Wuthering Heights
Illustrated by Clare Leighton
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4.4 • 5 Ratings
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- $0.99
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- $0.99
Publisher Description
This Top Five Classics edition of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights includes:
• 12 starkly beautiful woodcut illustrations by renowned artist Clare Leighton (the inspiration for the sets of the classic 1939 Laurence Olivier–Merle Oberon film adaptation)
• The complete, unabridged, carefully proofread text
• Charlotte Brontë’s preface and biographical notice to the 1850 edition
• A helpful introduction and author bio
Wuthering Heights was released in 1847 in the shadow of the instantly successful Jane Eyre, published two months earlier by her older sister Charlotte. It enjoyed only mixed reviews—but the reactions were intense, foreshadowing the eventual stature the novel would claim in the pantheon of English literature, surpassing in many readers’s eyes even her sister’s magnum opus. Though Emily would not live to see it, Wuthering Heights would become synonymous with passionate gothic romance and tragic love, establishing Heathcliff and Catherine as the most poignantly doomed couple in fiction since Romeo & Juliet, but with far darker consequences for everyone involved.
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.
