Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are…

The line comes in chapter 9 of Wuthering Heights. One evening at the Heights, Catherine Earnshaw tells the servant Nelly Dean that she has accepted Edgar Linton’s proposal, yet feels in her heart that she is wrong. She recounts a dream: in heaven she was so miserable that the angels flung her out onto the heath, where she woke sobbing for joy. She has “no more business to marry Edgar Linton” than to be in heaven, but it would “degrade” her to marry Heathcliff now. Then comes her confession: he is “more myself than I am”. Linton’s soul, she adds, is as different from theirs “as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire.”

But Heathcliff, sitting unseen behind the settle, has listened only until the word “degrade”, and slips out without hearing the rest. He vanishes that very night, and the tragedy begins.

Emily Brontë published the novel in 1847 under the name Ellis Bell, and died the next year, aged thirty.

Wuthering Heights, Volume I, chapter 9 (Catherine), 1847

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