Wuthering Heights (Oxford World's Classics) [Paperback]

Emily Bronte (Author), Ian Jack (Editor), Patsy Stoneman (Introduction)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 14, 1998 | Series: Oxford World's Classics

First published in 1847, Wuthering Heights 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. This edition uses the authoritative Clarendon text, and in a new introduction Patsy Stoneman considers the bewildering variety of critical interpretations to which the novel has been subject, as well as offering some provocative new insights for the modern reader.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The main drama in Bronte's novel happens in a long narrative told by an elderly housekeeper to a convalescing new tenant. This story-within-a-story setup makes it well suited for audio adaptation, as Scales takes the housekeeper's part and relates the past, while West performs as the tenant and describes the present. Scales primarily uses a folksy lower-class accent, but she also makes her voice harsh and threatening when speaking as Heathcliff, the surly man at the novel's heart. West, as the bewildered tenant, manages to sound both nervous and pretentious, but his part is fairly small, especially with this abridgment, so he mostly serves to provide transitions for the housekeeper's story. The extensive abridgment generally deletes sentences and phrases rather than entire paragraphs or sections. One drawback for the audio format is the difficulty of clarifying the novel's convoluted plot and family tree, since it's harder to search back through long CD tracks than through earlier chapters of the paperback. While a little of the depth of Bronte's writing is lost in abridgment, the novel's emotional core remains intact and wrenching, and the actors' heartfelt interpretations make it easy to imagine being curled up by a warm fire listening to an absorbing tale. In June, Penguin Audio remastered and released on CD for the first time nine other Penguin Classics: Crime and Punishment, Dracula, Frankenstein, Great Expectations, Jane Eyre, Moby Dick, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility and Tale of Two Cities.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From School Library Journal

Grade 8 Up-British actor Martin Shaw reads this shortened version of the classic Emily Bronte novel. His easily-understood accent is appropriate and helps to set the mood. Shaw reads at a very steady pace, pausing effectively for emphasis or when his character might be thinking. Usually calm and gentle, his voice can resonate with anger or other emotion when necessary. There is some differentiation in pitch to emphasize male vs. female speech, but it is not exaggerated or overdone. The abridgement retains Bronte's words linking speech or narration sometimes from one page to another. It provides students with an easier way to become familiar with the story and get a feel for her style. Teachers could use this presentation to introduce the novel or to entice students to read it on their own.
Claudia Moore, W.T. Woodson High School, Fairfax, VA
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 432 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press (May 14, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0192833545
• ISBN-13: 978-0192833549
• Product Dimensions: 7.4 x 4.9 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1,223 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #77,225 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Amazon Author Rankbeta 

(What's this?)

#56 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Classics

#56 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Classics

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

453 of 504 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Love Among The Damned February 25, 2005

By Gary F. Taylor HALL OF FAMETOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Mass Market Paperback

Published in 1847, WUTHERING HEIGHTS was not well received by the reading public, many of whom condemned it as sordid, vulgar, and unnatural--and author Emily Bronte went to her grave in 1848 believing that her only novel was a failure. It was not until 1850, when WUTHERING HEIGHTS received a second printing with an introduction by Emily's sister Charlotte, that it attracted a wide readership. And from that point the reputation of the book has never looked back. Today it is widely recognized as one of the great novels of English literature.

Even so, WUTHERING HEIGHTS continues to divide readers. It is not a pretty love story; rather, it is swirling tale of largely unlikeable people caught up in obsessive love that turns to dark madness. It is cruel, violent, dark and brooding, and many people find it extremely unpleasant. And yet--it possesses a grandeur of language and design, a sense of tremendous pity and great loss that sets it apart from virtually every other novel written.

The novel is told in the form of an extended flashback. After a visit to his strange landlord, a newcomer to the area desires to know the history of the family--which he receives from Nelly Deans, a servant who introduces us to the Earnshaw family who once resided in the house known as Wuthering Heights. It was once a cheerful place, but Old Earnshaw adopted a "Gipsy" child who he named Heathcliff. And Catherine, daughter of the house, found in him the perfect companion: wild, rude, and as proud and cruel as she. But although Catherine loves him, even recognizes him as her soulmate, she cannot lower herself to marry so far below her social station. She instead marries another, and in so doing sets in motion an obsession that will destroy them all....

