'You said I killed you - haunt me, then!'
Wuthering Heights is one of the most famous love stories in the English language. It is also one of the most potent revenge narratives. The intense and unbreakable bond between the fiery Catherine Earnshaw and the foundling Heathcliff has startled and fascinated readers since its first publication
in 1847. Of uncertain parentage and ethnicity, Heathcliff comes to Wuthering Heights as a child when Catherine's father finds him wandering alone through the slave-trading port of Liverpool. After Mr Earnshaw's death, Heathcliff and Catherine find refuge in each other when the household falls into
the hands of Catherine's dissolute older brother. Their bond deepens as they escape together from the violence and stern religion of their home to the Yorkshire moors.
But the story of Catherine and Heathcliff's attachment transforms from intimacy to strife when Catherine marries the refined Edgar Linton. The ensuing story of violence and thwarted passion is one of the most powerful tales of the gothic tradition, a literary mode from which Emily Bront� wrings all
of its terrifying potential. A regional novel with a global reach, a work of sensational effects with a startling ethical core, Wuthering Heights is both a romantic melodrama and wrenching study of the difficulty of escaping from the legacies of violence.
This new edition of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights features a revised version of the 1976 Clarendon text, along with updated annotations, and a new introduction that situates Brontë's novel within the broader context of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature, and brings fresh attention to how Heathcliff's ambiguous ethnicity impacts familiar novelistic discourses of sympathy.
