Wuthering Heights

Bronte wrote Wuthering Heights very much under the literary shadow of her sister Charlotte, who, well established as a popular author, felt obliged to revise and preface a second edition of the book which, she feared, readers would find in a great measure unintelligible, and, where intelligible, repulsive. The novel was far from the expected nineteenth century concern for Jane Austen's polite ironic teacup or the appalling, but familiar, slums of Dickens. Time and taste, however, make their necessary selections, and today Wuthering Heights simply must stand with the best of romance and tragedy, an elemental tale at once daemonic and charming, again intensely fresh with the fury of both man's joy and his dark, demanding fate. The text of this edition of Wuthering Heights is identical with that of Bronte's original version of 1847.