Wuthering Heights

Book Synopsis: A new, beautifully laid-out edition of Emily Brontë's 1847 classic, Wuthering Heights. Set in the west Yorkshire moors, Wuthering Heights is the story of two gentry families -- the Earnshaws and the Lintons -- and their turbulent relationships with Earnshaw's adopted son, Heathcliff. Now considered to be a timeless classic, it was a polarizing and controversial work in its own day, with its frank depictions of mental and physical cruelty and ahead-of-its-time challenges to Victorian conventions and mores. Emily Brontë's only published novel, it has established her as one of the most significant and most beloved novelists of the nineteenth century, and Wuthering Heights is often listed among the greatest novels of all time by critics and readers alike. It has been the subject of countless highly successful TV and movie adaptations. As Virginia Woolf wrote about Wuthering Heights: "Wuthering Heights is a more difficult book to understand than Jane Eyre, because Emily was a greater poet than Charlotte. ... She looked out upon a world cleft into gigantic disorder and felt within her the power to unite it in a book. That gigantic ambition is to be felt throughout the novel ... It is this suggestion of power underlying the apparitions of human nature and lifting them up into the presence of greatness that gives the book its huge stature among other novels."

Emily Brontë (1818-1848) was an English novelist and poet, best known for her lone published novel Wuthering Heights, which is considered to be one of the greatest classics of English literature. Born into the Brontë family, Emily was the second youngest of the four sibling who reached adulthood and first reached literary prominence publishing a collection of poetry alongside the other Brontë Sisters using the pseudonym Ellis Bell in 1846. This was followed by the publication of Wuthering Heights in 1847, which immediately sparked controversy. Published under her male pseudonym, critics were convinced it indeed was written by a man, as the powerful imagery and unbridled and savage emotions and passions of the characters initially appalled reviewers. Shortly after the death of her brother Branwell in late 1848, Emily herself fell ill and died in December of that year, at the age of 30. Tragically she died before knowing the acclaim Wuthering Heights would eventually receive, now being considered one of the finest literary masterpieces of nineteenth century England.