Wuthering Heights Reading Level: A Complete Guide

What Reading Level Is Wuthering Heights?

Lexile 880L (TeachingBooks); ATOS not confirmed; word count approximately 107,000–116,000; interest level grades 7–12. Our assessment: grades 10–12, ages 15–18, most commonly assigned in 11th–12th grade and AP Literature. The 880L is comparable to Jane Eyre‘s range but does not capture the novel’s structural challenges, which are considerably more demanding: the double-narrator frame (Lockwood and Nelly Dean), the nonlinear opening that drops readers into 1801 before moving back to explain the preceding thirty years, the large cast across two generations, and the unreliability of both narrators require sustained attention and are most appropriate for experienced high school readers. For official scores by edition, search by ISBN at Lexile.com or AR BookFinder.

The Narrative Structure — Two Narrators, Two Generations

Wuthering Heights has an unusual and deliberately complex narrative structure that is the primary reading challenge for new students:

The frame narrators. The novel opens in 1801. Lockwood, a new tenant at Thrushcross Grange, visits his landlord Heathcliff at Wuthering Heights and is caught in a snowstorm. He stays the night and has a disturbing dream involving a ghost at the window. Back at Grange, Lockwood asks Nelly Dean — the housekeeper who has worked for both families — to explain the situation he has walked into. Nelly then narrates the history of the Earnshaws and Lintons across the previous thirty years; her account constitutes the bulk of the novel. Both Lockwood and Nelly are unreliable: Lockwood is socially obtuse and misreads almost everything he observes; Nelly is involved in the events she narrates and has her own loyalties and blind spots. The novel never provides a perspective that stands entirely outside the frame narrators.

The two generations. The story Nelly tells covers two generations of the Earnshaw and Linton families:

First generation: Mr. Earnshaw brings home an orphan boy — of unknown origin, described as dark — and names him Heathcliff. Heathcliff and Earnshaw’s daughter Catherine develop an intense attachment. After Earnshaw dies, his son Hindley degrades Heathcliff from family member to servant. Catherine and Heathcliff’s relationship continues despite Hindley’s cruelty. Catherine becomes attached to the neighboring Linton family and eventually marries Edgar Linton, choosing social advantage over Heathcliff. Heathcliff disappears, returns three years later transformed by money and ambition, and begins a systematic revenge against both families. Catherine falls ill and dies after childbirth, having never fully resolved her relationship with Heathcliff. Heathcliff elopes with Edgar’s sister Isabella, whom he mistreats. Hindley dies, leaving his son Hareton in Heathcliff’s control. Heathcliff uses Hareton as he himself was used.

Second generation: Catherine’s daughter Cathy Linton, Edgar’s ward, grows up at Thrushcross Grange. Heathcliff manipulates her into marrying his sickly son Linton Heathcliff — securing the Linton estate when Linton dies. Cathy is left a prisoner at Wuthering Heights, in Heathcliff’s control, alongside the degraded Hareton. This is the situation Lockwood encounters in 1801. The novel’s concluding chapters, returning to Lockwood’s frame, show Heathcliff’s obsession with Catherine’s ghost beginning to overwhelm him; he dies in the room where she once slept. Cathy and Hareton, freed, begin a relationship that partially echoes and partially reverses the first-generation tragedy.

What Age Is Wuthering Heights Appropriate For?

Ages 15–18, grades 10–12. Content worth noting for parents and teachers:

What Is Wuthering Heights About?

Mr. Earnshaw, returning from Liverpool, brings home an orphan boy whom he names Heathcliff and raises alongside his own children, Catherine and Hindley. Heathcliff and Catherine form an intense, all-consuming bond. After Earnshaw dies, Hindley — who resents Heathcliff — demotes him to servant status. Catherine, attracted to the Linton family at neighboring Thrushcross Grange, marries Edgar Linton for his social position while telling Nelly that her attachment to Heathcliff is of a different and more fundamental order. Heathcliff, overhearing Catherine describe her love for Edgar as conventional compared to her bond with him, disappears.

