Frances Earnshaw

Frances is Mr. Hindley Earnshaw Catherine Earnshaw's young bride, brought to Wuthering Heights after their marriage in the south, her origins and family uncertain but apparently lacking wealth or distinguished name. Though gentle in nature and pleased by the domestic comforts of the old farmhouse, Frances possesses a delicate, consumptive constitution and a nervous, hysterical sensibility. She bears Mr. Hindley Earnshaw a son, Hareton Earnshaw, in a difficult birth that weakens her further; her physician recognizes the symptoms of consumption—quick breathing, susceptibility to noise, persistent cough—though she and her devoted husband desperately deny the diagnosis. Gay-hearted and determined to recover, she deceives herself and her grieving husband with false hope even as her body fails. Within weeks of her son's birth, she dies, leaving her infant Hareton Earnshaw motherless and her husband Mr. Hindley Earnshaw devastated, unable to bear the loss and spiraling into the reckless dissipation that compounds the misery of Wuthering Heights for a generation to come.