Young Cathy's Imprisonment and Defiance

Follows Catherine Linton (younger) from a sheltered childhood into captivity and forced marriage, and her slow emergence as a survivor who finally chooses her own happiness.

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The Enclosed Recluse

A Greenhouse Girl Taught to Be Happy Catherine Linton (younger) grows up within the park walls, knowing no house but the Grange and no heart but her father's. Her character combines her mother's dark eyes and spirit with Edgar's gentleness, and her happiness is a carefully tended garden. The World Outside Her longing to see Penistone Crags marks the first stirring of a will too strong for the garden. The expedition that follows is her first act of independence and her first encounter with the grim world of the Heights.

The Captive Bride

Doors That Will Not Open A Prisoner in the Parlour Lured by Linton's lies, Cathy is locked inside Wuthering Heights and beaten when she tries to seize the key. She burns with defiance even as tears run down her cheeks, and she kneels and pleads with Heathcliff without surrendering her pride. A Vow Extorted To save her dying father from misery, she promises to marry Linton, and the marriage is accomplished under duress. The girl who had been the Grange's little queen becomes a legal possession of her father's enemy.

The Widow in the Tower

A Prisoner Without a Jailer The Widow's Grief Catherine, widowed at seventeen, is left alone at Wuthering Heights, her father dead and her fortune in Heathcliff's hands. She walks the house like a ghost, refusing the kitchen company and scorning the pity of servants. The Hard Winter Her pride curdles into a cold contempt for everyone around her, and Zillah's tales show her curling back from kindness like a serpent. Yet the very hardness that isolates her is what keeps her will intact.

The Turn Toward Life

A Hand Extended Breaking the Circle of Hate Weary of loneliness, Cathy breaks Hareton's pipe and asks for friendship, then offers him a book and a kiss. The gesture costs her pride and buys her a companion, ending her self-imposed exile in the kitchen. A Teacher's Joy She becomes Hareton's tutor, finding a purpose in improving the man her enemies would have destroyed. Her defiance of Heathcliff is now expressed not in curses but in cultivation, and the garden she plants is the emblem of her victory.

The Heiress of Peace

Reading With Her Hand on His Shoulder A Future Reclaimed Lockwood sees Cathy standing over Hareton as he reads, her ringlets mingling with his brown locks, her voice scolding him affectionately. The captive of Wuthering Heights has become its future mistress. The Marriage of the Lines Her union with Hareton on New Year's Day brings Earnshaw land and Linton blood together, and the girl who was locked in a parlour becomes the lady of Thrushcross Grange. Cathy's destiny, so nearly crushed, ends in a peace her mother never knew.

Cathy's first thirteen years at Thrushcross Grange

August 1801, during the imprisonment at Wuthering Heights

after Linton Heathcliff's death, late 1801

spring 1802, during the weeks of reconciliation with Hareton

autumn 1802, on the eve of her marriage to Hareton