WUTHERING HEIGHTS is a bit difficult to "get into;" the opening chapters are so dark in their portrait of the end result of this obsessive love that they are somewhat off-putting. But they feed into the flow of the work in a remarkable way, setting the stage for one of the most remarkable structures in all of literature, a story that circles upon itself in a series of repetitions as it plays out across two generations. Catherine and Heathcliff are equally remarkable, both vicious and cruel, and yet never able to shed their impossible love no matter how brutally one may wound the other.

As the novel coils further into alcoholism, seduction, and one of the most elaborately imagined plans of revenge it gathers into a ghostly tone: Heathcliff, driven to madness by a woman who is not there but who seems reflected in every part of his world--dragging her corpse from the grave, hearing her calling to him from the moors, escalating his brutality not for the sake of brutality but so that her memory will never fade, so that she may never leave his mind until death itself. Yes, this is madness, insanity, and there is no peace this side of the grave or even beyond.

It is a stunning novel, frightening, inexorable, unsettling, filled with unbridled passion that makes one cringe. Even if you do not like it, you should read it at least once--and those who do like it will return to it again and again.

GFT, Amazon Reviewer Read more ›

97 of 106 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars wuthering heights editions April 9, 2003

By Jordi Vilalta Lopez

Format:Paperback

Rather than delve on the contents of this strangest and strongest of English novels, so intensely poetic in its haunting darkness and otherness, I'll comment briefly on the best editions available for a good first contact:

A) Text oriented editions (that is, editions with few materials added: normally an Introduction, annotation, and perhaps Charlotte's Peface and Biographical Notice and some bibliographical indications).

1. Oxford World's Classics: authoritative text, good annotation,
excellent introduction.

2. Penguin's Classics: same as above, everything looks a little shorter but is excellent nonetheless.

3. Wordsworth Classics edition. This would be a rather fine edition as befitting this collection, if it had a good 1847 text and not the heavily tampered-with Charlotte's 1850 edition. The text itself reflects accurately that of the 1900 Haworth Edition -a careful one-. The wording changes aren't perhaps so worrying nor is the toning-down of the dialectal tirades -although funny and useless-. What is worrying is the disappearance of more than six hundred paragrapph entries (I mean just the paragraphing, not the contents itself!), that makes for a different -and worse- reading experience. Very good and full -if brief- annotation. Mass-market, glued paperback.

4. Heather Glen's for Routledge. One of the finest text-oriented editions, especially for the excellent Introduction and Epilogue together with its good annotation, out-of-print for rather obscure reasons. If you find still a very good to fine copy at amazon Canadian branch (or at abebooks.com, it would be a good buy.

5. Orchises two-volume facsimile reprint of the 1847 edition. No notes nor any additional material. the books are well produced if a little expensive.... Very interesting item, but only suitable for textual scholars or would-be scholars, or otherwise for fetish-oriented WH-maniacs.

B) Study-oriented editions (i.e. editions that contain additional contextual information: early reviews, selection of Emily's poems, critical essays, chronologies of the novel or of the Bronte family...).

6. Norton's Fourth Edition (current item): OK, the text is still a little idiosyncratic, but the notes are much improved, and so is everything else (with the anthology of poems, and the critical essays). A very fine study edition but also suitable for a first contact, although annotation is still on the scarce side. Good paperback production without flaps but signature-sewn (or so it seems) and good paper and printing quality (albeit with a rather small type).

7. Broadview edition by Beth Newman: it's one of the best study editions overall. There are some minor textual foibles and the annotation is decidedly scanty (to make amends for Heywood excesses) but good and accurate, and both Prof. Newman ecellent Introduction and the selection of the additional contextual material is, arguably, the finest ever (including the very interesting document on "Brain fever"). Materially speaking, it is a good paperback without flaps with good paper and printing quality (like Norton Critical, although I can't ascertain without tearing apart my copy of Beth Newman's that it be signature-sewn instead of glue-only "perfect binding). In any case a very good buy.

