107 Fun Facts About Wuthering Heights

Under which pen name did Emily Brontë publish Wuthering Heights in 1847?

Ellis Bell: the sisters kept their initials but picked names that hid their sex, sensing that 'authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice'.

Which disease is blamed for Emily Brontë's death in December 1848, a year after Wuthering Heights appeared?

Tuberculosis killed her while critics still called the book too savage; only later was it ranked among the finest novels in English.

Wuthering Heights was first published in a three-volume set together with which other book?

Anne Brontë's Agnes Grey made up the third volume, but the publisher held both books back until their sister's Jane Eyre had become a hit.

Who played Cathy in Emerald Fennell's 2026 film of Wuthering Heights, opposite Jacob Elordi?

Margot Robbie also produced the film, and Fennell deliberately chose a loose retelling rather than a faithful adaptation of the book.

What does the snowed-in tenant reach through his broken window to seize, only to grasp a ghostly hand instead?

A fir branch was rattling its cones on the glass, but when he knocked through to grab it his fingers closed on a small ice-cold hand.

What is the name of the new tenant whose visit opens Wuthering Heights?

Mr Lockwood took the house to escape society after a failed seaside romance, and he hails the bleak moors as 'a perfect misanthropist's Heaven'.

In Wuthering Heights, what is the name of the more genteel house where the Lintons live?

Thrushcross Grange: once Heathcliff is dead, young Cathy and Hareton plan to marry and move there from the grim farmhouse.

Which housekeeper narrates most of Wuthering Heights to the convalescing tenant?

Nelly Dean grew up alongside Hindley and Catherine at the farmhouse, so she saw most of what she tells the tenant at first hand.

In which city does Mr Earnshaw find the orphan he brings home and names Heathcliff?

Liverpool, sixty miles off on foot: Mr Earnshaw found the boy starving in its streets and, when no one claimed him, carried him home.

Whose name does Mr Earnshaw give to the foundling he brings home?

A son who died young: the name served as both first name and surname, and jealous Hindley hated the boy who took it.

What happens to Catherine when she and Heathcliff spy on the Lintons?

She is attacked by their dog, Skulker, so she stays five weeks with the Lintons, who send Heathcliff home; she returns a young lady.

Why does Catherine say she cannot marry Heathcliff, even though she loves him?

His low social status would 'degrade' her, she says; Heathcliff overhears that much and slips away before she says how deeply she loves him.

Declaring that she and Heathcliff share one soul, what does Catherine famously say?

I am Heathcliff, she tells the housekeeper, on the very evening she has accepted Edgar Linton's proposal.

What happens to Catherine after she waits outside in a storm the night Heathcliff runs away?

She catches a fever, and Edgar's parents, who take her to their house to recover, catch it too and both die.

Whom does Heathcliff marry to spite Edgar?

Isabella ignored every warning; he later sneered that she had pictured in him 'a hero of romance', and she fled south while pregnant.

Through what vice of Hindley's does Heathcliff gain control of Wuthering Heights?

Gambling: Hindley mortgaged every acre to feed his habit, with Heathcliff as the mortgagee, so the house fell to Heathcliff when Hindley died.

Catherine dies shortly after doing what?

Giving birth to a daughter: she died two hours later without regaining consciousness, and amid the grief nobody cared for the unwelcome baby at first.

How does Heathcliff react when he learns that Catherine has died?

Calls on her ghost to haunt him: he begs her to take any form and drive him mad, then dashes his head against a tree.

What does Hareton throw into the fire after young Cathy mocks his efforts to read?

His books went into the flames, yet Cathy later makes peace with a gift of a book and teaches him to read, and the pair plan to marry.

When Hareton proudly tells young Cathy he can now read the inscription over the farmhouse door, what can he read?

Only his own name: he spells out 'Hareton Earnshaw' but cannot tell the figures of the date, so Cathy laughs at him for a dunce.

In Wuthering Heights, which sanctimonious old servant speaks in thick Yorkshire dialect?

Joseph treasures his black-currant bushes, so when Hareton rips up a row of them to make young Cathy a flower bed, the old man wails to Heathcliff.

How does Heathcliff die?

Starves himself in Catherine's old room: sure he has nearly reached his heaven with her, he stops eating, and is found dead by the open window.

Soon after Heathcliff dies, what does a weeping shepherd boy say he has seen on the moor?

Him walking with a woman: the frightened boy dared not drive his lambs past them, and country folk swear on the Bible that Heathcliff walks.

