March 20

March 20 is the birthday of Catherine Linton, the daughter of Edgar Linton and the late Catherine Earnshaw, and the anniversary of her mother's death. For Edgar Linton, the date is a day of private grief: he invariably spends it alone in the library and walks at dusk as far as Gimmerton Kirk, where he often prolongs his stay beyond midnight, visiting his wife's grave. The household at Thrushcross Grange never manifests any signs of rejoicing on this day, because it is also the anniversary of the elder Catherine's death. The younger Catherine is thus thrown on her own resources for amusement.

The Seventeenth Birthday and the Encounter with Heathcliff

On the twentieth of March, when Catherine Linton reaches seventeen, the weather is beautiful and springlike. Her father has retired to the library for his solitary observance, and she comes down dressed for going out, asking Nelly Dean to accompany her for a ramble on the edge of the moor. Mr. Linton has given her leave, provided they go only a short distance and return within the hour. Catherine claims she wants to see where a colony of moor-game are settled and whether they have made their nests yet. Nelly Dean, suspecting nothing, puts on her bonnet and follows. Catherine bounds ahead like a young greyhound, and despite Nelly's repeated calls to stop, she presses further and further, until she dives into a hollow two miles nearer Wuthering Heights than her own home. There she is arrested by Heathcliff himself, who is reproving her for poaching on his land. Heathcliff, recognizing her, insists she and Nelly come into his house for a rest, and despite Nelly's protests, Catherine agrees, curious to see the son Heathcliff mentions. This encounter on her seventeenth birthday marks the beginning of her secret involvement with the inhabitants of Wuthering Heights, an involvement that will lead to her forced marriage to Linton Heathcliff and her eventual imprisonment in the house.

The Anniversary as a Marker of Generational Change

March 20 also serves as a temporal marker for the second generation's growth and transformation. Catherine Linton, who at thirteen had never been beyond the range of the park by herself, is by her seventeenth birthday a young woman of full height, with a figure both plump and slender, elastic as steel, and a whole aspect sparkling with health and spirits. Her birthday encounter with Heathcliff and her cousin Linton Heathcliff—whom she had not seen since he was a small boy—reveals how much time has changed them all. Linton, still some months short of sixteen, has grown tall but remains languid and slight, with a grace that mitigates his defects. Hareton Earnshaw, now a great strong lad of eighteen, stands awkward and rough, unable to read the inscription over the door. The date thus crystallizes the contrast between the vitality of the younger Catherine and the decay of the elder generation's hopes, as well as the beginning of her entanglement with the two young men who will shape her fate.

Thematic Significance: Grief, Growth, and the Cycle of Loss

The dual nature of March 20—a birthday and a death-day—embodies the novel's central tension between love and loss, inheritance and dispossession. Edgar Linton's annual retreat to the graveyard on this date underscores the enduring power of the elder Catherine's memory and the way grief structures the lives of those left behind. For the younger Catherine, the same date marks her emergence from the sheltered world of Thrushcross Grange into the violent, passionate realm of Wuthering Heights. The birthday thus becomes a threshold: it is the day on which she first steps beyond her father's protection and into the orbit of Heathcliff's revenge, setting in motion the events that will lead to her father's death, her forced marriage, and her eventual reconciliation with Hareton. The novel's final resolution, in which Hareton and the younger Catherine are to be married on New Year's Day, suggests that the cycle of grief and loss associated with March 20 may finally be broken, as the second generation finds a union that transcends the enmities of the past.