7. Alison Booth's for Longman Cultural. Other of the very best study editions available. The text is deadly acuurate -except for some 1850 unobtrusive detail- on the
Clarendon 1976 reference critical edition, although the punctuation -like Norton Critical, Broadview's Newman and Oneworld's one- has been silently lightened and modernized throughout. It looks like glue-only "perfect binding" paperback, but perhaps it is signature-sewn. Paper and printing quality are good enough. The only misgiving I have is the overdone fragmentation of contextual material (good and relevant material though it is): there are 40+ items, many of them very short or they wouldn't fit into 430 pages. One of the best possible buys.

8. Onewold's Classics edition. A fine paperback edition with flaps, very good paper and printing quality and (I rather surmise than know for sure) signature-sewn. The text looks like 1847 in paragraphing but it takes in too
many of 1850 "improvements" and is wrong at some places: it's short of a disaster, but rather non-reliable (in spite of the well-meant efforts by the almost anonymous editing panel who perpetrated it). Annotation is good and comprehensive enough, but the contextual material is rather scanty and run-of-the-mill non-commital.

9. Barnes&Noble's Tatiana Holway edition (hardcover). To say it promptly the only fault with this lovely edition (but, as stated above in wordsworth Classics edition, a really big fault) is its accurate and reliable 1850 Haworth Edition text. Other than this, it looks as a popularly oriented edition, but with quality marks. The Introduction by Daphne Merkin is good enough, the annotation by Holway is really excellent. Supplementary material is very scanty: the "Charlotte's prefatory materials" of 1850 (prefixed to the text, which is a pity), and some comments about film and TV adaptations as well as some chosen excerpts of reviews. Material production is outstanding: nice hardcover with dust jacket, good paper and printing quality, the only good available edition in a becoming format (Clarendon Edition is very hard to come by nowadays: say one to three years to pin it down). Don't forget the Franklin Mint editions of the sixties and seventies if you are interested in a very beautiful book with a reliable 1847 text and illustrations by Alan Reingold (and nothing else). Read more ›

109 of 122 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars My favorite novel of all time March 3, 2006

By B. McEwan TOP 1000 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback

There is a thin line between love and hate, and once Heathcliff crosses it, we see a grand, passionate and absorbingly interesting man turn into a fearsome thug. Thwarted in his love for his childhood soulmate, Catherine Earnshaw, Heathcliff turns his devastation outward, becoming a hateful -- and hated -- person all across the bleak moors that surround his Yorkshire village.

Heathcliff courts and marries the sister of the man whom Catherine chose over Heathcliff, only to torture her emotionally as a way of getting even with her brother. Meanwhile, Catherine slowly wastes away pining for Heathcliff, for although she once rejected him, she eventually realizes that she has made an irredeemable error and can never be happy. Heathcliff sums up the tragedy of their lives in a single question near the end of the novel when he asks, "Why did you betray your heart, Cathy?"

Sound depressing? It's not. Wuthering Heights is a grand and glorious novel that dramatically illustrates the power of love, for good and ill. But more importantly, it teaches us that the only path to happiness is to be true to one's heart, rather than one's head. Had Catherine honored her bond with Heathcliff and refused to bow to the social mores of her day, not only would the two of them been much happier, but all of the many people whose lives they stumbled into would have been much better off.

Another reviewer said that those of us who love this novel probably have a strong identification with one of the characters, and for me that is quite true. That's the reason for reading a classic like Wuthering Heights, because when it speaks to you in the clear and true way that Bronte does, you know that you are not alone, and that some things transcend time and place....

Think about it -- a prim, Victorian preacher's daughter living on the moors of England before there was electricity can reach across 150 years of time and speak to the heart of a wired American in the 21st century. Pretty amazing, and highly recommended. Read more ›