Heathcliff's Rise to Master

Traces Heathcliff's arc from a nameless Liverpool foundling to sole lord of Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange, and the hollow victory that finishes him.

increasingBearing stren­gth in each eventdecreasing

The Foundling Arrives

The Cuckoo in the Nest A Return from Liverpool Mr. Earnshaw returns from his sixty-mile walk to Liverpool with a starving, ragged, black-haired child he has rescued from the streets. The household recoils, and only the old master takes the boy in, christening him Heathcliff after a son who died in childhood. The child is sullen, patient, and wholly alien to the Earnshaw way of life. A Rival for the Heir The adoption seeds the family's destruction. Hindley Earnshaw feels his birthright and his father's heart stolen, while Catherine Earnshaw claims the stranger as her playmate and ally. The novel's central patterns of displaced inheritance, mysterious origins, and storm-locked domesticity all begin at this threshold.

Demoted to Servant

The Foundling Cast Down A Rightful Place Hindley Earnshaw returns as master and reduces Heathcliff to the condition of a farm labourer, deprives him of the curate's lessons, and forbids him Catherine's company. The degradation is designed to push the foundling back to what Hindley calls his right place. A Vow in the Dark Heathcliff swallows the humiliation with a kind of superhuman patience. Nelly Dean hears him declare that he is trying to settle how he shall pay Hindley back, and that he hopes Hindley will not die before the reckoning comes. The patience itself becomes the engine of the revenge plot.

The Gentleman Returns

An Invader in Polite Clothing A Changed Man A tall, athletic, well-dressed stranger surprises Nelly Dean in the garden of Thrushcross Grange: it is Heathcliff, transformed and prosperous. Catherine Earnshaw greets him with rapturous joy, Edgar Linton with constrained distaste, and the household with an immediate foreboding of trouble. A Suspicious Forwardness Heathcliff announces that he has already been invited to lodge at Wuthering Heights with Hindley, his old persecutor. Nelly is instantly alarmed, sensing that the return is not a homecoming but an occupation in gentleman's clothing, and that every kindness shown him now will be paid back in another coin.

Seizing the Heights

The Usurper at the Door A Debt Enforced With Hindley dead and the estate deeply mortgaged, Heathcliff, as mortgagee, takes possession of Wuthering Heights and custody of Hareton Earnshaw. He mutters that now he will see whether one tree can be made to grow as crooked as another under the same wind. The Grange Yields Edgar Linton's attempt to claim his wife's nephew is met by a threat to take Edgar's own son if the removal is pressed, and the Grange retreats into helplessness. The family house of the Earnshaws falls to the foundling, openly and without resistance, closing the first great movement of Heathcliff's career.

Master of Both Houses

The Double Crown The Sum of His Exertions When young Catherine Linton returns to Thrushcross Grange, Edgar dies in a blissful daze, and Heathcliff walks in as lord of both estates. Mr. Lockwood finds him rich, solitary, and settled in grimness; the conquest that began with a child's vow in a garret appears complete. A Rot Inside the Victory The triumph, however, is already failing. Nelly Dean observes that Heathcliff hardly eats or rests, that he speaks of his whole life as a fight he wishes were over, and that the pleasure of crushing his enemies has abandoned him. The conqueror is being consumed by the conquest itself.

The Hollow End

The Vanished Will Levers and Mattocks Useless Heathcliff confesses to Nelly that he no longer has the will to strike: levers and mattocks stand ready to demolish the two houses, and yet the desire to lift a single slate off either roof has vanished. He stands in the shadow of a strange change, seeing only Catherine's image in every tree, cloud, and face. A Death of Longing His body wastes while his soul pursues a vision no one else can see. On an April morning his eyes are found open, fixed and exultant, in the oak-panelled bed where the nightmare of Catherine's ghost was once conjured. The man who climbed from a Liverpool gutter to two estates dies alone, his single name carved later upon a barren headstone.

harvest season of the early 1770s, when Catherine Earnshaw was about six

after Mr. Earnshaw's death, when Hindley returns with Frances Earnshaw

a mellow September evening, three years after Heathcliff's disappearance

shortly after Hindley Earnshaw's death

after Edgar Linton's death, autumn 1801

March to April 1802, just before Heathcliff's death