Wuthering Heights

Hardcover, 352 pages

English language

Published Feb. 1, 1947 by World Publishing Company.

OCLC Number:
861831213

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3 stars (11 reviews)

Wuthering Heights is an 1847 novel by Emily Brontë, initially published under the pseudonym Ellis Bell. It concerns two families of the landed gentry living on the West Yorkshire moors, the Earnshaws and the Lintons, and their turbulent relationships with Earnshaw's adopted son, Heathcliff. The novel was influenced by Romanticism and Gothic fiction.

200 editions

reviewed Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (Oxford world's classics)

Review of 'Wuthering Heights' on 'Goodreads'

2 stars

Until 3/4 of the way through I was highly tempted to dismiss this book with a two word review: "Histrionic nonsense." At about that point, however, I was struck by a resemblance to a superficially altogether different genre of literature - no, not the oft noted influence of the wildly popular only a few decades previously, Gothick novel - but a genre I have never heard mentioned in relation to Emily Bronte: Greek Tragedy.

The overwrought, intense, oppressive insanity of almost all the principal characters, the death of one of them at the half-way point, the feeling that everything is going according to the demented will of some external force out to amuse itself, the violently destructive internal relations of a family, all speak to me of the tone and temper of those plays about people such as Oedipus, Electra and Cassandra. To me this explains the histrionics, cruelty, structure …