Wuthering Heights - Softcover

Bronte, Emily

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0143123106 ISBN 13: 9780143123101

Publisher: Penguin Group USA, 2012

Synopsis

Now a major motion picture from Academy Award winning director Andrea Arnold

Heathcliff, an orphan, is raised by Mr. Earnshaw as one of his own children. Hindley, Mr. Earnshaw's son, despises him, but his sister, wild Cathy, becomes Heathcliff's constant companion, and he falls violently in love with her. When Cathy will not marry Heathcliff, his terrible vengeance ruins them all and carries over to a second generation - but still their love will not die (Movie Tie-in Edition, Penguin Books).

About this title

About the Author

Emily Jane Brontė was the most solitary member of a unique, tightly-knit, English provincial family. Born 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 Reverend Patrick Brontė. All five were poets and writers; all but Branwell would publish at least one book.

Fantasy was the Brontė children’s one relief from the rigors of religion and the bleakness of life in an impoverished region. They invented a series of imaginary kingdoms and constructed a whole library of journals, stories, poems, and plays around their inhabitants. Emily’s special province was a kingdom she called Gondal, whose romantic heroes and exiles owed much to the poems of Byron.

Brief stays at several boarding schools were the sum of her experiences outside Haworth until 1842, when she entered a school in Brussels with her sister Charlotte. After a year of study and teaching there, they felt qualified to announce the opening of a school in their own home, but could not attract a single pupil.

In 1845 Charlotte Brontė came across a manuscript volume of her sister’s poems. She knew at once, she later wrote, that they were “not at all like poetry women generally write…they had a peculiar music–wild, melancholy, and elevating.” At her sister’s urging, Emily’s poems, along with Anne’s and Charlotte’s, were published pseudonymously in 1846. An almost complete silence greeted this volume, but the three sisters, buoyed by the fact of publication, immediately began to write novels. Emily’s effort wasWuthering Heights; appearing in 1847 it was treated at first as a lesser work by Charlotte, whoseJane Eyre had already been published to great acclaim. Emily Brontė’s name did not emerge from behind her pseudonym of Ellis Bell until the second edition of her novel appeared in 1850.

In the meantime, tragedy had struck the Brontė family. In September of 1848 Branwell had succumbed to a life of dissipation. By December, after a brief illness, Emily too was dead; her sister Anne would die the next year.Wuthering Heights, Emily’s only novel, was just beginning to be understood as the wild and singular work of genius that it is. “Stronger than a man,” wrote Charlotte, “Simpler than a child, her nature stood alone.”

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin Group USA
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0143123106
• ISBN 13: 9780143123101
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 344