Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights” is sung by a ghost. The song takes one scene from the third chapter of Emily Brontë’s novel, a dead girl at a bedroom window begging to be let in, and tells it from the girl’s side of the glass. That is most of the Kate Bush Wuthering Heights meaning in a sentence: she ignored the plot, the revenge and the second generation, and kept the image that the whole book circles back to.
How a teenager wrote it
Bush wrote the song at eighteen, in a few hours late at night on 5 March 1977, according to MusicRadar’s account of the recording. The trigger was television, not the book. She had caught the last few minutes of a 1967 BBC adaptation, and told the BBC programme Ask Aspel in 1978 that what stayed with her was a hand coming through a window, with broken glass and blood.
She worked at an upright piano in her flat in south London. In a 1979 letter to her fan club, quoted in the same piece, she remembered a full moon outside and the curtains open, and looking up at it whenever she needed an idea. The Guardian notes that the old adaptation sent her to the novel itself, and that she found out she and Brontë shared a birthday. Both were born on 30 July, uDiscover Music records, Brontë in 1818 and Bush 140 years later.
The track was recorded in July 1977 at George Martin’s AIR Studios in London, produced by Andrew Powell, during the sessions for her debut album The Kick Inside (MusicRadar). Powell later recalled that the song arrived so complete that the orchestral parts were already implied in what she played him on the piano.
The release and the chart record
EMI did not want it as the first single. The label preferred “James and the Cold Gun”, and Bush, still a teenager, pushed for “Wuthering Heights” instead (Guardian). It came out on 20 January 1978.
By March it was No 1 in the UK, knocking Abba’s “Take a Chance on Me” off the top and staying there for four weeks. The Official Charts Company counts it as the first UK No 1 by a female artist with a song she wrote herself. Bush was nineteen by then. It is still her only UK chart-topping single; the nearest she has come since is No 3, with “Running Up That Hill” in 1985. MusicRadar adds that it also reached No 1 in Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Australia and New Zealand.
She made two videos for it and performed it on Top of the Pops five times in 1978, which is where the floaty dress, the wide eyes and the dance that people still copy all come from (Guardian).
| Fact | Detail | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Written | Night of 5 March 1977, when Bush was 18 | MusicRadar |
| Recorded | July 1977, AIR Studios, London; producer Andrew Powell | MusicRadar |
| Released | 20 January 1978, debut single | MusicRadar |
| UK peak | No 1 for four weeks, March 1978 | Official Charts |
| Record set | First UK No 1 by a woman with a self-written song | Official Charts |
| Novel | Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë, 1847 | MusicRadar; Gutenberg #768 |
The scene the song comes from
The window scene belongs to Lockwood, the novel’s first narrator, a southern gentleman who has rented Thrushcross Grange and is stranded overnight at Wuthering Heights by snow. He sleeps in an old oak-panelled bed in a chamber the master never willingly lets anyone use, dreams, and is woken by a fir branch tapping the glass. He breaks the pane to stop it.
my fingers closed on the fingers of a little, ice-cold hand! The intense horror of nightmare came over me: I tried to draw back my arm, but the hand clung to it, and a most melancholy voice sobbed, “Let me in—let me in!”
Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847), chapter 3
The voice gives its name and its excuse:
“Catherine Linton,” it replied, shiveringly (why did I think of Linton? I had read Earnshaw twenty times for Linton)—”I’m come home: I’d lost my way on the moor!”
Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, chapter 3
Two things in this passage go straight into the song: the cold hand, and the claim of having come home after losing the way on the moor. The name matters too. The ghost calls herself Linton, her married name, and Lockwood only knows it because he has spent the evening reading the names scratched into the window ledge. Bush’s ghost goes by the girlhood name, Cathy, the one Heathcliff uses.
Then comes the line that makes the scene a horror story and not a ghost story:
Terror made me cruel; and, finding it useless to attempt shaking the creature off, I pulled its wrist on to the broken pane, and rubbed it to and fro till the blood ran down and soaked the bedclothes
Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, chapter 3
This is almost certainly the blood and glass Bush saw on television. The song removes it entirely. In her version nobody hurts the ghost, and the only cruelty is the waiting.
“It is twenty years,” mourned the voice: “twenty years. I’ve been a waif for twenty years!”
Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, chapter 3
Twenty years is the gap between Catherine’s death and Lockwood’s visit, and it is the emotional engine of the song: the ghost has been out on the hills for a very long time, and she is cold.
