Central to the story is the love between Heathcliff, an adopted [[gypsy]] boy, and his foster sister Catherine Earnshaw. Catherine's marriage to a richer, more respectable man than her true love drives Heathcliff into villainous madness, resulting in him inflicting years of psychological and physical abuse his own family and those connected with him; Heathcliff himself was subject to comparable abuse as a boy by his older foster brother Hindley. The wild, stark, forbidding, tempestuous moors make an apt setting for this bleak subject matter, and Brontë is almost cinematic ''avant la letre'' in her use of the former as a backdrop to the latter. | Central to the story is the love between Heathcliff, an adopted [[gypsy]] boy, and his foster sister Catherine Earnshaw. Catherine's marriage to a richer, more respectable man than her true love drives Heathcliff into villainous madness, resulting in him inflicting years of psychological and physical abuse his own family and those connected with him; Heathcliff himself was subject to comparable abuse as a boy by his older foster brother Hindley. The wild, stark, forbidding, tempestuous moors make an apt setting for this bleak subject matter, and Brontë is almost cinematic ''avant la letre'' in her use of the former as a backdrop to the latter. |