My Cathy,

I feel a strange, warm wind in the air. I smell the first golden furze blossoms. I hear the vanguard of the lapwings returning to the whinstone-lined hills. Winter, I believe, is ending. 

You are my love, my life, my soul. We are like the rocks of Penistone Crags: inseparable, the threads of our souls intertwined beyond the workings of any mortal. Our love is the sea in all its uncontainable beauty, passion, and wildness. And yet, you chose Edgar Linton — a feeble lamb whose entire capacity for love could barely fill a bucket — for a husband over me. Poor Edgar could not even bear a few teaspoons of our love.

You said that it would degrade you to marry me. You cast me out, and so I wandered the endless moors until I could not bear to walk any farther. I offered you a life of liberty while Edgar offered you a life of subdued gentility. While we escaped to the moors from Hindley’s tyranny, Edgar lived in grandiose comfort, content with the walls of Thrushcross Grange as the extent of his world. Our spirits — unlike his — are free, and the moor is our liberator. And nothing — not even the wills of almighty God or Satan — could have separated us, save you.

But you know that you cannot possibly, truly, love Edgar — not in the slightest way that we love each other. The Lintons are a damnable, repulsive, sickly breed; I cannot stand Isabella, that mere slut of a wife! She, like Edgar, fills her head with fantasies of love but cannot love. 

I have kept nightly vigils beneath your window and beside the ash tree. I have hung my arms on its still bare, scarred branches and stared through your cracked lattice. I feel so close to you, to ending the Lintons and all of our miseries, but a prison of books, duties, and glass windows stands between us. 

So let me help you. Let me free you. Let me burn the books, violate the duties, and break the glass panes keeping you from me. Let me tear down the walls imprisoning you. Let me rip the flesh and crush the skulls of those who dare cross us. All you need do is nod and I will make the ground beneath and the sky above crash upon Edgar. Cathy, let me take you away from Edgar and sickness and give you life and freedom. I must see you and I must speak with you. I will stop at nothing until I secure what is mine, what is ours.

When you are ready, I will come to you and we will escape together from Linton. Our spirits will reunite and we will wander the wild, wuthering moors together for the rest of time.

With much passion, 

Your Heathcliff


I wrote this letter from Heathcliff’s perspective to his one and only love Catherine. The intense passion of their love underscores the entirety of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights; this emotive epistle, which mirrors the climax of the first half of the novel, serves to exemplify the transcendental extremity of Catherine and Heathcliff’s relationship.

For more Wuthering Heights, please view my essay on the centrality of the second half of the novel.