Wuthering Heights Trivia
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107 free Wuthering Heights trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Wuthering Heights trivia quiz covers both generations of Emily Brontë's novel: the snowed-in tenant and the ghost at the window, the orphan from Liverpool, the dog at Thrushcross Grange, Catherine's fatal choice, Heathcliff's three-year absence and his revenge on Hindley, Edgar and Isabella, the sickly Linton, the illiterate Hareton and the reconciliation at the end. Nelly Dean, Joseph and Mr Lockwood all get their due. The second half is about the book in the world: the Ellis Bell pseudonym, the publisher who bundled it with Agnes Grey, the reviewer who thought its author must be suicidal, Rossetti's 'fiend of a book', Virginia Woolf's verdict, Charlotte's 1850 edit, Top Withens and the Yorkshire dialect. It closes with the screen and the charts: Olivier and Oberon in 1939, Fiennes and Binoche, Tom Hardy, and the eighteen-year-old Kate Bush who wrote a number one in an evening. Every answer has been checked against the Wikipedia articles on the novel, its author, the 1939 film and the song, and each explanation adds one detail worth carrying up onto the moor. Jane Eyre has its own BrainPickle quiz.
30 of 107 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Under which pen name did Emily Brontë publish Wuthering Heights in 1847?
Ellis Bell
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'.
Q 02Which disease is blamed for Emily Brontë's death in December 1848, a year after Wuthering Heights appeared?
Tuberculosis
Tuberculosis killed her while critics still called the book too savage; only later was it ranked among the finest novels in English.
Q 03Wuthering Heights was first published in a three-volume set together with which other book?
Anne Brontë's Agnes Grey
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.
Q 04Who played Cathy in Emerald Fennell's 2026 film of Wuthering Heights, opposite Jacob Elordi?
Margot Robbie
Margot Robbie also produced the film, and Fennell deliberately chose a loose retelling rather than a faithful adaptation of the book.
Q 05What does the snowed-in tenant reach through his broken window to seize, only to grasp a ghostly hand instead?
A fir branch
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.
Q 06What is the name of the new tenant whose visit opens Wuthering Heights?
Mr Lockwood
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'.
Q 07In Wuthering Heights, what is the name of the more genteel house where the Lintons live?
Thrushcross Grange
Thrushcross Grange: once Heathcliff is dead, young Cathy and Hareton plan to marry and move there from the grim farmhouse.
Q 08Which housekeeper narrates most of Wuthering Heights to the convalescing tenant?
Nelly Dean
Nelly Dean grew up alongside Hindley and Catherine at the farmhouse, so she saw most of what she tells the tenant at first hand.
Q 09In which city does Mr Earnshaw find the orphan he brings home and names Heathcliff?
Liverpool
Liverpool, sixty miles off on foot: Mr Earnshaw found the boy starving in its streets and, when no one claimed him, carried him home.
Q 10Whose name does Mr Earnshaw give to the foundling he brings home?
A son who died young
A son who died young: the name served as both first name and surname, and jealous Hindley hated the boy who took it.
Q 11What happens to Catherine when she and Heathcliff spy on the Lintons?
She is attacked by their dog
She is attacked by their dog, Skulker, so she stays five weeks with the Lintons, who send Heathcliff home; she returns a young lady.
Q 12Why does Catherine say she cannot marry Heathcliff, even though she loves him?
His low social status
His low social status would 'degrade' her, she says; Heathcliff overhears that much and slips away before she says how deeply she loves him.
Q 13Declaring that she and Heathcliff share one soul, what does Catherine famously say?
I am Heathcliff
Q 21In Wuthering Heights, which sanctimonious old servant speaks in thick Yorkshire dialect?
Joseph
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.
Q 22How does Heathcliff die?
Starves himself in Catherine's old room
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.
Q 23Soon after Heathcliff dies, what does a weeping shepherd boy say he has seen on the moor?
Him walking with a woman
I am Heathcliff, she tells the housekeeper, on the very evening she has accepted Edgar Linton's proposal.
Q 14What happens to Catherine after she waits outside in a storm the night Heathcliff runs away?
She catches a fever
She catches a fever, and Edgar's parents, who take her to their house to recover, catch it too and both die.
Q 15Whom does Heathcliff marry to spite Edgar?
Isabella
Isabella ignored every warning; he later sneered that she had pictured in him 'a hero of romance', and she fled south while pregnant.
Q 16Through what vice of Hindley's does Heathcliff gain control of Wuthering Heights?
Gambling
Gambling: Hindley mortgaged every acre to feed his habit, with Heathcliff as the mortgagee, so the house fell to Heathcliff when Hindley died.
Q 17Catherine dies shortly after doing what?
Giving birth to a daughter
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.
Q 18How does Heathcliff react when he learns that Catherine has died?
Calls on her ghost to haunt him
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.
Q 19What does Hareton throw into the fire after young Cathy mocks his efforts to read?
His books
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.
Q 20When Hareton proudly tells young Cathy he can now read the inscription over the farmhouse door, what can he read?
Only his own name
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.
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.
Q 24Whose three graves does the tenant find side by side at the end of Wuthering Heights?
Catherine, Edgar and Heathcliff
Catherine, Edgar and Heathcliff: Heathcliff had bribed the sexton to pull away the loosened side of her coffin when he was buried beside her.
Q 25In Wuthering Heights, what does the dialect word 'wuthering' describe?
The atmospheric tumult of stormy weather
The atmospheric tumult of stormy weather: the house stands so exposed that the north wind has bent its gaunt thorns all one way.
Q 26Which house did Ellen Nussey suggest as the model for Wuthering Heights?
Top Withens
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.
Q 27While Catherine lies dead awaiting burial, what does Heathcliff slip secretly into her locket?
A curl of his own hair
A curl of his own hair, after throwing out Edgar's; the housekeeper found the discarded curl, twisted the two together and enclosed both.
Q 28Which Pre-Raphaelite poet called Wuthering Heights 'a fiend of a book' whose action 'is laid in hell'?
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
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.
Q 29Which modernist novelist declared in 1925 that Emily 'was a greater poet than Charlotte'?
Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf wrote it in The Common Reader to explain why Wuthering Heights is a harder book to understand than Jane Eyre.
Q 30Heading for which rocky landmark does young Cathy stray into Wuthering Heights and meet Hareton?
Penistone Crags
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.