Emily Brontë Wuthering Heights (Oxford World's Classics Edition)

“Heathcliff is Emily Brontë, a woman who pressed at the limits of gender …”

(Camille Paglia)

An intensely felt love story that inspired Kate Bush's song of the same name, the terrain on which the story of Wuthering Heights takes place is arguably inspired by the caustic and yet beautiful hills that surround Brontë's former home in Haworth, Yorkshire. This environmental setting for a romantic, emotional narrative offers us a way to think about how our physical experience of the natural world impacts our inner lives and sense of the erotic.

The novel also explores gender-shifts, perspectives on sadomasochism and the fluidity of identity - as outlined by American critic Camille Paglia in her book Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence, from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. 

The deeper concerns of Wuthering Heights - discrimination, oppression and the refrains of extreme patriarchy - assert that gender relations and our sense of identity in relation to others are shaped by socio-cultural forces. 

This Oxford World's Classics edition of Wuthering Heights contains the authoritative Clarendon text, with revised and expanded notes and a selection of poems by Emily Brontë, too. The cover features Julia Margaret Cameron’s 1864 portrait of the actress Ellen Terry.

If you are interested in the raw and harshly-felt realities of Brontë's novel, we recommend you watch British director Andrea Arnold's adaptation (released in 2011).