, for passion, or even revenge.

In Wuthering Heights, Brontë takes these youthful desires to their extremes. The yearnings of Catherine and the mysterious Heathcliff, brought into the Earnshaw family as an orphan child under circumstances that are never explained, are so fierce that they fuel a violent, bitter feud. Ultimately it is their thwarted desire that locks two families and two houses in a conflict that spans generations.

In one of the novel’s most famous episodes, the adult Catherine stages an extreme protest, following a row with Heathcliff and her husband, from the confines of her bedroom at Thrushcross Grange. For four days and nights she survives, according to her ever-practical maid Nelly Dean, on ‘nothing but cold water, and ill-temper’ (p.132). Delirious and desperate, she dramatically tears apart her pillow, filling the room with feathers. Amid this destruction, she carefully identifies each one: wild-duck, pigeon, moorcock, and finally, lapwing. ‘Bonny bird; wheeling over our heads in the middle v

WUTHERING HEIGHTS

of the moor’ (p.130) says a broken Catherine, who can now only imagine such freedom. Brontë shows us a young woman, trapped in married life, longing to be liberated from adulthood, to be free like a lapwing on the moor. Heathcliff later matches her desperation as he contemplates life without Cathy: ‘Two words would comprehend my future, death and hell – existence, after losing her, would be hell’ (p.159).

Wuthering Heights, then, is no novel of manners or ‘quiet’ Victorian sentiment: it is a novel of grand gesture, grand passion, grand emotion.

To return to Wuthering Heights many years after a first reading is to be struck again, not just by the novel’s depiction of the extraordinary central romance between the young Catherine and Heathcliff, or by the complexity of its multilayered narrative, but by the novel’s enduring, emotional power. It is this raw sense of youthful longing, from a writer who tragically never lived long enough to outgrow it, that can connect us all with how intensely we once felt or might have lived.

Contexts and concerns Wuthering Heights – first readers In May 1846, the Brontë sisters Charlotte, Emily and Anne published their poems under the male pseudonyms of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. The poems managed to secure some wider attention: critics considered them of ‘varying excellence’, likely destined to be ‘speedily forgotten’3 – and less than a handful of copies were sold.

The publication and positive critical reception of the sisters’ first novels, starting with Currer Bell’s Jane Eyre in October 1847 and continuing less than two months later with Ellis Bell’s Wuthering Heights and Acton Bell’s Agnes Grey, was therefore greeted by critics with surprise, even bewilderment. Speculation increased about the mystery of vi

CHAPTER

1

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!’ Even the gate over which he leant manifested no sympathizing movement to the words; and I think that circumstance determined me to accept the invitation: I felt interested in a man who seemed more 1

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Chapter 2 7

coal-scuttles: containers for keeping coal in

8

t’fowld: the fold, a hollow in a hilly countryside

8

laith: barn (NQ)

8

flaysome: frightening/dreadful (NQ)

8

noa hend wi’t: no end of it (i.e. there will be no end of it)

8

pigeon cote: a small shelter for pigeons

10

corrugated: furrowed

10

embrowned: made darker, browner

10

sagacity: wisdom, understanding

12

boor: rough, uneducated or rude person

13

tuh t’ divil: to the devil

14

Black Art: dark magic

14

wax and clay: of models made for casting magic spells

16

postern: back door or gate

16 cope-stone: large stone on the top of a building or wall (here used metaphorically as the final straw/finishing touches) 17

Wisht, wisht!: be quiet!

Chapter 3 18

clothes-press: a large oak cupboard for storing clothes

19 fly-leaf: page at the front of the book, which is either blank or has very little printed on it 19

garret: small room at the top of a house

20

homily: a speech of complaint or instruction

20

nobbut: only (NQ)

20

lugs: ears (NQ)

20

laiking: playing, messing about (NQ)

20

childer: children (NQ)

21

riven: ripped

21

gait: manner, way of behaving (NQ)

21

laced: beaten 364

Appendix: Preface to the 1850 edition by Charlotte Brontë I HAVE just read over “Wuthering Heights,” and, for the first time, have obtained a clear glimpse of what are termed (and, perhaps, really are) its faults; have gained a definite notion of how it appears to other people—to strangers who knew nothing of the author; who are unacquainted with the locality where the scenes of the story are laid; to whom the inhabitants, the customs, the natural characteristics of the outlying hills and hamlets in the West-Riding of Yorkshire are things alien and unfamiliar.

To all such “Wuthering Heights” must appear a rude and strange production. The wild moors of the north of England can for them have no interest; the language, the manners, the very dwellings and household customs of the scattered inhabitants of those districts, must be to such readers in a great measure unintelligible, and — where intelligible — repulsive. Men and women who, perhaps naturally very calm, and with feelings moderate in degree, and little marked in kind, have been trained from their cradle to observe the utmost evenness of manner and guardedness of language, will hardly know what to make of the rough, strong utterance, the harshly manifested passions, the unbridled aversions, and headlong partialities of unlettered moorland hinds and rugged moorland squires, who have grown up untaught and unchecked, except by mentors as harsh as themselves. A large class of readers, likewise, will suffer greatly from the introduction into the pages of this work of words printed with all their letters, which it has become the custom to represent by the initial and final letter only—a blank line filling the interval. I may as well say at once that, for this circumstance, it 377