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  • Published: 1 April 2008
  • ISBN: 9780099511595
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 368
  • RRP: $23.00

Wuthering Heights




'May you not rest, as long as I am living. You said I killed you - haunt me, then' Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

Rediscover Emily Bronte's powerful tale of love, violence and obsession.

'May you not rest, as long as I am living. You said I killed you - haunt me, then'

Wuthering Heights is the tale of two families both joined and riven by love and hate. Cathy is a beautiful and wilful young woman torn between her soft-hearted husband and Heathcliff, the passionate and resentful man who has loved her since childhood. The power of their bond creates a maelstrom of cruelty and violence which will leave one of them dead and cast a shadow over the lives of their children.

Emily Brontë's novel remains a stunningly original and shocking exploration of obsessive passion.

  • Published: 1 April 2008
  • ISBN: 9780099511595
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 368
  • RRP: $23.00

About the authors

Emily Bronte

Emily Jane Brontë was the most solitary member of a unique, tightly-knit, English provincial family. Born in 1818, she shared the parsonage of the town of Haworth, Yorkshire, with her older sister, Charlotte; her brother, Branwell; her younger sister, Anne; and her father, the Reverend Patrick Brontë. All five were poets and writers, and all but Branwell would publish at least one book. Fantasy was the Brontë children’s one relief from the rigors of religion and the bleakness of life in an impoverished region. In 1845, Charlotte Brontë came across a manuscript volume of her sister’s poems. At her sister’s urging, Emily’s poems, along with Anne’s and Charlotte’s, were published pseudonymously in 1846. An almost complete silence greeted this volume, but the three sisters, buoyed by the fact of publication, immediately began to write novels. Emily’s effort was Wuthering Heights; appearing in 1847, it was treated at first as a lesser work by Charlotte, whose Jane Eyre had already been published to great acclaim. Emily Brontë’s name did not emerge from behind her pseudonym of Ellis Bell until the second edition of her novel appeared in 1850.

Praise for Wuthering Heights

A dark and passionate tale of tortured but enduring love... Mesmerising

Guardian

This brilliantly atmospheric Yorkshire saga has only one drawback - Emily never wrote another novel. For me, it is both fantastic but also true to life because the protagonists have such believably fierce emotions

Kate Mosse

When I was 16 I read Wuthering Heights for the first time, and I read it as a kind of oracle; that life is worth nothing if it is not worth everything. Disaster does not matter, intensity does. You can dilute Wuthering Heights, as Mills & Boon and musicals have done. But if you are honest, you cannot escape its central stark premise; all or nothing. The all is not Heathcliff - that is the sentimental version. The all is what Heathcliff represents, which is life itself

Jeanette Winterson

It is as if Emily Brontë could tear up all that we know human beings by, and fill these unrecognizable transparencies with such a gust of life that they transcend reality

Virginia Woolf

Only Emily Brontë exposes her imagination to the dark spirit

V. S. Pritchett

Hers...is the rarest of all powers. She could free life from its dependence on facts...by speaking of the moor make the wind blow and the thunder roar

Virginia Woolf

Commonly thought of as 'romantic', but try rereading it without being astonished by the comfortableness with which Brontë's characters subject one another to extremes of physical and psychological violence

Sarah Waters

Lambasted when it came out as irredeemably perverse and, I quote, as practically "French"'

A. L. Kennedy

The greatest love story ever told, Heathcliff the hero being a wild, stormy, gothic fellow who will not rest until his beloved Cathy is in his arms again, even though she died some years previously. My favourite moment comes when he bribes the sexton who buried Cathy to bury him next to her, with the sides of their coffins left open, so when they're dug up 50 years hence nobody will know which bones are his, and which are hers

Patrick McGrath

A dark and passionate tale of tortured but enduring love... Mesmerising

Guardian

This brilliantly atmospheric Yorkshire saga has only one drawback - Emily never wrote another novel. For me, it is both fantastic but also true to life because the protagonists have such believably fierce emotions

Kate Mosse

When I was 16 I read Wuthering Heights for the first time, and I read it as a kind of oracle; that life is worth nothing if it is not worth everything. Disaster does not matter, intensity does. You can dilute Wuthering Heights, as Mills & Boon and musicals have done. But if you are honest, you cannot escape its central stark premise; all or nothing. The all is not Heathcliff - that is the sentimental version. The all is what Heathcliff represents, which is life itself

Jeanette Winterson

It is as if Emily Brontë could tear up all that we know human beings by, and fill these unrecognizable transparencies with such a gust of life that they transcend reality

Virginia Woolf

Only Emily Brontë exposes her imagination to the dark spirit

V. S. Pritchett

Hers...is the rarest of all powers. She could free life from its dependence on facts...by speaking of the moor make the wind blow and the thunder roar

Virginia Woolf

Commonly thought of as 'romantic', but try rereading it without being astonished by the comfortableness with which Brontë's characters subject one another to extremes of physical and psychological violence

Sarah Waters

Lambasted when it came out as irredeemably perverse and, I quote, as practically "French"'

A. L. Kennedy

The greatest love story ever told, Heathcliff the hero being a wild, stormy, gothic fellow who will not rest until his beloved Cathy is in his arms again, even though she died some years previously. My favourite moment comes when he bribes the sexton who buried Cathy to bury him next to her, with the sides of their coffins left open, so when they're dug up 50 years hence nobody will know which bones are his, and which are hers

Patrick McGrath

This beautifully designed box-set of four acclaimed novels by the Bronte sisters had me engrossed in Wuthering Heights for the first tie since my school days .... Marvellous

Daily Mail