Editorial Reviews:
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"My greatest thought in living is Heathcliff. If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be... Nelly, I am Heathcliff! He's always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure... but as my own being." Wuthering Heights is the only novel of Emily Bronte, who died a year after its publication, at the age of thirty. A brooding Yorkshire tale of a love that is stronger than death, it is also a fierce vision of metaphysical passion, in which heaven and hell, nature and society, are powerfully juxtaposed. Unique, mystical, with a timeless appeal, it has become a classic of English literature.
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Emily Bronte's only novel appeared to mixed reviews in 1847, a year before her death at the age of thirty. In the relationship of Cathy and Heathcliff, and in the wild, bleak Yorkshire Moors of its setting, Wuthering Heights creates a world of its own, conceived with a disregard for convention, an instinct for poetry and for the dark depths of human psychology that make it one of the greatest novels of passion ever written.
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Customer Reviews: Read 493 more reviews...
 I can see why we call this a "classic" August 22, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Anyone who is a frequent reader of this blog knows of my aversion to classics. I don't typically enjoy them, I always have to force myself to finish them, and I usually just end up giving up before I finish altogether. This book started out similar - it took me a really long time to get invested in the story and characters, I read it very slowly, and I was pretty sure I was going to hate it by page 50. Fortunately for me, though, I ended up enjoying the story when I (sadly) forced myself to continue on. (Thanks, Classics Challenge, for that little push!) I am SO proud of myself for getting through this and actually feeling like I somewhat enjoyed the book. Someone described this book to me as almost like a soap opera (can't remember who...), and that individual is completely right. There is so much drama in here... it's crazy. I definitely felt attached to the characters, even with all their unpredictable drama, and I'm glad that I finished the book and got to appreciate it. I can't really say that this is one of my favorites, but it is a pretty decent book, and I can see why it is dubbed a "classic".
 very intense July 29, 2008
The outdated writing style takes a little getting used to, but once you do, it's good. It's incredible to me how the author, with her unusually limited experience of the outside world, who probably never had a boyfriend or lover in her life and lived a secluded life in a remote part of Yorkshire with her sisters and died a virgin, could have created such an incredibly realistic and well-drawn character like Heathcliffe. I love the fact that he's flawed and I love the chemistry between him and Jenny. It's just amazing to me that so much passion could lurk in the heart of such an isolated and inexperienced soul as Emily Bronte. I don't suppose she and Charlotte got any real romance or sex as governesses. Emily's poems are full of originality and vision, but it is her novel that's a true masterpiece.
Love doesn't always make us happy. July 2, 2008
Told in alternating flashbacks from the perspectives of two narrators, Wuthering Heights is the gothic love story of Catherine and Heathcliff. Their doomed love has tragic repercussions for them and both of their families.
I absolutely loved this when I first read it as a teenager. It's like a creepy soap opera.
 Tedious and unengaging June 18, 2008
2 out of 5 found this review helpful
I don't know what people see in this book. I found it irritating from the start -- all the characters are thoroughly unlikeable. After slogging my way through a quarter of the book, I found I still couldn't care less what happened to these people, and in fact I rather hoped they might all be swept away in a flood.
The writing is also painfully verbose and florid. I would be willing to cope with this if the story was engaging, but as it is, it's just another reason to put the book down and never pick it up again.
it's a pity... but it doesn't measure up June 16, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Of course, I'm not referring to one of the best novels (I don't say "best-loved" novels, because it's not a lovable reading, but an all-important, soul-searching and unforgettable one). As the noted critic A. C. Swinburne said in 1883: "It may be true that not many will ever take it to their hearts: it is certain that those who do like it will like nothing very much better in the whole world of poetry or prose".
So it has been for more than a century. Nobody should miss this strangest and strongest of English novels, so hauntingly beautiful and intensely poetical in its dark and eerie otherness. By the way, don't miss Emily Bronte's poems, or a good selection of them.
The issue now, is this PARTICULAR paperback edition (Wordsworth Classics, 2000). What do we get and what not, how does it compare to the other editions in the marketplace.
To begim with, it's ONE OF THE THINNEST EDITIONS EVER, light on your pocket and cheap as airborne luggage (6/8 inch vs., say, one full inch for Penguin Classics edition). The mass-market paperback, is as bad as you fear, and then some... for its paper quality and binding. A bit surprisingly, printing quality is good enough. The Introduction (18 pp) by John S. Whitley is not bad, perhaps one bit askew for the intended readership (I don't feel myself at ease with those Freudian interpretations). The Bibliography is good and so is the annotation at the end of the book, three pages in small type that aren't user-friendly, specially in the handling of the dialect tirades.
So, it looks like a good edition, were it not for the outrageous material production; but then, Penguin's and Oxford's aren't so much better as paper quality and binding go, although their type is easier on the eyes and the printing quality a little better. And, mind, when I speak of bad quality paper, it's a matter of Penguin browned pages in only five years, and Oxford's little better behaving of slightlier browned pages in ten years. Wordsworth Classics pages haven't got brown so far but they sure will do (when you make paper out of whole timber logs, it always happens).
The worst thing, by far, is the text itself. It's a careful and accurate 1850-type text, that follows that of the by then very distinguished Haworth Edition (1900), the same text used by Barnes&Noble Classics noteworthy hardcover edition. Of course, there are texts far worse than that, namely Modern Library, Chatham River and
Time-Warner ones, not to mention Gutenberg Project's most corrupted electronic text.
As you probably know, the 1850 text was edited, or more precisely, in all good will tampered-with, by Charlotte Bronte (who didn't like her sister's novel at all). The changes in the text from the 1847 edition were pervasive, and detrimental: there were some hundred of small stylistical or grammatical "improvements", now as useless as then; a toned-down, sweetened version of York dialect paragraphs that looks decidedly funny and almost as hard to understand; the punctuation was brought in line with Victorian practice (which isn't ours, anyway): professional, light and discrete, syntactical in concept, instead of Emily's rather inconsistent usage, rethorical in concept, as 18th century's prose and specially poetry had been. Even WORSE was the urgent need to save printing space at all costs, which resulted in the disparition of more than 600 paragraph beginnings (I mean just the paragraphing, not the paragraph contents!). Overall, it makes for a worse and distorted reading experience. Many of us (I don't know HOW many) think 1850 is a no-go textform, and would like to see it no more in the intricate textual history of this work.
TO SUMMARIZE: I recommend strongly NOT to buy this edition, in spite of its real merits. And then what?
If durability is not a must and budget is tight, go for either Penguin's Classics (Pauline Nestor) or Oxford's World Classics (Patsy Stoneman).
If durability is a must, and budget is not so tight, then go for one of the best context-oriented, "study" editions: Broadview Press (Beth Newman),
Longman Cultural (Alison Booth) or Norton Critical (Fourth Edition) (Dunn).
If what you are after is a nice hardcover edition, the options are greatly reduced:
you may try Barnes&Noble, with the selfsame ignoble text as Wordsworth Edition, or go for a good copy of the 1978 Franklin Mint edition, the one with the Alan Reingold lithographs, with a very good 1847 text and no Introduction or annotation other than Charlotte Bronte Preface (NOT to be read BEFORE the novel) and full and right glosses as footnotes for the dialectal tirades (the first edition to do so, as far as I know).
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