Who is nelly wuthering heights

Literary Articles. Create your Fan Badge. Nelly Dean serves as the chief narrator in Wuthering Heights. A sensible, intelligent, and compassionate woman, she grew up essentially alongside Hindley and Catherine Earnshaw and is deeply involved in the story she tells.

She has strong feelings for the characters in her story, and these feelings complicate her narration. Nelly is an eyewitness-first person participant-main narrator of Wuthering Heights. He instructs the servant Joseph what to do for the day, and then asks his children what they would like him to bring home for them.

Hindley requests a fiddle and Catherine a whip. He promises Nelly he will bring her some apples and pears before he bids his family goodbye and leaves. Three days pass following Mr. Catherine would ask her mother when her father would be home, and Mrs. Earnshaw hopes he will return on the third evening; she had even placed their meal on hold. By the evening, Mr. Earnshaw is not home yet, and the children get tired of running to the gate. Earnshaw comes in. He sits down, groaning but laughing, and rants of his exhausting trip home.

Nelly is frightened, and Mrs. Earnshaw is wanting to throw the boy out of their house, as they already have children of their own to look after.

Earnshaw, still fatigued, explains how he found the boy starving and homeless on the streets of Liverpool. He tried to find its owners, but nobody knows who he was or who he belonged to. His time in Liverpool was limited, and decided to take the child back home with him. Earnshaw asks Nelly to wash the boy, dress him in clean clothes and let him sleep with the children.

Hindley and Catherine are disappointed when they learned that they did not receive the gifts their father has promised them, and they refused to share their rooms with the child. Nelly leaves him on the stairs landing, hoping he might be gone tomorrow, but he goes to Mr. Nelly was made to confess, and as punishment, Mr. Earnshaw makes her leave the house. When she returns a few days later, she discovers that they have christened the gipsy child and is named Heathcliff, after a deceased infant son.

Catherine has grown fond of him, while Hindley hates him and Nelly did, too, as well as Mrs. Heathcliff was known as a quiet, sulky child, who took his beatings by Hindley without crying and whenever Nelly pinched him, he would make it look like an accident.

Earnshaw would be enraged when he sees that Heathcliff is being mistreated, and he chose him as his favourite child over Catherine.

After Mrs. Nelly shows sympathy for Heathcliff for a while, and when the children, including Heathcliff, contracted scarlet fever, Nelly has to tend them. Heathcliff was severely ill and Nelly is constantly looking after him.

While Catherine and Hindley bothered her during their treatment, Heathcliff was quiet and never complained. Heatchliff recovers, and the doctor praises Nelly for nursing Heathcliff and the children back to health. One time, Mr. Hindley ends up giving up his horse, insulting and threatening him, and then he knocks Heathcliff under his feet just as he took the horse. Nelly is surprised to see how calmly Heathcliff took it.

He exchanges saddles and sits down on the hay to overcome the painful blow he received. Nelly thinks him vindictive at first but would later be deceived. Several years later, Mr. He becomes more irritable as he spends most of his time alone and nobody in the household bothers him.

He still adores Heathcliff and would get more angry whenever Hindley still bullies Heathcliff. His curate advises him to send his son to college and he agrees with that idea. With Hindley gone, Nelly hopes there will be some peace at home, although she is hurt at the fact of her master having to agree to the good deed. Earnshaw grows more weaker and Joseph offers him comfort. Catherine is constantly causing mischief everyday and is now more fond of Heathcliff. Nelly and the servants try to keep them separate, yet she still acts bossy to everyone else.

She would tease her ailing, irritated father, and he would scold her for her wild behaviour, even recalling she is worse than her brother. Whenever Catherine cried after being punished, Nelly tried to console her for her faults, but her mistress just laughs.

One stormy night in October, Nelly was knitting while Mr. Earnshaw sat by the fireplace, and Catherine and Heathcliff snuggled themselves with their father. Earnshaw asks Catherine if she would be a good daughter, and she kisses him and sings him to sleep. Nelly then tells her to be quiet and everyone is silent for half an hour while Joseph finishes his Bible and would say his prayers to the master before going to bed. Joseph shines his light on him and tells the children to go to bed.

