ABSTRACT
Cathy Earnshaw is the most authoritative voice within the text. She is the author of the "hidden" or "ghost-text" of Wuthering Heights, even though she speaks from beyond the grave–an extraordinary, extreme example of a woman's voice moving from the private to the public sphere, for the grave is "a fine and private place." Charlotte's "Biographical Notice" to the second edition of Wuthering Heights, dated September 19, 1850, over a year after Emily's death on May 28, 1849, shows that Emily Bronte's complexity could scarcely be comprehended even within her own close-knit family. Wuthering Heights, as title and as house, could be compared to Dickens's Bleak House for its realistic architectural detail and its symbolic resonances. Lockwood's snobbishness about rustics clearly demonstrates that he would never be the man for her: "Living among clowns and misanthropes, she probably cannot appreciate a better class of people, when she meets them".
