Product Description

"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, in which heaven and hell, nature and society, are powerfully juxtaposed. Unique, mystical, with a timeless appeal, it has become a classic of English literature.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2384 in Books
• Published on: 1983-11-01
• Released on: 1983-10-01
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 336 pages

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.

From AudioFile
This audiobook offers a good introduction to Bront''s romantic tale of the tormented relationship between Heathcliff and Cathy, two of the best known protagonists in nineteenth-century literature. Nadia May gives a spirited reading; she characterizes voices with enthusiasm but handles female voices more successfully than male ones. In all, May's overall tone is so strident that it becomes somewhat irritating. C.R.A. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine

From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Erica Bauermeister
Wuthering Heights is a classic tale of possessive and thwarted passion, one of the forerunners of today's soap operas and romance novels. The tempestuous and mythic story of Catherine Earnshaw, the precocious daughter of the house, and the ruggedly handsome, uncultured foundling her father brings home and names Heathcliff, is played out against the backdrop of English moors no less wild and raw than the love they develop for one another. Brought together as children, Catherine and Heathcliff quickly become attached to each other. As they grow older, their companionship turns into obsession. Family, class, and fate work cruelly against them, as do their own jealous and volatile natures, and much of their lives is spent in revenge and frustration. Yet there is something magnificent about the depth and intensity of their love. Even as you condemn Catherine and Heathcliff for the pain they inflict upon themselves and others, it is hard not to listen in awe when Catherine cries out "I am Heathcliff! He's always, always in my mind; not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being." -- For great reviews of books for girls, check out Let's Hear It for the Girls: 375 Great Books for Readers 2-14.

Customer Reviews

Love doesn't always make us happy.
Told in alternating flashbacks from the perspectives of two narrators, Wuthering Heights is the gothic love story of Catherine and Heathcliff. Their doomed love has tragic repercussions for them and both of their families.

I absolutely loved this when I first read it as a teenager. It's like a creepy soap opera.

Tedious and unengaging
I don't know what people see in this book. I found it irritating from the start -- all the characters are thoroughly unlikeable. After slogging my way through a quarter of the book, I found I still couldn't care less what happened to these people, and in fact I rather hoped they might all be swept away in a flood.
The writing is also painfully verbose and florid. I would be willing to cope with this if the story was engaging, but as it is, it's just another reason to put the book down and never pick it up again.

it's a pity... but it doesn't measure up
Of course, I'm not referring to one of the best novels (I don't say "best-loved" novels, because it's not a lovable reading, but an all-important, soul-searching and unforgettable one). As the noted critic A. C. Swinburne said in 1883: "It may be true that not many will ever take it to their hearts: it is certain that those who do like it will like nothing very much better in the whole world of poetry or prose".
So it has been for more than a century. Nobody should miss this strangest and strongest of English novels, so hauntingly beautiful and intensely poetical in its dark and eerie otherness. By the way, don't miss Emily Brontë's poems, or a good selection of them.

The issue now, is this PARTICULAR paperback edition (Wordsworth Classics, 2000). What do we get and what not, how does it compare to the other editions in the marketplace.

To begim with, it's ONE OF THE THINNEST EDITIONS EVER, light on your pocket and cheap as airborne luggage (6/8 inch vs., say, one full inch for Penguin Classics edition). The mass-market paperback, is as bad as you fear, and then some... for its paper quality and binding. A bit surprisingly, printing quality is good enough. The Introduction (18 pp) by John S. Whitley is not bad, perhaps one bit askew for the intended readership (I don't feel myself at ease with those Freudian interpretations). The Bibliography is good and so is the annotation at the end of the book, three pages in small type that aren't user-friendly, specially in the handling of the dialect tirades.

So, it looks like a good edition, were it not for the outrageous material production; but then, Penguin's and Oxford's aren't so much better as paper quality and binding go, although their type is easier on the eyes and the printing quality a little better. And, mind, when I speak of bad quality paper, it's a matter of Penguin browned pages in only five years, and Oxford's little better behaving of slightlier browned pages in ten years. Wordsworth Classics pages haven't got brown so far but they sure will do (when you make paper out of whole timber logs, it always happens).

The worst thing, by far, is the text itself. It's a careful and accurate 1850-type text, that follows that of the by then very distinguished Haworth Edition (1900), the same text used by Barnes&Noble Classics noteworthy hardcover edition. Of course, there are texts far worse than that, namely Modern Library, Chatham River and
Time-Warner ones, not to mention Gutenberg Project's most corrupted electronic text.

As you probably know, the 1850 text was edited, or more precisely, in all good will tampered-with, by Charlotte Brontë (who didn't like her sister's novel at all). The changes in the text from the 1847 edition were pervasive, and detrimental: there were some hundred of small stylistical or grammatical "improvements", now as useless as then; a toned-down, sweetened version of York dialect paragraphs that looks decidedly funny and almost as hard to understand; the punctuation was brought in line with Victorian practice (which isn't ours, anyway): professional, light and discrete, syntactical in concept, instead of Emily's rather inconsistent usage, rethorical in concept, as 18th century's prose and specially poetry had been. Even WORSE was the urgent need to save printing space at all costs, which resulted in the disparition of more than 600 paragraph beginnings (I mean just the paragraphing, not the paragraph contents!). Overall, it makes for a worse and distorted reading experience. Many of us (I don't know HOW many) think 1850 is a no-go textform, and would like to see it no more in the intricate textual history of this work.

TO SUMMARIZE: I recommend strongly NOT to buy this edition, in spite of its real merits. And then what?
If durability is not a must and budget is tight, go for either Penguin's Classics (Pauline Nestor) or Oxford's World Classics (Patsy Stoneman).
If durability is a must, and budget is not so tight, then go for one of the best context-oriented, "study" editions: Broadview Press (Beth Newman),
Longman Cultural (Alison Booth) or Norton Critical (Fourth Edition) (Dunn).
If what you are after is a nice hardcover edition, the options are greatly reduced:
you may try Barnes&Noble, with the selfsame ignoble text as Wordsworth Edition, or go for a good copy of the 1978 Franklin Mint edition, the one with the Alan Reingold lithographs, with a very good 1847 text and no Introduction or annotation other than Charlotte Brontë Preface (NOT to be read BEFORE the novel) and full and right glosses as footnotes for the dialectal tirades (the first edition to do so, as far as I know).