Wuthering Heights : Collins Classics

HarperCollins is proud to present its range of best-loved, essential classics. Is Mr. Heathcliff a man? If so, is he mad? And if not, is he a devil?

Heathcliff, an orphan, wild and unkempt, is taken in by Mr Earnshaw and raised as his son at Wuthering Heights on the bleak Yorkshire moors. He is drawn to Earnshaw's daughter Catherine, and as the pair grow up together they become bound by an intense and passionate love. But when Catherine's father dies, Heathcliff is condemned to servitude, and social disparity drives a wedge between them that will eventually become their downfall.

Poetic, grand in scope, and with complex ideas of morality, social codes, violence and illness, Wuthering Heights is one of the most unique and emotive Gothic novels, and is considered Emily Brontë's masterpiece.

About the Author

Emily Brontë was born in Thornton, Yorkshire, on July 30th 1818, to Patrick Brontë and Maria Branwell. Maria died early in Emily’s life and her father was a withdrawn, quiet man who preferred eating alone in his room to dining with his four children: Charlotte, Emily, Anne and their brother Branwell. Maria’s sister helped raise them, but she too was a solitary type. So to amuse themselves, the Brontë siblings created their own imaginary world, Angria, and wrote pages and pages of detailed notes about the kingdom and its inhabitants.

Emily Brontë is most famous for her novel Wuthering Heights published in 1847 a year before she died aged just thirty, in Haworth, Yorkshire on December 19th 1848.