Wuthering Heights

The West Yorkshire moors above Haworth, the country Emily Brontë walked from the parsonage. The two houses are invented but firmly rooted here: Wuthering Heights is traditionally the ruined farmhouse at Top Withens, Thrushcross Grange is drawn from Ponden Hall near Stanbury, Gimmerton from the local villages, and the open moorland of Penistone Hill lies the hour's walk between them that is the whole novel.

Heathcliff

Wuthering Heights (Top Withens)

Ch. 1 · 0% through the novel

Wuthering Heights is the name of Mr. Heathcliff's dwelling. “Wuthering” being a significant provincial adjective, descriptive of the atmospheric tumult to which its station is exposed in stormy weather.

Lockwood, the new tenant of the Grange, walks up to call on his landlord and gives the house its name and its weather in a sentence. “Wuthering” is the local word for the roar of wind over the edge, and Brontë sets the farm where the north wind bends the thorns one way. Top Withens, the ruin walkers still climb to, stands in exactly that exposure.

inspired by The Heights is Brontë's invention, but the farmhouse has long been identified with Top Withens, a ruin on Haworth Moor she knew from the parsonage. The building never matched the novel's grand house; the bleak, wind-scoured site does. The pin marks the signposted ruin.

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