Wuthering Heights

After Nelly Dean finishes recounting the family's history to Lockwood, the story catches up to the present. Lockwood leaves the area for a time and returns eight months later to find Nelly now living at Wuthering Heights as housekeeper, and she brings him up to date on what has happened since.

Cathy Linton, widowed by Linton's death and trapped at Wuthering Heights under Heathcliff's control, gradually softens toward Hareton Earnshaw, the uneducated young man she had once mocked. She begins teaching him to read, and their initial hostility turns into affection and eventually love. Emboldened, Cathy confronts Heathcliff over his theft of both the Earnshaw and Linton properties. Heathcliff, however, is losing interest in his long revenge. Increasingly consumed by memories of the elder Catherine and convinced he senses her presence, he withdraws from the young couple, stops eating, and grows visibly weaker. Nelly finds him behaving strangely, talking as though to Catherine's ghost, in the days before his death.

Heathcliff is discovered dead in the same room where Catherine once slept, the window open as if to let something in, his expression described as almost joyful. He is buried beside Catherine, per his own prior instructions, with Edgar Linton's grave on her other side. With Heathcliff gone, Hareton inherits and reclaims Wuthering Heights, and Cathy is left the undisputed owner of Thrushcross Grange. The two plan to marry and move together to the Grange, leaving Wuthering Heights to Joseph, the dour old servant who stays on there.

In the neighborhood, locals begin reporting sightings of Heathcliff's ghost, and some claim to see him walking the moors with Catherine. Lockwood visits the churchyard and looks upon the three graves — Catherine's, Edgar's, and Heathcliff's, lying side by side — reflecting that he cannot imagine how anyone could conceive of unquiet slumbers for those sleeping in so calm a place. The novel closes on this note of uneasy peace, suggesting that the turbulent lovers, in death, may finally have found rest.