Wuthering Heights is a multigenerational saga set between 1771 and 1802. Though Heathcliff and Cathy’s relationship is a significant part of the story, Cathy dies at age 18 halfway through the book. Heathcliff spends the rest of the novel carrying out a revenge scheme that involves torturing everyone around him, including his own son, the son of a man who abused him, and the daughter Cathy gave birth to just before she died.
Film adaptations like the 1939 version often leave out this second generation of characters. But without them, “you lose that sense of a cycle of violence,” says Murray Tremellen, a curator at the Brontë Parsonage Museum.
As a child, Heathcliff’s main tormenter is Cathy’s brother, Hindley, who physically abuses Heathcliff and forces him to work in the stables as a servant. Later, after Heathcliff mysteriously earns his fortune, he takes revenge on Hindley by gaining financial control of Wuthering Heights and forcing Hindley’s son, Hareton, to work as a servant in the manor he was supposed to inherit.
The fact that Cathy marries her wealthy neighbor Edgar Linton instead of Heathcliff fuels a lot of Heathcliff’s anger, and he takes it out on his own wife and child. Heathcliff has tricked Edgar’s sister, Isabella, into marrying him by pretending to love her. Once wed, Heathcliff immediately turns abusive, killing her dog by hanging it from a tree and trapping her at Wuthering Heights. Isabella runs away while pregnant to raise their child alone; but after she dies, Heathcliff calls their sickly son, Linton, back to Wuthering Heights to abuse him and use him in his ongoing revenge plot.
This leads us to Cathy’s daughter, also named Cathy. When the younger Cathy is a teenager, Heathcliff kidnaps her and forces her to marry the younger Linton (her first cousin), while simultaneously preventing her from seeing her dying father. This allows Heathcliff to gain full possession of Edgar’s estate after Edgar and Linton die.