The gloomy opening chapters of Wuthering Heights

Haven't read it since college (though feels as if I've read it ten times, as it's such a cultural reference point), and had completely forgotten the strange opening chapters of Emily Bronte's "Wuthering Heights": Lockwood arriving as a tenant and paying a courtesy visit to his landlord, Heathcliffe, in the eponymous WH, and being treated incivilly, as if he's an intruder - which, in fact, he is. The Heathcliffe-Earnshawe family is obviously strange and perverse, and Lockwood can't quite figure out why. By novelist's prestidigitation, Lockwood ends up spending the night at WH, and the one kindly servant puts him in the room that is: Always closed off for some unknown reason! And then, he just happens to stumble on a bunch of diaries and papers fortuitously placed beside his bed, and begins reading by lamplight - and that of course opens us up to the story of Heathcliffe as a young man and his relationship with Catherine. The mood of the story is as dark and mysterious as I remember - the houses gloomy and foreboding (Lockwood oddly remarks, in the 2nd sentence of the novel I think, that this is such beautiful countryside - kind of a funny sentence, in the context - and we're not sure why Lockwood favors such isolation; he probably has his own story in there somewhere), the weather always tumultuous and threatening - a real example of the Romantic fallacy: the weather and the externals of nature seem to express the inner feelings of the characters. (Some contemporary horror writers and directors have gotten lots of mileage from reversing this fallacy: having really scary things happen in very ordinary settings, which oddly can make the events even scarier). In reading the framing chapters, as Lockwood "discovers" the story of Heathcliffe and Catherine, I couldn't help but think of Ethan Frome, and wonder how closely Wharton modeled her novel on this one: the outsider, a bit more prosperous and urbane, comes into a very isolated rural landscape and culture, has a brush with a taciturn and perhaps difficult older man, and gradually learns the man's back story, which explains his misanthropy. The huge difference is that Wharton, right from the preface to her novel, holds herself at a distance and is almost condescending toward her own characters, amazed that such "simple" people could have such complex lives (at least that's her stance - she couldn't be too amazed as she endowed them with these lives) whereas Bronte seems to be as one with her characters, an avid diarist and a denizen of the moors herself.