Wuthering Heights

• Author: Emily Bronte
• Year: 1847
• Setting: Yorkshire
• Amazon Listing - Wuthering Heights

This classic novel tells the story of Heathcliff and Cathy. The book is notable because it is told in a non-linear way, involving several flashbacks, and involves two narrators – Mr Lockwood and Nelly Dean. The novel opens in 1801, with Lockwood arriving at Thrushcross Grange, a grand house on the Yorkshire moors he is renting from the surly Heathcliff, who lives at nearby Wuthering Heights. Lockwood spends the night at Wuthering Heights and has a terrifying dream: the ghost of Catherine Linton, pleading to be admitted to the house from outside. Intrigued, Lockwood asks the housekeeper Nelly Dean to tell the story of Heathcliff and Wuthering Heights.

Nelly takes over the narration and begins her story thirty years earlier, when Heathcliff, a foundling living on the streets of Liverpool, is brought home by Mr. Earnshaw and becomes the fast friend of Catherine Earnshaw. Although they are soul mates, they are not destined to live happily ever after together, and much of the book involves Heathcliff exacting revenge on Catherine's family, the neighbor family which includes the man Catherine married and Heathcliff's wife, and all of their offspring. The novel contains many Gothic and supernatural elements.