Catherine wants to say goodnight to her father, but sees that Mr. Earnshaw is dead. Nelly joins Catherine and Heathcliff as they wept, until Joseph tells her to put on her cloak and go to the nearby village of Gimmerton to fetch the doctor and parson.

Nelly travels through the storm and only brings back the doctor, as the parson would come in the morning. She sees how calm they are and they talked about Heaven being a beautiful place; leaving her sobbing as she listens.

She took some delight in her new home, though Nelly finds her to be a silly woman. Nelly had to accompany her to one of the rooms instead of tending the children. Frances sat down shivering and turns hysterical. Nelly asks what is wrong with her, and that she is afraid of death. Hindley has changed into a polished gentleman during his 3-year absence and after he arrived at Wuthering Heights, he makes Joseph and Nelly move to the back kitchen as he takes control of the house.

Frances fails to bond with her sister-in-law Catherine and Hindley becomes more strict in the household as his wife becomes more irritated. Despite his hard labour, Heathcliff seeks comfort with Catherine as they would spend their time together in the fields and behave like savages. Joseph and the curate would scold him for his reckless supervision of the young couple, and they convince him to flog Heathcliff and Catherine as punishment without dinner.

Heathcliff and Catherine would run outside in the morning and stay outside all day. They would laugh at the punishments given to them by the curate and Joseph, until they forget the time they were together.

The couple then began plotting a plan of revenge, which leaves Nelly concerned of their behaviour. One Sunday night, Heathcliff and Catherine were sent away from the sitting room for being disruptive. Nelly and the others searched the house, yard and stables, but they were gone. Hindley orders all the doors to be locked and not let the couple in. After everyone went to bed, Nelly stays awake, anxious to sleep, and opens her window. She sees someone coming up the road with a glowing lantern and puts on her shawl to warn the person to prevent waking Hindley from knocking.

It was Heathcliff and Nelly is startled to see him without Catherine. Nelly wonders why he and Catherine were at the Grange. Heathcliff says he needs to change his wet clothes first and then tell her what has happened. Nelly reminds him to be careful from waking up the master. He quickly undresses as Nelly prepares to put out the candle. Heathcliff explains that he and Catherine left the wash house to seek freedom and go to Thrushcross Grange, as they decided to see how the Linton family there spends their Sunday evenings.

Heathcliff continues that he and Catherine raced from the Heights to the Grange. Catherine trails behind barefoot and Heathcliff says to Nelly she needs to find her shoes in the bog tomorrow morning.

We're going to take a moment to raise our twenty-four-ounce mug of coffee to Nelly Dean. Thanks, Nelly. Without you, there would be no Wuthering Heights. Nelly is our eyes and ears on the ground. As Lockwood figures out pretty quickly, Nelly Dean has the inside scoop on the Earnshaw-Linton melodrama.

She is trusted by the members of both houses, so she is a pretty good source for the story. But that doesn't necessarily mean that we like her. At the same time, Nelly has been excommunicated from Wuthering Heights at least two times that we know of. New York: Ferguson, Abrams et al. Open Document.

Essay Sample Check Writing Quality. In the novel of Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte brilliantly employs frame narrative in order to tell a story within a story. The character of Ellen Dean, known formally as Nelly, tells of the past and present from her first person perspective, to the visiting Mr.

She depicts the events as she recalls them that transpired during her years at the respective houses, Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange. Although Nelly is basing the characters solely on her own interpretation of them, she is a pretty reliable source, having grown up with the first generation of characters and cared for the second. She grew up on the moors and her life revolves around the Earnshaws and the Lintons, whom she serves in more ways than one.

Without her account of the events that took place on the Yorkshire moors, it would all be a mystery. In Wuthering Heights, Bronte depicts Nelly as the servant, confidant and mother figure and without her narrative the story would not be as plausible. Nelly was brought to Wuthering Heights by her mother, who was a nursemaid for Hindley Earnshaw.