Emily Bronte shows an unerring psychology in her handling of the relations between Isabella and Catherine.  It is Isabella’s morbid passion for Heathcliff that wakes the devil in Catherine.  Isabella is a sentimentalist, and she is convinced that Heathcliff would love her if Catherine would “let him”.  She refuses to believe that Heathcliff is what he is.  But Catherine, who is Heathcliff, can afford to accuse him. “‘Nelly,’” she says, “’help me to convince her of her madness.  Tell her what Heathcliff is....  He’s not a rough diamond—­a pearl-containing oyster of a rustic; he’s a fierce, pitiless, wolfish man.’” But Isabella will not believe it. “‘Mr. Heathcliff is not a fiend,’” she says; “’he has an honourable soul, and a true one, or how could he remember her?’” It is the same insight that made George Meredith represent Juliana, the sentimental passionist, as declaring her belief in Evan Harrington’s innocence while Rose Jocelyn, whose love is more spiritual and therefore more profoundly loyal, doubts.  Emily Bronte, like George Meredith, saw a sensualist in every sentimentalist; and Isabella Linton was a little animal under her silken skin.  She is ready to go to her end quand meme, whatever Heathcliff is, but she tricks herself into believing that he is what he is not, that her sensualism may justify itself to her refinement.  That is partly why Heathcliff, who is no sensualist, hates and loathes Isabella and her body.

But there are moments when he also hates the body of Catherine that betrayed her.  Emily Bronte is unswerving in her drawing of Heathcliff.  It is of a piece with his strangeness, his unexpectedness, that he does not hate Edgar Linton with anything like the same intensity of hatred that he has for Isabella.  And it is of a piece with his absolute fiery cleanness that never for a moment does he think of taking the lover’s obvious revenge.  For it is not, I imagine, that Emily Bronte deliberately shirked the issue, or deliberately rejected it; it is that that issue never entered her head.  Nor do I see here, in his abandonment of the obvious, any proof of the childlikeness and innocence of Emily, however childlike and innocent she may have been.  I see only a tremendous artistic uprightness, the rejection, conscious or unconscious, of an unfitting because extraneous element.  Anne, who was ten times more childlike and innocent than Emily, tackles this peculiar obviousness unashamed, because she needed it.  And because she did not need it, Emily let it go.

The evil wrought by Heathcliff, like the passion that inspired and tortured him, is an unearthly thing.  Charlotte showed insight when she said in her preface to Wuthering Heights:  “Heathcliff betrays one solitary human feeling, and that is not his love for Catherine; which is a sentiment fierce and inhuman ... the single link that connects Heathcliff with humanity is his rudely confessed regard for Hareton Earnshaw—­the young man whom he has ruined;