Heathcliff is a fictional character in the novel Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. Owing to the novel's enduring fame and popularity, he is often regarded as an archetype of the tortured Romantic hero whose all-consuming passions destroy both himself and those around him.

Legend has stereotyped him somewhat into a romantic hero, and he is generally known more for his love for Catherine Earnshaw than his final years of vengeance in the second half of the novel, in which he grows into a bitter, haunted man (although there are also a number of incidents in Heathcliff's early life that show that he was an angry and sometimes malicious individual from the beginning; again, these tend to be glossed over in the popular imagination). His complicated, mesmerising and altogether bizarre nature makes him a rare character, with components of both the hero and villain.