Heathcliff is not how you remember him from the movie

For those who, probably from the movie version of "Wuthering Heights" (it's Olivier playing Heathcliff, a David Lean production I think?) imagine him as a dashing, romantic figure embroiled in a tragic and ill-fated love affair with Catherine - please read the book. It's much more evil and stark than you - than I - had remembered. In fact, though we feel sorrow for Heathcliff because of his isolation and mistreatment during his youth, there is nothing worthy or noble about the adult Heathcliff. He's a thoroughly evil character - a very sick man, obsessed and dangerous. In the first half of the book we see his horrendous and unjustified verbal attacks on the hapless Edgar Linton and his relentless cruelty to his wife, Isabella - and in the 2nd half of the book his behavior is worse, more reprehensible, as he insists on raising his estranged son upon Isabella's death. When the frail and sheltered young boy enters the WH household, Heathcliff is just horrible to him, tormenting the poor kid and humiliating him. H confesses to the ever-present servant, Nelly, that he hopes to make a match between Linton and his cousin, Cathy Linton - though H's real motives are of course dark and obscure. He's in some way trying to play out in the next generation the great and unconsummated (we assume) love between him and Catherine - but why and to what perverse end? Perhaps marriage among close family members was not as unusual in 19th-century rural England - but it's obvious that the two are terribly mismatched and that Linton is not likely to survive even to full adulthood. Bronte frequently has her characters describe Heathcliff as a satanic and monstrous, and Wuthering Heights itself as a hellish place - and I'd have to agree.