Wuthering Heights

Product Description

Discover a passionate tale of love lost, found, and avenged in Wuthering Heights. Lockwood, a wealthy man from England, rents a house from an eccentric gentleman named Heathcliff, who is the tortured master of Wuthering Heights. Through Lockwood and the housekeeper, Nelly, the story of Heathcliff’s adoption, upbringing, revenge, and love for Catherine is told. The unconventional relationships and complex story structure will keep you turning pages long into the night.

Book Description

Cambridge Literature is a series of literary texts edited for study by students aged 14-18 in English-speaking classrooms. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte is edited by Richard Hoyes, Head of English and Media Studies, Farnham College, Surrey.

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.
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Review

“It is as if Emily Bronte could tear up all that we know human beings by, and fill these unrecognizable transparencies with such a gust of life that they
transcend reality.”
–Virginia Woolf
“From the Trade Paperback edition.

From the Back Cover

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.

About the Author

Emily Bronte was born in Thornton, Yorkshire, England, on July 30, 1818. The daughter of a clergyman, she lived a solitary life in Haworth, Yorkshire, with her father; brother, Branwell; and surviving sisters, Charlotte and Anne, until her death on December 19, 1848. Published in 1847 under the pseudonym “Ellis Bell,” Wuthering Heights—her only novel—is now considered one of the masterpieces of English literature.

From the Publisher

“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