Inroduction ‘Wuthering Heights’: Popular Memory/Critical Debate

Abstract

FREQUENTLY adapted for children’s editions and for film and television, Wuthering Heights has left an indelible mark on British consciousness. Mention of the novel’s name or of its principal characters almost guarantees the evocation in most minds of the idea of a love story, a sense of landscape, or an atmosphere of storm and conflict. One scene, where Cathy and Heathcliff call each other’s names from distant hillsides, seems especially deeply engraved in popular memory — the more intriguingly so for the fact that no such scene is directly presented anywhere in Emily Brontë’s text.