What the song keeps from the rest of the novel
Brontë also writes the other side of the window. Heathcliff hears Lockwood yell, sends him out of the room, and does something Lockwood finds embarrassing to watch:
He got on to the bed, and wrenched open the lattice, bursting, as he pulled at it, into an uncontrollable passion of tears. “Come in! come in!” he sobbed. “Cathy, do come. Oh, do—once more!
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Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, chapter 3
The song’s tragedy is that these two moments never meet. The ghost begs at one window; the man who wants her opens it, and nothing comes in but snow. Bush gives us only the first half, which is why the song feels unresolved however many times the chorus comes round.
The idea of the moor as the place Catherine belongs comes from her own mouth, years earlier in the story, when she tells Nelly Dean about a dream:
heaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy.
Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, chapter 9
The same conversation contains the declaration most readers remember:
Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same; and Linton’s is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire.
Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, chapter 9
Later, ill and half delirious at Thrushcross Grange, Catherine asks for the window again, and the line could stand as a summary of the song’s narrator:
I wish I were a girl again, half savage and hardy, and free; and laughing at injuries, not maddening under them!
Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, chapter 12
And after her death Heathcliff makes the request that the ghost scene answers:
you said I killed you—haunt me, then!
Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, chapter 16
| In the song | Where it comes from | Chapter |
|---|---|---|
| A ghost at the window asking to be let in | Lockwood’s dream | 3 |
| Lost on the moor, coming home | The ghost’s own words to Lockwood | 3 |
| The cold | “a little, ice-cold hand” | 3 |
| The moor as her real home | Catherine’s dream of being flung out of heaven | 9 |
| The haunting as something Heathcliff wanted | “haunt me, then!” | 16 |
What the song leaves out
Almost everything, and that is a strength. There is no Lockwood, so the person at the window is never a stranger who wounds her. There is no Nelly Dean, the housekeeper who tells most of the novel and whose judgements colour it. There is no Hindley, no Isabella, and no second half: the novel spends its later chapters on the next generation, Catherine’s daughter Cathy and Hindley’s son Hareton, and ends with something like peace. The song stays at the window.
It also leaves out Heathcliff’s cruelty. The novel’s Heathcliff is a man who hangs his wife’s dog and schemes to take two estates, and Brontë does not soften him. Heard from inside the song, he is only the person on the other side of the glass. A ghost’s-eye view makes him the loved one, which is the one thing the novel never lets you settle on.
The novel’s own last sentence, spoken by Lockwood at the three graves on the edge of the moor, is a calmer answer to the song than anything in it:
I lingered round them, under that benign sky: watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.
Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, chapter 34
Lockwood is wrong, of course, and the village boy who has just told him he saw Heathcliff and a woman walking on the moor knows it. Bush sides with the boy.
A second tribute, forty years on
In 2018, the bicentenary of Emily Brontë’s birth and the fortieth anniversary of the single, Bradford Literature Festival commissioned four writers to compose texts carved into stones in the landscape between the Brontës’ birthplace at Thornton and the parsonage at Haworth. Carol Ann Duffy wrote for Charlotte, Jackie Kay for Anne, Jeanette Winterson for the family’s legacy, and Kate Bush for Emily (Bradford Literature Festival; Guardian). In a statement quoted by the Guardian, Bush called the commission an honour and a chance to thank Brontë, whose single novel she described as an extraordinary work of art.
The route between the four stones is about eight miles, roughly the walk the sisters themselves are thought to have taken. Anyone who wants to follow the song back to its source can do it on foot, or start with chapter 3 of the free Gutenberg edition. For more songs built on books, see songs that quote literature and albums named after books; for more of the novel’s strange moments, try the strangest sentences in classic literature and book quotes about solitude.
Sources
- Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, Project Gutenberg eBook #768: gutenberg.org/ebooks/768 (plain text: pg768.txt)
- MusicRadar, Neil Crossley, feature on the making of “Wuthering Heights”, 19 February 2025: musicradar.com
- The Guardian, Rebecca Nicholson, “The 100 greatest UK No 1s: No 14, Kate Bush – Wuthering Heights”, 19 May 2020: theguardian.com
- Official Charts Company, Rob Copsey, “Official Charts Flashback 1978”, 8 March 2018: officialcharts.com
- uDiscover Music, Tim Peacock, “Kate Bush Pays Tribute To Emily Brontë 40 Years On”, 26 April 2018: udiscovermusic.com
- The Guardian, “Kate Bush makes second tribute to Emily Brontë with art installation”, 26 April 2018: theguardian.com
- Bradford Literature Festival, Brontë Stones: bradfordlitfest.co.uk