Wuthering Heights characters

Appears from the start

The dark, ungracious master of Wuthering Heights, an isolated farmhouse on the Yorkshire moors, and the landlord of the tenant who narrates the frame. He is brooding, curt, and inhospitable, keeping a grim household of half-wild dogs and sullen dependents. As the housekeeper's long account unfolds, he is shown to have been a foundling of unknown origin, taken in as a boy and raised at the Heights alongside the family already living there. He is a man shaped by early affection and early cruelty in equal measure, and even at first meeting he radiates a coiled resentment that sets the tone for the whole story.

Appears from the start

A city gentleman who rents Thrushcross Grange, the more comfortable house on the same moor, seeking solitude. He calls on his landlord out of curiosity and is drawn into the strange, hostile atmosphere of Wuthering Heights. Snowed in during a second visit, he passes a disturbing night in an old bedchamber and becomes fascinated by the household's buried history. He is the outer narrator of the book: it is to him that the housekeeper tells the long tale of the two families, and his own puzzled observations frame that account.

Also known as Ellen Dean

First appears in chapter 4

The housekeeper who has served both households across two generations and who narrates the central story to the curious tenant. Raised almost as one of the family, she has witnessed nearly every important event first hand, and her practical, watchful, sometimes meddling perspective shapes how the whole history is told. She is loyal, shrewd, and moralizing, often trying to steer the people around her, and her long memory supplies the intimate detail of the tale.

First appears in chapter 4

The master of Wuthering Heights in the older generation and father of the household's two children. Returning from a journey, he brings home a ragged, dark-haired orphan boy and insists the family raise him as their own, favoring the foundling over his own son. A well-meaning but stubborn man, his decision plants the resentment that will poison the household for years after his death.

Also known as Cathy, Catherine Linton

First appears in chapter 4

The spirited, willful daughter of the Earnshaw household, wild and passionate as a child and inseparable from the foundling raised beside her. Their bond becomes the emotional center of the book. Torn between that fierce attachment and a longing for comfort and social standing, she is proud, impulsive, and easily provoked, and the choices driven by that conflict set much of the tragedy in motion.

First appears in chapter 4

The son of the older Earnshaw, jealous from boyhood of the foundling his father prefers. Bitter and resentful, he treats the newcomer with growing cruelty. After his father's death and his own return as head of the house, he sinks into drink and dissipation, degrading the household and, in particular, punishing the boy he has always hated by reducing him to a servant.

First appears in chapter 2

An elderly, sour servant at Wuthering Heights, fiercely religious and forever condemning those around him as sinners. He speaks in broad dialect and delivers a stream of grim scriptural judgement. A fixture of the house across the generations, he is disagreeable and self-righteous but enduring, one of the few constants in the changing household.

First appears in chapter 6

The son of the genteel Linton family at Thrushcross Grange, refined, mild, and well brought up in contrast to the rougher world of Wuthering Heights. He becomes attached to the Earnshaw daughter and offers her the comfort and respectability she partly craves. Gentle and even weak beside the fiercer figures around him, he is nonetheless capable of steady devotion.

First appears in chapter 6

Edgar Linton's younger sister, raised in sheltered comfort at Thrushcross Grange. Delicate and naive, she has little experience of the harsher passions at work around her. Her romantic imagination and lack of judgement about the darker characters draw her into serious trouble as the story develops.

First appears in chapter 8

The son of Hindley Earnshaw, born as his mother dies. Left largely to the mercy of the household after his father's decline, he grows up neglected and uneducated. Though rough-mannered and kept deliberately ignorant, he is shown to be capable of loyalty and gentleness, and he carries the old Earnshaw name into the story's later generation.

Also known as Cathy, Catherine Heathcliff

First appears in chapter 18

The daughter of Edgar Linton and the elder Catherine, raised in seclusion at Thrushcross Grange. Bright, affectionate, and headstrong like her mother, but gentler, she grows up sheltered from the neighboring house's troubles. Her curiosity about the world beyond the Grange leads her into the second generation's entanglement with Wuthering Heights.

First appears in chapter 19

The sickly son of Isabella Linton, brought into the story as a frail, peevish boy after his mother's death. Weak in body and temperament, spoiled and fretful, he becomes a pawn in the schemes surrounding the two estates, valued by others less for himself than for what his existence can be made to secure.