Wuthering Heights

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What to expect

The sole novel of Emily Brontë, who died a year after its publication at the age of thirty, Wuthering Heights is one of the most original classics in the canon of English literature. Set amid the wild and stormy Yorkshire moors, it is the tale of childhood playmates who grow into soul mates, and whose tempestuous natures and obsessive love eventually destroy them and those around them.

High on a windy hill, the old gothic manor of Wuthering Heights is the ancestral home of the lordly Earnshaw family. When kind Mr. Earnshaw adopts Heathcliff, a wild child from the slums, he unwittingly sets in motion a cycle of love and revenge that will possess his family for a generation. Heathcliff is despised and abused by Earnshaw’s son and heir, Hindley, who views him as a rival. But Heathcliff’s tempestuous nature finds its match in Earnshaw’s daughter, Catherine, and the two become inseparable.

When Hindley becomes master of the estate, he forces Heathcliff to work as a degraded hired hand. Cathy, now divided from Heathcliff by social status, decides to marry the civilized Edgar Linton in hopes of gaining leverage to protect Heathcliff from her brother. To her despair, Heathcliff disappears; but he returns a few years later, now a wealthy gentleman, intent on using his new power to ruin Hindley, Edgar, and anyone who dared to drive a wedge between him and Cathy.

Fraught with psychological tension and supernatural atmosphere, Wuthering Heights is a haunting tale of the exalted heights and destructive depths of human passion.

Critics Review

  • “Carolyn Seymour conducts a graceful dance over the stormy moors in her performance of this dark, complex novel. Readers who kept a safe distance from the gruff Heathcliff in other versions of the book may fall for his tormented soul in this production. Seymour’s rendition of this iconic character makes Heathcliff a simultaneously loathsome and lovable figure…Seymour’s narration shines when she takes on the less-than-warm cast who populate Wuthering Heights and its surrounding environs. Her snappy dialogue and blend of sharp humor and compassion for the characters make this audiobook a fine view of a classic.”

    AudioFile
  • “[My favorite novelist of all time is] Emily Brontë, author of the
    greatest psychological novel ever written, with the most complex character ever
    conceived. Read Wuthering Heights when you’re eighteen and you think Heathcliff is
    a romantic hero; when you’re thirty, he’s a monster; at fifty you see he’s just human.”

    Alice Hoffman, New York Times bestselling author
  • “[A] classic tale of possessive and thwarted passion…There is something magnificent about the depth and intensity of their love…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.’”

    Erica Bauermeister, 500 Great Books by Women
  • “It is as if Emily Brontë could tear up all that we know human beings by, and fill these unrecognizable transparencies with such a gust of life that they transcend reality.”

    Virginia Woolf
  • Wuthering Heights is a strange sort of book—baffling all regular criticism; yet it is impossible to begin and not finish it; and quite as impossiple to lay it aside afterwards and say nothing about it…We strongly recommend all our readers who love novelty to get this story, for we can promise them that they never have read anything like it before.”

    Douglas Jerrold's Weekly Newspaper (January 1848)
  • “If the rank of a work of fiction is to depend solely on its naked imaginative power, then this is one of the greatest novels in the language.”

    G. W. Peck, The American Review: A Whig Journal of Politics, Literature, Art and Science (June 1848)

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