Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

Waterstone’s windows in Piccadilly may be full of romantic books for Valentine’s Day but I am re-reading a novel so deep, so dark it takes my breath away. Published a year before her death in 1848, her sister Charlotte called it ‘moorish, wild and knotty as the heath’, ‘hewn in a world workshop, with simple tools, out of homely materials’, ‘from no model but the vision of his (her) meditations’. ‘With time and labour the crag took human shape and there it stands colossal, dark, and frowning, half-statue, half rock; in the former sense, terrible and and goblin-like; in the latter, almost beautiful for its colouring is of mellow grey, and moorland moss clothes it; and heath, with its blooming bells and balmy fragrance, grows faithfully close to the giant’s foot.’
Emily Bronte died aged thirty; I recall seeing her poems in tiny spidery handwriting in the British Library and visiting the parsonage in Haworth years ago with its chaise-longue, covered in torn black leather, where she lay dying from consumption. What a masterpiece she achieved in such a brief life.
Two scenes from the novel have stayed with me over the years, as if I had read only them yesterday.
The first is when Cathy confides to their housekeeper, Nelly Dean, that she may marry Edgar Linton. Unbeknown to them, Heathcliff is listening at the door, but steals away before Cathy reveals her love for him.
‘I’ve dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they’ve gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind.’
‘It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now; so he shall never know how much I love him; and that, not because he’s handsome, Nelly, but because he’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same, and Linton’s is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire.’

Heathcliff leaves Wuthering Heights to return a rich man but is only reconciled with Cathy, now married and living at Thrushcross Grange, as she lies dying.
How they met I hardly saw, but Catherine made a spring, and he caught her, and they were locked in an embrace from which I thought my mistress would never be released alive.
'You teach me how cruel you’ve been – cruel and false. Why did you despise me? Why did you betray your own heart, Cathy? I have not one word of comfort – you deserve this…'
At the end of the novel the narrator encounters a young boy who has seen Heathcliff and a woman on the heath.
Wuthering Heights will be shut up ‘for the use of ghosts as choose to inhabit it’, the narrator says.
‘They are afraid of nothing. Together they would brave satan and all his legions.’
Or would they?
I sought and soon discovered, the three head-stones on the slope next the moor – the middle one, grey, and half buried in heath – Edgar Linton’s only harmonised by the turf and moss, creeping up its foot – and Heathcliff’s still bare.
I lingered round them, under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers, for the sleepers in that quiet earth.