He returns three years later, transformed. He has acquired money and a harder manner. He systematically destroys both families: winning Wuthering Heights from the alcoholic Hindley through gambling; eloping with Edgar’s sister Isabella, whom he treats with sustained cruelty; and positioning himself to inherit the Linton estate through his son Linton Heathcliff’s marriage to Cathy. Catherine — caught between Edgar and Heathcliff — falls into a delirium and dies after giving birth to Cathy. Heathcliff is not present at her death and never recovers from it; for the remaining years of his life he is preoccupied with Catherine’s ghost.

The second-generation story — Cathy, Hareton, and Linton Heathcliff — is Heathcliff’s revenge fully deployed. He degrades Hareton as he himself was degraded; he uses his sickly son as a legal instrument to secure the Linton estate. By the novel’s end, Heathcliff’s obsession with Catherine has intensified to the point where he cannot eat or sleep; he sees her face in everyone around him. He dies in her room, the window open. Cathy and Hareton begin a relationship. The narrator Lockwood returns to find Wuthering Heights quieted.

Heathcliff — Origins and Race

Heathcliff’s origins are never explained in the novel. Mr. Earnshaw finds him in Liverpool — then a major port city — and describes him as a “dark” child who speaks an unknown language. Throughout the novel he is described with terms including “dark,” “gipsy,” and “a little Lascar” (a South Asian or East Asian sailor). His parentage, ethnicity, and race are never stated.

Contemporary scholarship has examined Heathcliff’s ambiguous racial identity in the context of Victorian Britain’s empire, the Liverpool slave trade, and the novel’s repeated use of racial markers without explicit identification. Some scholars read Heathcliff as Black or of African descent; others read him as Romani; others as South Asian; the novel’s deliberate ambiguity on this point is itself a subject of discussion. For AP Literature and advanced high school courses, Heathcliff’s racial ambiguity — and what it means in the context of the class and social structures the novel depicts — is a productive discussion topic.

Wuthering Heights Themes and Lessons

The novel’s central structural argument is that Heathcliff’s exclusion — from the Earnshaw family by Hindley, from Catherine by her marriage to Edgar, from social respectability by his origins — produces the systematic revenge he deploys across both generations. The cruelty he experiences is reproduced in the cruelty he inflicts. The second generation — Hareton Earnshaw degraded as Heathcliff was degraded, Cathy manipulated as Catherine was not — mirrors the first with modifications. The novel does not present this cycle as justified; it presents it as the mechanism by which social exclusion perpetuates itself.

The unreliable narrators are among the novel’s most discussed formal features. Nelly Dean — who presents herself as a sensible observer — makes decisions throughout the story that affect the events she is narrating; she is not a neutral reporter. Lockwood — the frame narrator who opens and closes the novel — misreads every situation he encounters and draws entirely wrong conclusions. The effect is that the reader is never given a stable, authoritative account of what happened; every version is mediated through a narrator with limited knowledge and personal investment.

Discussion questions: How reliable are Lockwood and Nelly Dean as narrators — what do each of them get wrong? What is the relationship between the social exclusion Heathcliff experienced and the revenge he pursues — does one explain the other? How does the second-generation story (Cathy, Hareton, Linton Heathcliff) repeat and modify the first? What does the novel suggest about Heathcliff’s racial origins — and what difference does it make to how we read his exclusion?

Books Similar to Wuthering Heights

About Emily Brontë

Emily Jane Brontë was born on July 30, 1818, in Thornton, Yorkshire, England, the fifth of six children of the Reverend Patrick Brontë and Maria Branwell Brontë. After their mother’s death in 1821, the family moved to Haworth, Yorkshire, where the children were largely educated at home and developed the imaginative world — Gondal, Emily and Anne’s shared creation — that formed the basis of Emily’s literary development. Unlike her sister Charlotte, Emily had almost no contact with literary society and rarely left Yorkshire. She worked briefly as a teacher and studied in Brussels with Charlotte, but returned home quickly. She published her only novel, Wuthering Heights, in December 1847 as one volume of a three-volume set that also included Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey. The initial critical reception was mixed. Emily Brontë never knew the extent of her novel’s subsequent reputation; she died of tuberculosis on December 19, 1848, at age thirty, less than a year after publication. She left behind a substantial body of poetry, published in the 1846 Bell brothers collection and separately after her death. Wuthering Heights is the only novel she wrote.