Heathcliff (Wuthering Heights)

Heathcliff (Wuthering Heights)

Heathcliff is a fictional character in the novel Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. Owing to the novel's enduring fame and popularity, he is often regarded as an archetype of the tortured romantic hero whose all-consuming passions destroy both himself and those around him.

He is better known as a romantic hero, due to his love for Catherine Earnshaw, than for his final years of vengeance in the second half of the novel, in which he grows into a bitter, haunted man, and for a number of incidents in his early life that suggest that he was an angry and sometimes malicious individual from the beginning. His complicated, mesmerising and altogether bizarre nature makes him a rare character, with components of both the hero and villain.