Wuthering Heights (Norton Critical Editions) [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

Rather than delve on the contents of this strangest and strongest of English novels, so intensely poetic in its haunting darkness and otherness, I'll comment briefly on the best editions available for a good first contact:

A) Text oriented editions (that is, editions with few materials added: normally an Introduction, annotation, and perhaps Charlotte's Peface and Biographical Notice and some bibliographical indications).

1. Oxford World's Classics: authoritative text, good annotation,
excellent introduction.

2. Penguin's Classics: same as above, everything looks a little shorter but is excellent nonetheless.

3. Wordsworth Classics edition. This would be a rather fine edition as befitting this collection, if it had a good 1847 text and not the heavily tampered-with Charlotte's 1850 edition. The text itself reflects accurately that of the 1900 Haworth Edition -a careful one-. The wording changes aren't perhaps so worrying nor is the toning-down of the dialectal tirades -although funny and useless-. What is worrying is the disappearance of more than six hundred paragrapph entries (I mean just the paragraphing, not the contents itself!), that makes for a different -and worse- reading experience. Very good and full -if brief- annotation. Mass-market, glued paperback.

4. Heather Glen's for Routledge. One of the finest text-oriented editions, especially for the excellent Introduction and Epilogue together with its good annotation, out-of-print for rather obscure reasons. If you find still a very good to fine copy at amazon Canadian branch (or at abebooks.com, it would be a good buy.

5. Orchises two-volume facsimile reprint of the 1847 edition. No notes nor any additional material. the books are well produced if a little expensive. Very interesting item, but only suitable for textual scholars or would-be scholars, or otherwise for fetish-oriented WH-maniacs.

B) Study-oriented editions (i.e. editions that contain additional contextual information: early reviews, selection of Emily's poems, critical essays, chronologies of the novel or of the Bronte family...).

6. Norton's Fourth Edition (current item): OK, the text is still a little idiosyncratic, but the notes are much improved, and so is everything else (with the anthology of poems, and the critical essays). A very fine study edition but also suitable for a first contact, although annotation is still on the scarce side. Good paperback production without flaps but signature-sewn (or so it seems) and good paper and printing quality (albeit with a rather small type).

7. Broadview edition by Beth Newman: it's one of the best study editions overall. There are some minor textual foibles and the annotation is decidedly scanty (to make amends for Heywood excesses) but good and accurate, and both Prof. Newman ecellent Introduction and the selection of the additional contextual material is, arguably, the finest ever (including the very interesting document on "Brain fever"). Materially speaking, it is a good paperback without flaps with good paper and printing quality (like Norton Critical, although I can't ascertain without tearing apart my copy of Beth Newman's that it be signature-sewn instead of glue-only "perfect binding). In any case a very good buy.

7. Alison Booth's for Longman Cultural. Other of the very best study editions available. The text is deadly acuurate -except for some 1850 unobtrusive detail- on the
Clarendon 1976 reference critical edition, although the punctuation -like Norton Critical, Broadview's Newman and Oneworld's one- has been silently lightened and modernized throughout. It looks like glue-only "perfect binding" paperback, but perhaps it is signature-sewn. Paper and printing quality are good enough. The only misgiving I have is the overdone fragmentation of contextual material (good and relevant material though it is): there are 40+ items, many of them very short or they wouldn't fit into 430 pages. One of the best possible buys.

8. Onewold's Classics edition. A fine paperback edition with flaps, very good paper and printing quality and (I rather surmise than know for sure) signature-sewn. The text looks like 1847 in paragraphing but it takes in too
many of 1850 "improvements" and is wrong at some places: it's short of a disaster, but rather non-reliable (in spite of the well-meant efforts by the almost anonymous editing panel who perpetrated it). Annotation is good and comprehensive enough, but the contextual material is rather scanty and run-of-the-mill non-commital.

9. Barnes&Noble's Tatiana Holway edition (hardcover). To say it promptly the only fault with this lovely edition (but, as stated above in wordsworth Classics edition, a really big fault) is its accurate and reliable 1850 Haworth Edition text. Other than this, it looks as a popularly oriented edition, but with quality marks. The Introduction by Daphne Merkin is good enough, the annotation by Holway is really excellent. Supplementary material is very scanty: the "Charlotte's prefatory materials" of 1850 (prefixed to the text, which is a pity), and some comments about film and TV adaptations as well as some chosen excerpts of reviews. Material production is outstanding: nice hardcover with dust jacket, good paper and printing quality, the only good available edition in a becoming format (Clarendon Edition is very hard to come by nowadays: say one to three years to pin it down). Don't forget the Franklin Mint editions of the sixties and seventies if you are interested in a very beautiful book with a reliable 1847 text and illustrations by Alan Reingold (and nothing else).

Is there anybody out there who hasn't heard of Heathcliff, the dark villian/hero of this high pitched and utterly committed work of madness? Oh, I love it. It was difficult for me at first. I'm a writer, but not a natural reader. But once I was into this book, once I stopped asking questions of the narrative and just entered the shadowy world of Catherine and her doomed household, I was quite literally spellbound. Bronte died believing this book was a failure. What a dreadful irony that this quiet, disciplined woman who lived out her life in a cold parsons' house with her brilliant sisters, her drunken brother and her eccentric father (The man memorized Paradise Lost: imagine. And outlived all his children!) never even had an inkling that this outpouring of her heart and soul would become a classic, overshadowing even her sister's highly successful Jane Eyre. Both Bronte sisters had the capacity to create archetypes -- to imprint upon the culture seminal patterns that endure to the present time. One last point: the father was Irish. Madness and genius in the blood, indeed. Enjoy it. I read it over every year or so, sometimes twice in a row. I study it; I watch all the film versions. I just love it, the way it works, its strange cruelty and enchantment.

I read this book aloud to my wife 23 years ago. At the time, I was working as an apprentice at a winery on the Rhine River. There was an old medeival castle across the river from our room. It was the perfect setting, as we two were the only English speaking people in the town. I think now is the right time to review the book, because I can only recall the feelings left behind by this powerful work of literature. Most of the plot and many of the characters have been long forgotten, leaving only the residue of strong emotion. I have read many works of powerful fiction by the world's great authors since then. But not one of them affected me emotionally the way this extraordinary tale did. I remember one gray German morning finishing the chapter where Heathcliff digs up the body of his beloved Catherine because he has gone mad in his desire to hold her close once more. And then off to the Altenkirch Schwanenkellerei I went. I spent the rest of the day working quietly in the cellars of the winery, deep inside the mountain with mold hanging all about, and brooding over the maniacal behavior of these highly romantic, insane characters. I've never been able to shake the feeling entirely. There is something so entirely timeless about this work, as though it were a piece of ancient literature, old far beyond the 1840s setting, something so utterly classical and piercingly primordial, it's as though you already had the genesis of this material in your DNA and it only required this story to bring it back to life within you. You recognize the spell it weaves because it speaks to the humanity in you so clearly, it is as though you have been secretly drugged. The English language has rarely been utilized as well as it has here, and I dare say you would need to go back to Shakespeare to find its parallel. Romanticism reached its high water mark with this novel. Ms. Brontë has now become immortal because of her creation, and in the Pantheon of world literaure, she stands among the Titans. If you are a native speaker of the English language, you can hardly consider yourself educated if you have not read this astounding novel of romantic love and uncontrollable passion.