Whose three graves does the tenant find side by side at the end of Wuthering Heights?

Catherine, Edgar and Heathcliff: Heathcliff had bribed the sexton to pull away the loosened side of her coffin when he was buried beside her.

In Wuthering Heights, what does the dialect word 'wuthering' describe?

The atmospheric tumult of stormy weather: the house stands so exposed that the north wind has bent its gaunt thorns all one way.

Which house did Ellen Nussey suggest as the model for Wuthering Heights?

Top Withens carries a Brontë Society plaque saying its buildings bore no resemblance to the house Emily described, yet it remains a popular walk from Haworth.

While Catherine lies dead awaiting burial, what does Heathcliff slip secretly into her locket?

A curl of his own hair, after throwing out Edgar's; the housekeeper found the discarded curl, twisted the two together and enclosed both.

Which Pre-Raphaelite poet called Wuthering Heights 'a fiend of a book' whose action 'is laid in hell'?

Dante Gabriel Rossetti wrote that in an 1854 letter, yet in the same letter he rated it the best novel he had read 'for two ages', bar one.

Which modernist novelist declared in 1925 that Emily 'was a greater poet than Charlotte'?

Virginia Woolf wrote it in The Common Reader to explain why Wuthering Heights is a harder book to understand than Jane Eyre.

Heading for which rocky landmark does young Cathy stray into Wuthering Heights and meet Hareton?

Penistone Crags: she had gazed at those golden rocks from her nursery window for years, and the road to them ran right past the farmhouse.

After Catherine flings the door key into the fire, what does Edgar do to Heathcliff?

Strikes him in the throat, then slips out the back door for help, so Heathcliff smashes the lock with a poker and escapes.

After Catherine boxes Edgar Linton's ear during a tantrum, what does their quarrel lead them to do?

They confess their love: the quarrel broke down their shy pretence of mere friendship, just before Hindley came home raging drunk.

Who played Heathcliff opposite Merle Oberon in the celebrated 1939 film?

Laurence Olivier: the film's success established him as a leading international film actor.

Which Academy Award did the 1939 film of Wuthering Heights win, from its eight nominations?

Best Cinematography, won by Gregg Toland, whose camerawork on Citizen Kane two years later was nominated but did not win.

In Wuthering Heights, where does the snowbound tenant find young Catherine Earnshaw's diary scrawled?

The margins of old books: its entries tell how, after her father's death, Hindley forced her and Heathcliff to sit through endless Sunday sermons.

Which actor played Heathcliff in ITV's 2009 two-part adaptation?

Tom Hardy met Charlotte Riley, who played Cathy, on set, and the pair married in real life in 2014.

While researching her first hit, what did Kate Bush discover she shared with Emily Brontë?

The same birthday, 30 July: Bush had only read the book after seeing the last few minutes of a 1967 BBC adaptation on television.

'Wuthering Heights' made Kate Bush the first woman to top the UK chart with what?

A song she wrote herself, in a single evening at 18; EMI wanted a rockier track as her debut single, but Bush held out for this one.

Which single did Kate Bush's 'Wuthering Heights' knock off the top of the UK chart?

The song is sung from Catherine's point of view as she pleads at Heathcliff's window to be let in.

In a 1970 Monty Python's Flying Circus sketch, how do Heathcliff and Catherine talk across the moors?

By semaphore flags, in the episode that introduced the Spanish Inquisition; even her husband and the baby in its cradle wave flags.

What job did Emily Brontë take near Halifax, only to leave it after about six months?

Schoolteacher, at Law Hill School, where her days ran from six in the morning to eleven at night, a life Charlotte called slavery.

Believing her reason could find 'new spheres of discovery', what did her Brussels teacher Constantin Heger say Emily should have been?

A navigator, said Heger; but their aunt's death called the sisters home from Brussels, and Emily, unlike Charlotte, never went back.

What was the name of the imaginary world whose poems Emily copied into a labelled notebook in 1844?

Gondal: Emily and Anne kept its saga going into adulthood, and in 1845 Emily wrote that it still flourished 'bright as ever'.

In its first year, how many copies did the Brontë sisters' 1846 book of poems sell?

Two, so Charlotte gave away unsold copies to famous writers, among them Thomas De Quincey.

As Emily Brontë weakened in late 1848, how did she answer pleas to call a doctor?

Refused to see one, vowing that no 'poisoning doctor' would come near her; only hours before she died did she whisper that she would see one now.

In July 1848, why did Charlotte and Anne Brontë rush to London to visit Charlotte's publisher?

