‘May you not rest, as long as I am living. You said I killed you – haunt me, then.’ Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
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 Bront's novel is a stunningly original and shocking exploration of obsessive passion
About the Author
Emily Bronte was the most solitary member of a unique, tightly knit, English provincial family. Bom 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 Rev. Patrick Bronte. All five were poets and writers; all but Branwell would publish at least one book. Brief stays at several boarding schools were the sum of Emily's experiences outside Haworth, until 1842, when she entered a school in Brussels with her sister Charlotte. In 1845, Charlotte Bronte came across a manuscript volume of Emily's poems and realized Emily's talent. At Charlotte's urging, Emily's poems along with Anne's and her own were published pseudonymously in 1846. Though almost complete silence greeted the volume, the three sisters began to write novels. Emily's effort was Wuthering Heights, appearing in 1847. Emily Bronte died in December of 1848, when Wuthering Heights was just beginning to be understood as the wild and singular work of genius that it is.
Industry Reviews
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 Bronte 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 Bronte exposes her imagination to the dark spirit -- V. S. Pritchett