Wuthering Heights - a perfect end

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


If we're talking about 'best book endings' then Wuthering Heights has to be one of my favourites. I read it first when I was 14 years old, in secondary school - I still have my much-marked and annotated copy. The ending is so beautiful, a description of the quiet graveyard on the edge of the moor where all the tempestuous Greek drama of human passions and monumental errors has been acted out. All three headstones are described, one of them 'half buried in heath', one of them 'only harmonized by the turf, and moss creeping up its foot,' then one of them completely bare. Heathcliff's.

Then that lovely ironic last line as the narrator Lockwood wonders 'how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.'

Sorry to be so specific, but the juxtaposition of 'unquiet' with 'quiet' is so perfect! Need I say more?



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