Product Description

This new edition of Emily Brontë's classic 1847 novel uses the authoritative Clarendon text. Patsy Stoneman's introduction considers the bewildering variety of critical interpretation to which the novel has been subject, as well as offering some provocative new insights for the modern reader.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #405472 in Books
• Published on: 1970-04-30
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

Synopsis
Emily Bronte's classic is set on the bleak Yorkshire moors, where the drama of Catherine and Heathcliff, Heathcliff's cruel revenge against Edgar and Isabella Linton, and the promise of redemption through the next generation, is enacted.

About the Author
Patsy Stoneman is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Hull.

Customer Reviews

Probably the best novel of all time
This book is pure genius. I read it again, and again, and always find something new to admire. It is everything a book should be. It has fantastic characters, wonderful plotting, a pacy, suspenseful story which keeps you turning the pages and is so dense that it throws up new treasures after every read.
This is the only work of Emily Bronte apart from a few poems and some juvenailia, and it is my regret that we will never know if she could have surpassed this great book with her next.
The story is well known, but in brief it is the story of Heathcliff, a foundling, who is brought to the home of Catherine Earnshaw one dark and horrible night by her father who has found him on one of his business trips and decides to rescue him. Catherine and Heathcliff form an unbreakable bond which sustains them through great misfortune and on into death, and is one of the most romantic love stories of all time.
Their love however, is also destructive and terrible. It plays out against the background of the louring moors and their terrible grandeur, which reinforces the natural, brutal cruelty of their feelings for each other and everyone else. Their love is sadistic and at times horrific and the more tragedy that is heaped upon them, the more strangled and terrible their expressions of love become.
The characters of Heathcliff and Catherine are at times utterly vile and repulsive and it is a strength of Bronte's writing that despite this you still will them to have their happy ending, and can't help sympathising with them.
The narrative is fantastically complex, with narrators within narrators and stories within stories, so that Bronte is able to give us a 360 degree view of the story and make the characters completely three dimensional, showing all their humanity, good and bad.
This is the one book I would make compulsory reading for everyone, everywhere.

A genius's masterpiece
This book is probably the one every writer at the back of their minds wants to write. I know I wish I did. When I first picked it up I thought it would be the typical Victorian romance; boy was I in for a shock! After a slow start it picked up. I remember I was incredibly shocked at the power of the novel & I still am. It is THE most passionate piece of literature ever in the English language maybe because it is so accurate about human emotions but at the same time it shows that human emotions can be uncontrollable/untameable. It seems so unbelievable yet you can't romanticize about the characters especially Heathcliff. The greatest scholars have great difficult analysing this book so I'm not going to start.
Only regret is that Emily didn't live to write any more great literature.

Great, but..
I wanted to find out what all the fuss was about Wuthering Heights and so I bought this cd set to listen to in the car as I have little time to read but drive alot (they don't mix!). The story has a lot of complexity especially at the start in terms of who's related to who but the language, structure & errie feel of this book make it a clear classic. One note however, this audio version is excellently voiced & produced and I give it 5 stars for that but I did not realise it was abridged. I don't know if I am happy or upset! Now I have something to look forward to again, the bits of the story I missed. And those times I struggled with the story line, was that because of the missing parts. This edition is 3 cds, there is an 11 cd unabridged version for sale on Amazon from the same publishers. This is a great cd set but if you are serious about reading this book & judging it yourself as a classic perhaps, then I think you must hear the full version as it was written.