Wuthering Heights
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3.7 • 3 Ratings
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
HarperCollins is proud to present a range of best-loved, essential classics.
‘Is Mr. Heathcliff a man? If so, is he mad? And if not, is he a devil?’
Set on the bleak moors of Yorkshire, Lockwood is forced to seek shelter at Wuthering Heights, the home of his new landlord, Heathcliff. The intense and wildly passionate Heathcliff tells the story of his life, his all-consuming love for Catherine Earnshaw and the doomed outcome of that relationship, leading to his revenge.
Poetic, complex and grand in its scope, Emily Brontë's masterpiece is considered one of the most unique gothic novels of its time.
About the author
Emily Brontë was born in Thornton, Yorkshire, on July 30th 1818, to Patrick Brontë and Maria Branwell. Maria died early in Emily’s life and her father was a withdrawn, quiet man who preferred eating alone in his room to dining with his four children: Charlotte, Emily, Anne and their brother Branwell. Maria’s sister helped raise them, but she too was a solitary type. So to amuse themselves, the Brontë siblings created their own imaginary world, Angria, and wrote pages and pages of detailed notes about the kingdom and its inhabitants. Emily Brontë is most famous for her novel Wuthering Heights published in 1847 a year before she died aged just thirty, in Haworth, Yorkshire on December 19th 1848.
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.
