Story
About eleven o'clock that night was born the Catherine you saw at Wuthering Heights: a puny, seven-months' child; and two hours after the mother died, having never recovered sufficient consciousness to miss Heathcliff, or know Edgar.
— Nelly Dean to Mr Lockwood in Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights
It soon becomes apparent that Heathcliff's plans for their marriage form part of his endeavour for revenge on Edgar and his daughter: Cathy will marry Linton, be it against her will or not. Nelly finds the childish love letters and burns them. Linton's letters, it is implied, are so beautiful that they were most likely written by Heathcliff as a means of drawing Cathy to the Heights and delivering her fate.
...yet with touches, here and there, which, I thought, were borrowed from a more experienced source.
— Nelly Dean in Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, p213
The relationship sinks after Nelly's discovery, but it later emerges, to Nelly's considerable horror, that Cathy has been making more visits to Wuthering Heights in their stead.
Edgar presently falls ill with distress, and Heathcliff keeps Cathy and Nelly at the Heights until Cathy finally agrees to marry Linton. Desperate to see her father once more before he dies, she consents, and her fate at Wuthering Heights is sealed. Edgar dies, kissing his daughter on the cheek, knowing that Thrushcross Grange, the Linton household, is now in the hands of his enemy.
Linton, who does not at all resemble his father, but is in almost every way like his mother, falls ill as well and dies shortly after his marriage. Heathcliff forces him in his dying moments to bequeath everything to him, nothing to Cathy. As a result, it seems that Cathy, now cold and distant because of her understandable misery, is yet another character destined for an unhappy ending.
Eventually, however, she and Hareton form an unlikely romance: after long having shrugged off his attempts at winning her affection, she begins to aid him in his education. Heathcliff sees the love between the two blossom and, probably because he has a grudging soft spot for Hareton, no longer takes pleasure in degrading them. Heathcliff begins to see Hareton as an adopted son, sharing a similar life of the poor stable boy robbed of his inheritance and love. He no longer stands between Hareton and Cathy, seeing it as now a pointless endeavour and essentially as revenge against himself, and the two are finally allowed to openly love each other.
Heathcliff dies happily and is buried next to the elder Catherine. Cathy and Hareton make plans to marry on New Year's Day, and to reside at Thrushcross Grange. The spirits of Catherine and Heathcliff may be happily watching over their love.
Read more about this topic: Catherine Linton
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