To prove they were two people, not one impostor: rumour held that a single author wrote all the sisters' novels, while Emily stayed behind at home.

When her fierce bulldog Keeper broke a house rule, how did Emily Brontë deal with him?

Punched him with her fists, though he flew at anyone who struck him; she then bathed his bruises herself, and he later walked first among her mourners.

Whom does the new tenant first take the scornful young woman at Wuthering Heights to be?

Heathcliff's wife, then the surly young man's; in truth she is Heathcliff's widowed daughter-in-law, so the tenant blunders twice over tea.

Hoping to cheer Heathcliff up, whom does the housekeeper suggest his unknown parents might have been?

An emperor and a queen: the Emperor of China and an Indian queen, she says, so he might be a prince, kidnapped by wicked sailors and brought to England.

How does Hindley try, and fail, to kill Heathcliff?

With a pistol that had a knife blade fixed to its barrel: Heathcliff wrenched it away, and the blade snapped shut on Hindley's own wrist.

Which village lies nearest the two houses in Wuthering Heights?

Gimmerton: its chapel's stipend was so poor that no clergyman would take the post, and by the story's end it held no Sunday services.

When Charlotte found Emily Brontë's poetry notebook by chance in 1845, how did Emily react?

She was upset: it took Charlotte hours to reconcile her to the discovery and days to persuade her to publish.

Whom does the dying Linton Heathcliff make heir to his and young Cathy's belongings?

His father: the boy was pressured into the will, so even the belongings Cathy had inherited from her own father passed to Heathcliff.

What did Branwell Brontë's old friends later claim about Wuthering Heights?

He wrote much of it, they said he had told them; early Brontë biographers Mary Robinson and Clement Shorter both dismissed the claim.

Why was the tenant's housekeeper, by her own account, almost always at Wuthering Heights as a child?

Her mother nursed Hindley, so she grew up as his foster-sister; years later, when his wife died, she raised his baby son Hareton herself.

Delirious after days shut in her room, what sight terrifies Catherine?

Her own reflection: she thought she was lying in her chamber at Wuthering Heights and took the mirror for the black press there.

When young Edgar Linton mocks his long hair, what does Heathcliff throw in Edgar's face?

Hot apple sauce, the first thing to hand, so Hindley hauled him off and flogged him, and Catherine could scarcely enjoy her party for thinking of him.

Which veteran British pop star cast himself as the lead of Heathcliff, a 1996 musical based on Wuthering Heights?

Cliff Richard's show quoted its own scathing reviews in its advertising and still played to nearly half a million people.

Which fellow nominee beat the 1939 film of Wuthering Heights to the Academy Award for Best Picture?

Gone with the Wind took the Oscar, but New York's film critics chose Wuthering Heights as the year's best film, settling it only after 14 ballots.

Which future James Bond played Heathcliff in the 1970 film of Wuthering Heights, the first made in colour?

Timothy Dalton's film, like the 1939 classic, leaves out the second generation, and Michel Legrand's music for it earned a Golden Globe nomination.

Watching Heathcliff waste away late in Wuthering Heights, which monster does the housekeeper briefly wonder if he is?

A vampire or a ghoul is her passing thought, half a century before Dracula; she then scolds herself, since she had tended Heathcliff from infancy.

Which pop star wrote an album of original songs for Emerald Fennell's 2026 film of Wuthering Heights?

Charli XCX led with 'House', a single featuring Welsh musician John Cale, and released the full album on the same day the film opened.

Which novel by one of Emily Brontë's sisters beat Wuthering Heights into print by about two months?

Jane Eyre was an immediate success in October 1847, which finally pushed Emily's slow-moving publisher to bring out her book that December.

Which singer had a 1996 hit with a Jim Steinman power ballad inspired by Wuthering Heights?

Celine Dion recorded 'It's All Coming Back to Me Now' after Steinman, who called it a woman's song, won a court case to stop Meat Loaf singing it.

How are both of the men young Cathy marries in Wuthering Heights related to her by blood?

Her first cousins come from opposite sides of the family: one is the son of her father's sister, the other the son of her mother's brother.

Which English actor made his film debut as Heathcliff in the 1992 adaptation of Wuthering Heights?

Ralph Fiennes's dark Heathcliff opened the door to his next big part: Steven Spielberg cast him as the Nazi commandant Amon Goeth in Schindler's List.

Which Romantic poet lends his name to the brooding kind of hero Heathcliff of Wuthering Heights is often called?

