At the moment when Heathcliff crows over him with ‘we’ll see if one tree won't grow as crooked as another, with the same wind to twist it!’ (Brontë 186), Hareton in Wuthering Heights might stand for all orphans in literature. With necessarily shallow or severed roots, the orphan is peculiarly exposed to the winds of change. Adapting to changing fashions and patterns in fictional narrative has always been the lot of the orphan. In the 1870s, those fashions and patterns were of course not quite as they had been in the 1840s, when Wuthering Heights was written. The rise of sensation fiction was one significant new addition to the literary landscape; and a growing interest in heredity, soon to be explored by Zola and Ibsen, was another. Novels were becoming increasingly attuned to the rhythms of ‘Retrograde Investigation’, which had been one of the chapter titles in M. E. Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1861–2), and increasingly inclined to reason upward from the child to the parent. The energies of the detective story and the mystery thriller were therefore very often directed towards families harbouring skeletons in their cupboards and contending with a tainted inheritance, focused particularly on the figure of the father.

The Canadian writer and scholar James De Mille (1833?–80) soon sensed the way the wind was blowing, and used it to fill the sails of his 1874 novel The Living Link. The story opens in Cumberland with the heroine, Edith Dalton, who at the age of eighteen has already lost her mother, receiving reports of her father's death far away in Van Diemen's Land; so the pain of a fresh bereavement is added to the ‘inherited infamy’ (De Mille 158) of being the daughter of a man sentenced to transportation for life. Edith resolves to do all that she can to erase this ‘stain of infamy’ (45) and ‘vindicate her father's memory’ (18). Eventually it is shown that Frederick Dalton was neither a murderer nor a forger (but suffered for the misdeeds of another), and nor is he dead. He escaped and has hidden behind a disguise which he will not cast off, in a grand reunion with Edith, until his name is cleared. ‘It was the one sweet hope of my life to redeem my name from its foul stain’, he says, ‘and then declare myself.