Wuthering Heights
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- $1.99
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- $1.99
Publisher Description
Wuthering Heights, published in 1847, is the only novel by Emily Brontë, one of the three Brontë sisters. She died just a year after its initial publication, but her legacy has continued; despite being her only work, it has transcended the 160 intervening years with grace. Emily Brontë broke with the norms and mores of the day; she offered a stark look at & depiction of cruelty and tackled timeless themes such as religious hypocrisy, morality, the class system, and more.
Containing elements of Gothic fiction, the tale takes place in the moorlands. The frame narrative introduces us to some important characters, especially Heathcliff, before rewinding the time back several decades and continuing from there. The story has a bit of everything – love, revenge, death, family, and more.
Initial reviews were mixed. The characters of the book seemed to have left an impression on early readers; they were, to an extent, disturbed by their selfishness and savagery. It almost reads as though the climate was such that such a story was considered audacious and not fit for general consumption.
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.
