Mrs. Earnshaw

Mrs. Earnshaw is the wife of Mr. Earnshaw and the mother of Hindley Earnshaw and Catherine Earnshaw. Though she appears only in the early chapters of Nelly Dean's retrospective narrative, her attitudes and her early death exert a lasting influence on the emotional architecture of Wuthering Heights. She is the first adult in the household to voice outright hostility toward Heathcliff, and her failure to intervene in the children's cruelty helps cement the pattern of persecution that defines his childhood.

Identity and Introduction

Mrs. Earnshaw is introduced through her reaction to the arrival of Heathcliff, whom Mr. Earnshaw brings home from Liverpool as a starving, ragged, dark-haired child. While her husband presents the boy as "a gift of God," Mrs. Earnshaw is "ready to fling it out of doors" and demands to know how he "could fashion to bring that gipsy brat into the house, when they had their own bairns to feed and fend for." Her immediate, visceral rejection establishes the foundling as an unwelcome intruder. She never relents: when the children refuse to let Heathcliff sleep in their room, she does not overrule them, and Nelly Dean, who had put the boy on the landing out of fear, is sent out of the house for her "cowardice and inhumanity"—a punishment that implicitly endorses the family's collective coldness.

Role in Heathcliff's Early Life

Mrs. Earnshaw's death occurs less than two years after Heathcliff's arrival. During that interval, she offers him no protection. Nelly Dean notes that "the mistress never put in a word on his behalf when she saw him wronged." Her silence is all the more damaging because she is the only adult female authority in the house; her passivity effectively licenses Hindley's physical abuse and the servants' pinches and plagues. When old Mr. Earnshaw begins to favor Heathcliff openly, Mrs. Earnshaw does nothing to mediate the growing jealousy between her son and the foundling. Her death, when it comes, removes the last potential check on Hindley's resentment, and Nelly observes that afterward "the young master had learned to regard his father as an oppressor rather than a friend, and Heathcliff as a usurper."

Death and Aftermath

Mrs. Earnshaw dies quietly, without a dramatic scene. Nelly Dean mentions the event only in passing, noting that it happened "in less than two years" after Heathcliff's arrival. The brevity of the report mirrors the thinness of her presence in the household's emotional life. Her death leaves the Earnshaw children without maternal supervision at a critical moment: Catherine is still a wild, mischievous child, Hindley is on the verge of adolescence and already bitter, and Heathcliff is entirely dependent on the capricious favor of the father. The vacuum she leaves is filled first by Joseph's sanctimonious religiosity and later by Frances Earnshaw's fragile, short-lived influence—neither of which provides the stability the children need.

Thematic Significance

Mrs. Earnshaw embodies the failure of maternal care that haunts the first generation of the Earnshaw family. Her open hostility to Heathcliff and her refusal to intervene in the children's cruelty establish the moral climate of the household: one in which the foundling is marked as an outsider and left to fend for himself. Her early death also removes the possibility of any moderating influence on Hindley, whose hatred of Heathcliff hardens into the systematic degradation that drives the novel's central revenge plot. In a story crowded with passionate attachments and violent enmities, Mrs. Earnshaw is notable for her absence of feeling—a coldness that proves as consequential as any active malice.