1. A Misanthropist's Heaven (Chapters 1–3)

In Wuthering Heights, the behaviour of a small group of people in a confined locality, realistically evoked through their distinctive speech and the actions of daily life, metamorphoses into a total internal experience of wuthering turbulence and inspired resolution. The scene of the drama is a microcosm of a mental ‘universe’ at once familiar yet, as in Catherine's terms, ‘a mighty stranger’. The lateral dimension of this universe is formed by the two houses across the moor; its depth is measured by the tension-filled gap between the two outsiders Lockwood and Heathcliff; and its vertical dimension, the congruence between the living and the ghostly dead, is established only at the end. Because the artistry of the story is compelling, Wuthering Heights does, in a sense, read itself. But the poetic structure of the novel and the mental configuration which this expresses, is bewilderingly complex, and liable to disorient the reader's grasp of space and time once he pauses to analyse the connections being impressed upon him. Introductions to Wuthering Heights often try to stabilise the reader by offering chronological charts of plot and lineage. There is a certain primitive appeal in ‘proving’ that the author was clear-headed about dates, seasons, legalities and terms of pregnancy ‘despite’ the turmoil left by the book, which is in any case a function of the reader's confusion not the author's. However, ultimately this evades rather than confronts the emotional constellation whose skeleton is the story not the plot, and whose flesh the poetic ambiguities which reverberate within.

The story comprises events in the order in which they are presented to the reader, with unchronological but significant juxtapositions. We recall, then, that Wuthering Heights begins in the winter of 1801, when the city-dweller Lockwood arrives in a ‘beautiful’ but ‘desolate’ northern country for his first encounter with his new landlord and ‘solitary neighbour’ Heathcliff, and his first view