Lord Byron gave his name to the proud, moody, vengeful outsider, and the Brontë children discovered him early, in a magazine their father read.

In her delirium in Wuthering Heights, what does Catherine do with the feathers she tears from her pillow?

Sorts them by bird: turkey, wild duck, pigeon, lapwing. She decides the pigeon feathers in the pillow are the reason she has not been able to die.

In Wuthering Heights, what does Heathcliff do to his bride's little dog the night they elope?

Hangs it from a hook in the garden wall, as he later boasts; the housekeeper finds the animal at its last gasp and frees it before she knows anyone has eloped.

How does Wuthering Heights relay the first wretched days of Heathcliff's bride in her new home?

A long letter to the housekeeper makes the bride one of the novel's handful of narrators; in it she asks whether the man she has married is human at all.

What does Heathcliff hurl at his wife's head on the night she flees Wuthering Heights for good?

A dinner knife lodges beneath her ear; she pulls it out, answers with a parting insult and runs across the moor that night, never to live with him again.

What does the housekeeper in Wuthering Heights do with the love notes she finds hidden in young Cathy's drawer?

Burns them, at Cathy's own frantic request, because the alternative was laying them before her father; Cathy scorches her fingers trying to save a few.

How does Heathcliff force young Cathy to marry his dying son late in Wuthering Heights?

Holds her prisoner is the method: lured indoors, she is kept from her dying father until she gives in, while the housekeeper stays locked up for five nights.

What does Heathcliff bribe the sexton to do once he is buried beside Catherine in Wuthering Heights?

Remove the coffin sides that face each other, so that their dust can mingle; he has already knocked hers loose while a grave was being dug next to it.

What reward does Hareton claim from young Cathy for finishing a reading lesson near the end of Wuthering Heights?

A few kisses, at least five by the watching tenant's count, which Hareton generously returns; a wandering gaze during the lesson earns him a smart slap instead.

When Heathcliff is found dead in Wuthering Heights, what can the housekeeper not manage to close?

His staring eyes will not shut and seem to sneer at her efforts, fixing a look of exultation she had hoped to hide before anyone else saw it.

What sets Wuthering Heights apart from everything else Emily Brontë published before her death at thirty?

It alone was a novel; the rest of her published work was poetry, and though a publisher's letter suggests she began a second novel, no manuscript has ever been found.

In which West Yorkshire village did Emily Brontë spend most of her life and write Wuthering Heights?

Haworth was no rural idyll: an inspector who reported on the village in 1850 found deeply insanitary conditions and an unusually high rate of early death.

Which epic poem do the critics behind The Madwoman in the Attic read Wuthering Heights as a reply to?

Paradise Lost tells of a fall from heaven into hell; on this reading Emily Brontë turns Milton upside down, and Catherine is destroyed by falling into polite order.

Wuthering Heights is a landmark of which genre, launched by Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto?

Gothic fiction of the previous century was usually set in continental Europe and the distant past; Emily Brontë moved its terrors to a Yorkshire farmhouse.

Which literary device, also used in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, structures the telling of Wuthering Heights?

A frame narrative nests one teller inside another: a tenant's account holds the housekeeper's tale, which in turn holds still other voices.

Which Walter Scott novel, set among quarrelsome Northumberland squires, is named as an influence on Wuthering Heights?

Rob Roy gave Emily Brontë a model for Catherine in Diana Vernon, a spirited young woman just as out of place among her boorish relations.

What did the violence of Wuthering Heights lead many Victorian reviewers to assume about its author?

A man had written it, reviewers assumed, and nothing on the title page said otherwise: Emily's real name was not printed on her book until after her death.

In a 2007 British poll, Wuthering Heights was voted the greatest example of which kind of tale?

Love story was the voters' verdict, though some of the novel's admirers insist it is nothing of the kind and read it as a study of evil and abuse.

Maryse Condé's 1995 novel Windward Heights moves the story of Wuthering Heights to which part of the world?

The Caribbean setting of Cuba and Guadeloupe turns Heathcliff into Razyé, and unlike Emily Brontë's lovers, Condé's pair secretly have a child together.

In Wuthering Heights, a neighbour guesses the young Heathcliff may be a 'little Lascar', a term for what?

An Indian sailor is the usual meaning: lascars crewed European ships from the 1500s, and the neighbour's other guess is an American or Spanish castaway.

Which British actress turned down a supporting part in the 1939 film of Wuthering Heights after lobbying to play Cathy?

