Wuthering Heights Summary & ending explained

In the winter of 1801 I rented Thrushcross Grange to get away from people, and found the most unsociable man in England four miles up the hill. My landlord, Mr. Heathcliff, met me at the gate of Wuthering Heights as if I'd come to collect a debt. Over his door someone had carved the year 1500 and the name Hareton Earnshaw.

I went back the next day, which was a mistake. Snow fell while I sat among people who would not speak to me: a pale young widow glaring at the fire, a rough young man in work clothes, an old servant, Joseph, muttering scripture. Nobody would guide me home, and the dogs dragged me down in the yard. In the end the housekeeper, Zillah, slipped me upstairs to a room her master let no one use.

The bed was an oak box with sliding panels. On the window ledge inside, scratched into the paint again and again, was one name in three forms: Catherine Earnshaw, Catherine Heathcliff, Catherine Linton. In the margins of some mildewed books, a child had kept a diary: her brother Hindley was a tyrant, and she and a boy called Heathcliff meant to rebel.

I fell asleep spelling the names. In the night a fir branch kept knocking at the glass. Half dreaming, I punched through the pane to break it off, and my fingers closed on a small hand, cold as ice.

"Let me in—let me in!" a voice sobbed. It said it was Catherine Linton, and that it had been wandering the moor for twenty years.

Fear made me savage. I dragged the thin wrist across the broken glass until blood soaked the sheets, and still it held on. I screamed.

The door burst open. Heathcliff stood there, candle shaking, face drained of all colour. He sent me out. From the passage I watched him climb onto the bed, wrench the window open to the storm, and sob into the snow, begging Cathy to come in. Just once more.

Nothing came. Only the wind.

Back at the Grange I sat shivering with a chill, and when my housekeeper, Mrs. Dean, brought me a basin of gruel, I asked who Catherine was. She went very still. Then she sat down by my fire.