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This Top Five Classics illustrated edition of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights includes the complete, unabridged text; 12 starkly beautiful woodcut illustrations by renowned artist Clare Leighton (which were the inspiration for the sets of the classic 1939 Laurence Olivier-Merle Oberon film adaptation), as well as a helpful introduction, detailed author bio, and bibliography.
Wuthering Heights was released in 1847 in the shadow of the instantly successful Jane Eyre, published two months earlier by her older sister Charlotte. It enjoyed only mixed reviews--but the reactions were intense, foreshadowing the eventual stature the novel would claim in the pantheon of English literature, surpassing in many readers' eyes even her sister's magnum opus. Though Emily would not live to see it, Wuthering Heights would become synonymous with passionate gothic romance and tragic love, establishing Heathcliff and Catherine as the most poignantly doomed couple in fiction since Romeo and Juliet, but with even darker consequences for everyone involved.
About the author
Emily Jane Brontë (30 July 1818 - 19 December 1848) was an English novelist and poet who is best known for her only novel, Wuthering Heights, now considered a classic of English literature. Emily was the third-eldest of the four surviving Brontë siblings, between the youngest Anne and her brother Branwell. She published under the pen name Ellis Bell.
Wuthering Heights's violence and passion led the Victorian public and many early reviewers to think that it had been written by a man.According to Juliet Gardiner, "the vivid sexual passion and power of its language and imagery impressed, bewildered and appalled reviewers." Literary critic Thomas Joudrey further contextualizes this reaction: "Expecting in the wake of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre to be swept up in an earnest Bildungsroman, they were instead shocked and confounded by a tale of unchecked primal passions, replete with savage cruelty and outright barbarism." Even though the novel received mixed reviews when it first came out, and was often condemned for its portrayal of amoral passion, the book subsequently became an English literary classic. Emily Brontë never knew the extent of fame she achieved with her only novel, as she died a year after its publication, aged 30.
Although a letter from her publisher indicates that Emily had begun to write a second novel, the manuscript has never been found. Perhaps Emily or a member of her family eventually destroyed the manuscript, if it existed, when she was prevented by illness from completing it. It has also been suggested that, though less likely, the letter could have been intended for Anne Brontë, who was already writing The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, her second novel.
