‘Wuthering Heights’ explained: Was Kate Bush inspired by the book?
“A most melancholy voice sobbed, ‘Let me in—let me in!” Emily Brontë wrote in Wuthering Heights. In the scene, the ghost of a young woman appears at the window, passionately declaring, “‘I’m come home: I’d lost my way on the moor!’” It’s the ghost of Cathy Earnshaw, a lost true love, knocking on the window of Heathcliff, who could never have her beloved, turning evil after her passing. It was a groundbreaking gothic love story written in 1847, and then written again, as a pop song, by Kate Bush in 1978.
Is ‘Wuthering Heights’ the song inspired by Wuthering Heights, the book? The really short and simple answer is yes, it is. As Bush sings in her grand chorus, “Heathcliff, it’s me, Cathy, I’ve come home”, she’s paraphrasing the ghostly scene in her lyrics and also in her movements, as the infamous dance in the music video sees her miming the ghost knocking on the window.
But it’s not an exact match, and there’s a reason for it. It’s not like Bush is recounting these scenes line by line. Cathy, in the book, never says, “Heathcliff, it’s me” when she returns as a spirit. It has personally forever bugged me that Bush didn’t commit to the Victorian lexicon and sing “I’m come home”, rather than altering it to “I’ve”. However, the song, from start to finish, is inspired by the novel as Bush plucks moments from throughout the book and charges the song with the complex, dark and passionate love of the two gothic protagonists.
The “Heathcliff, it’s me” feels like a nod towards one of the book’s most beautiful lines. “I am Heathcliff,” Cathy declares in an impassioned speech on love. She says, “My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff’s miseries, and I watched and felt each from the beginning: my great thought in living is himself. If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger: I should not seem a part of it.” It’s a monologue so full of dark, twisted devotion that one page was likely enough to provide enough fuel for the whole ballad.
But the song doesn’t just stay with Cathy. The perspective seems to bounce between the two lovers. “How could you leave me / When I needed to possess you?” Bush sings at one point, taking on Heathcliff’s persona. But, elsewhere, she is the lost and lonely spirit of Cathy, singing, “It gets dark, it gets lonely / On the other side from you”.
Overwhelmingly, it was the whole tale that moved Bush to write a song, giving her her first UK hit and making her the first woman to have a number one with a fully self-written song; a fact that beautifully connects her to Brontë’s own history-making legacy as a woman taking up space in the male-dominated world of gothic literature.
Did Kate Bush read ‘Wuthering Heights’?
At first, when Bush was first moved to write the track, she had yet to actually read the novel. Her first spark of inspiration came from an adaptation of the story, which prompted her to dig deeper into the classic tale and channel it into her own work.
“Well, I hadn’t read the book; that wasn’t what inspired it. It was a television series they had years ago,” she admitted to the BBC. That first interaction with the tale came years before she sat down to write it, adding that the imagery from the TV adaptation “was just hanging around for years” as it was so striking, “so I read the book in order to get the research right”.