Vivien Leigh wanted to act opposite her lover, the film's Heathcliff, but the studio thought her too little known in America to carry the picture.

Which exacting director made the Heathcliff of the 1939 film of Wuthering Heights shoot a single scene 72 times?

William Wyler called for take after take without a word of direction, exasperating a leading man who was already feuding with his co-star.

Which Irish singer appears uncredited as Emily Brontë herself in the 1992 film of Wuthering Heights?

Sinéad O'Connor's cameo suits a film that had to carry the author's name in its title, because a rival studio still owned the plain one.

Which British director cast James Howson, the first black actor to play Heathcliff, in her 2011 Wuthering Heights?

Andrea Arnold, following the novel's picture of a dark-skinned boy, first searched Britain's Romani community before widening the casting call across Yorkshire.

Which Spanish director moved Wuthering Heights to Mexico in his 1954 film Abismos de pasión?

Luis Buñuel had drafted the script in 1931 and waited two decades for funding; his Heathcliff, renamed Alejandro, credits his riches to a pact with Satan.

Which Hollywood film composer spent eight years writing his only opera, a setting of Wuthering Heights?

Bernard Herrmann, the man behind Psycho's shrieking strings, recorded the opera himself in 1966, but no theatre staged it complete until his centenary in 2011.

Which English progressive rock band borrowed from Wuthering Heights for the title of its 1976 album Wind & Wuthering?

Genesis went further on the record itself: two linked instrumentals take their titles from the final sentence of the novel.

Which actress played the author of Wuthering Heights in Emily, a 2022 biopic built around an invented love affair?

Emma Mackey's Emily is seen near death as the film opens, asked by her elder sister what inspired the novel; the film that follows is its imagined answer.

Which actor played Heathcliff in the BBC's 1967 serial of Wuthering Heights, the version that inspired Kate Bush's song?

Ian McShane's serial reached Kate Bush only in its final minutes, which she caught on television; she read the novel afterwards.

What does the housekeeper of Wuthering Heights say about how Heathcliff made his fortune in three years away?

She has no idea, and the novel never tells: the tenant guesses at college, an American war or highway robbery, and she will vouch for none of them.

Which wife does Hindley bring home to Wuthering Heights from his years away, only to lose her after Hareton's birth?

Frances arrives as a surprise: Hindley had kept the marriage from his father, and the housekeeper suspects she had neither money nor name to recommend her.

What kills Hindley Earnshaw of Wuthering Heights at twenty-seven, within months of his sister Catherine's death?

Drink finishes him, the doctor reports, true to his character; the housekeeper, his exact contemporary, sits down in the porch and weeps as for a blood relation.

Which Wuthering Heights servant is the housekeeper's only source for young Cathy's first weeks under Heathcliff's roof?

Zillah thinks young Cathy haughty and, on Heathcliff's orders, refuses her any help, even while the girl nurses her dying husband alone.

Which doctor is called to nearly every sickbed and deathbed in Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff's included?

Mr Kenneth is a plain, rough man by the housekeeper's account, and at the end he is at a loss to name the disorder Heathcliff died of.

Which public office does Edgar of Wuthering Heights hold, as his father did, until grief makes him a recluse?

Magistrate was the family's post; after Catherine's death he throws it up, avoids the village and keeps within his own park, save for visits to her grave.

Which plants do young Cathy and Hareton uproot for a flower bed, enraging an old servant of Wuthering Heights?

Currant bushes were the old man's pride; when Heathcliff demands a culprit, Cathy takes the blame and retorts that he has taken all her land.

Where is Catherine buried in Wuthering Heights, to the surprise of the villagers?

In a churchyard corner, on a grassy slope where the wall is so low that heath and bilberry plants have climbed over it from the moor.

Where is Edgar when Heathcliff slips in for a last meeting with the dying Catherine in Wuthering Heights?

At church: it is a warm Sunday, and the housekeeper leaves the doors open and sends the one remaining servant off to the village for oranges.

How does Edgar of Wuthering Heights respond when his sister runs off to marry Heathcliff?

Refuses to go after her: she left of her own accord, he says, and from now on is his sister only in name, though he has her belongings sent on.

Which flowers does Edgar lay on Catherine's pillow in Wuthering Heights as she recovers from her long illness?

Golden crocuses, the earliest flowers at the Heights by her account, bring the first gleam of pleasure to her face in months.

Which French actress played both Catherine and her daughter in the 1992 film of Wuthering Heights?

Juliette Binoche worked with the film's Heathcliff again four years later, when the pair were reunited for The English Patient.