Wuthering Heights

Emily Bronte’s Tale of all-consuming love is an omnipotent force to be reckoned with. It’s an intoxicating read—Marie ClaireA beautiful gift, and perfect gems for bookworms.—So DarlingA dark and passionate tale of tortured but enduring love… Mesmerising—GuardianThis 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 MosseWhen 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 WintersonOnly Emily Brontë exposes her imagination to the dark spirit—V. S. PritchettHers…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 WoolfCommonly 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 WatersLambasted when it came out as irredeemably perverse and, I quote, as practically “French”‘—A. L. KennedyThe 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

Emily Bronte was born on 30 July 1818. Her father was curate of Haworth, Yorkshire, and her mother died when she was five years old, leaving five daughters and one son. In 1824 Charlotte, Maria, Elizabeth and Emily were sent to Cowan Bridge, a school for clergymen’s daughters, where Maria and Elizabeth both caught tuberculosis and died. The children were taught at home from this point on and together they created vivid fantasy worlds which they explored by writing stories. Emily worked briefly as a teacher in 1938 but soon returned home. In 1846, Emily’s poems were published alongside those of her sisters, Charlotte and Anne, in Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. The following year Wuthering Heights was published. Emily Bronte died of consumption on 19 December 1848.

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