Word: heathcliffs
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Catherine's daughter, also named Catherine, and Hareton Earnshaw were to marry at the end of Wuthering Heights. Well, they did, and things went swimmingly until Heathcliff's natural son showed up and wooed Catherine away to Wuthering Heights. The child produced of this union is thus another illegitimate little Heathcliff who robs the nest of the next generation of Earnshaw men. "History," Agnes remarks blandly, "was repeating itself...
Rather than picking up after Brontë's novel, Heathcliff begins and ends during it. Novelist Jeffrey Caine attempts to show where Heathcliff was during the roughly three years he was absent from Wuthering Heights. L'Estrange suggests in passing that he was in Liverpool, working on the docks. Caine insists that he went to London and made a fortune in the underworld...
Ordinarily, such speculation is about as profitable as wondering what Hamlet studied at Wittenberg. But given its woolgathering premise, Heathcliff is a remarkably accomplished and engrossing novel. It is also a first-rate act of literary impersonation. Caine introduces convincing versions of Lockwood and Nelly Dean and, at some risk, a long autobiographical letter written by Heathcliff himself. Bereft because he knows Catherine will never marry him, the ferocious young man flees the Heights with a vague plan to wreak vengeance on the world. No sooner does he reach London than he joins a mob wrecking a house in Bloomsbury...
That sounds a lot like the Heathcliff that generations of readers have loved. Even those unfamiliar with Wuthering Heights can enjoy Heathcliff's crackling prose and rapid pacing. Inevitably, though, the information that Caine contrives detracts something from the legend that Brontë invented. Heathcliff was not meant to dally, however rudely, with Lon don ladies. Heathcliff also suggests that its hero is more pussycat than tiger. For all his violent talk ("I kicked him in the mouth, rattling his teeth nicely, like dice in a cup"), Heathcliff kills no one. His one violent act, cutting off the hand...
Except, of course, that there never was a real Heathcliff. The power of great fic tion makes such facts unimportant, and both L'Estrange and Caine have paid trib ute to that power. The trouble is that both writers hint of further tributes to come. Pinnacle does more than hint; it promises "additional volumes chronicling the lives and loves of the descendants of Heathcliff and Catherine." The prospect of some nine generations of Heathcliffs yet to come is horrifying, and not in a way Emily Brontë would admire. A Heathcliff in the factory, another in the trenches...