Wuthering Heights

Emily Brontë’s only novel detonates the Victorian drawing-room, replacing marriage plots with moor-plots where obsession howls louder than any wind. Heathcliff and Cathy do not woo; they haunt each other across class, death, and time until the very grass seems to grow from their veins. Brontë’s prose itself is moorland: thorny, ecstatic, alive with whinberries and corpse-white mist. Children are savage, dogs laugh, and the weather keeps score. Yet the final third pivots: the younger Catherine educates herself into freedom, letting gentleness erode the cycle of revenge. The book thus refuses either romantic triumph or moral sermon; it offers only the slow carbonation of change. When the graves finally settle, the reader is left listening for footsteps that may be wind, may be love, may be both. One closes the volume convinced that landscapes remember us more faithfully than we remember ourselves, and that passion, if denied a human home, will squat in the sky.