Wuthering Heights (Wordsworth Classics)

One of my favorite books. The cover is beautiful. If you’ve never read it you should.

The cover art speaks for itself! 😍

My sister loved this as a gift. Great book!

Pretty well known story at this point, my only comment is that this edition (the Wordsworth edition) has pretty small print. But the book is rather compact so it’s good to throw in your bag.

Book came exactly as pictured I am pleased and would order again

The Secrets Santa receiver loves it! She said it was "The prettiest edition" she's ever seen.

A nice copy

Of course, I'm not referring to one of the best novels (I don't say "best-loved" novels, because it's not a lovable reading, but an all-important, soul-searching and unforgettable one). As the noted critic A. C. Swinburne said in 1883: "It may be true that not many will ever take it to their hearts: it is certain that those who do like it will like nothing very much better in the whole world of poetry or prose". So it has been for more than a century. Nobody should miss this strangest and strongest of English novels, so hauntingly beautiful and intensely poetical in its dark and eerie otherness. By the way, don't miss Emily Brontë's poems, or a good selection of them. The issue now, is this PARTICULAR paperback edition (Wordsworth Classics, 2000). What do we get and what not, how does it compare to the other editions in the marketplace. To begim with, it's ONE OF THE THINNEST EDITIONS EVER, light on your pocket and cheap as airborne luggage (6/8 inch vs., say, one full inch for Penguin Classics edition). The mass-market paperback, is as bad as you fear, and then some... for its paper quality and binding. A bit surprisingly, printing quality is good enough. The Introduction (18 pp) by John S. Whitley is not bad, perhaps one bit askew for the intended readership (I don't feel myself at ease with those Freudian interpretations). The Bibliography is good and so is the annotation at the end of the book, three pages in small type that aren't user-friendly, specially in the handling of the dialect tirades. So, it looks like a good edition, were it not for the outrageous material production; but then, Penguin's and Oxford's aren't so much better as paper quality and binding go, although their type is easier on the eyes and the printing quality a little better. And, mind, when I speak of bad quality paper, it's a matter of Penguin browned pages in only five years, and Oxford's little better behaving of slightlier browned pages in ten years. Wordsworth Classics pages haven't got brown so far but they sure will do (when you make paper out of whole timber logs, it always happens). The worst thing, by far, is the text itself. It's a careful and accurate 1850-type text, that follows that of the by then very distinguished Haworth Edition (1900), the same text used by Barnes&Noble Classics noteworthy hardcover edition. Of course, there are texts far worse than that, namely Modern Library, Chatham River and Time-Warner ones, not to mention Gutenberg Project's most corrupted electronic text. As you probably know, the 1850 text was edited, or more precisely, in all good will tampered-with, by Charlotte Brontë (who didn't like her sister's novel at all). The changes in the text from the 1847 edition were pervasive, and detrimental: there were some hundred of small stylistical or grammatical "improvements", now as useless as then; a toned-down, sweetened version of York dialect paragraphs that looks decidedly funny and almost as hard to understand; the punctuation was brought in line with Victorian practice (which isn't ours, anyway): professional, light and discrete, syntactical in concept, instead of Emily's rather inconsistent usage, rethorical in concept, as 18th century's prose and specially poetry had been. Even WORSE was the urgent need to save printing space at all costs, which resulted in the disparition of more than 600 paragraph beginnings (I mean just the paragraphing, not the paragraph contents!). Overall, it makes for a worse and distorted reading experience. Many of us (I don't know HOW many) think 1850 is a no-go textform, and would like to see it no more in the intricate textual history of this work. TO SUMMARIZE: I recommend strongly NOT to buy this edition, in spite of its real merits. And then what? If durability is not a must and budget is tight, go for either Penguin's Classics (Pauline Nestor) or Oxford's World Classics (Patsy Stoneman). If durability is a must, and budget is not so tight, then go for one of the best context-oriented, "study" editions: Broadview Press (Beth Newman), Longman Cultural (Alison Booth) or Norton Critical (Fourth Edition) (Dunn). If what you are after is a nice hardcover edition, the options are greatly reduced: you may try Barnes&Noble, with the selfsame ignoble text as Wordsworth Edition, or go for a good copy of the 1978 Franklin Mint edition, the one with the Alan Reingold lithographs, with a very good 1847 text and no Introduction or annotation other than Charlotte Brontë Preface (NOT to be read BEFORE the novel) and full and right glosses as footnotes for the dialectal tirades (the first edition to do so, as far as I know).

I don’t know who was in charge of creating the typeset to this but it’s awful.

Ótima qualidade, produto chegou certinho, recomendo!

Everyone’s heard of Wuthering Heights - the love story of Heathcliff and Catherine - but do most people know that it’s not really a love story? I came to this book, having heard of it, and by extension the movie, for decades. I have always sterered clear of it, thinking it a slushy romance. I could not have been more wrong. If I were to sum it up it succinctly it would be that it’s about the obsession of loss, much like Hamlet. It’s written in the Gothic genre, so think Poe, but far more terrifying, because of how real it feels, yet completely surreal at the same time. As I read it I thought the characters could not get any worse but they kept surpassing my expectations. In fact, my husband asked me as I was getting towards the last few chapters of the book if there was any redemption and I had to say ‘nope, they’re all truly awful human beings’. It had peaked his interest so much that he’s even going to read it and he never reads books. The book itself is deliberately confusing. You gradually piece together who each person is, and their role, the further you go into the book. I advise keeping a pen handy and try to jot down a family tree, but even then, it’s still difficult to place everyone. The similarity in names leads to much confusion, and even Catherine’s name confuses, right in chapter 3 when you see three Catherines with different surnames. The book is full of biblical reference, reference to Greek mythology, Shakespeare and even Poe in the early chapters - ‘Thou art the man’. There is a lot of work to be done in reading this novel but it is absolutely worth it. This book is absolutely horrifying. The characters are for the most part absolutely detestable, particularly the main protagonists. Heathcliff is the devil incarnate, and Catherine is so utterly manipulative that she manipulates her own death - she and Heathcliff are well suited. I find little sympathy for most of the characters. Perhaps controversially, I do find myself more sympathetic to Hindley, usurped in many ways by an orphan/stranger taken off the streets. He is cast aside by his father and sister, in favour of the newcomer. He loses his horse, his son and home to the newcomer too. I find it understandable why he was cruel towards Heathcliff but he was still awful. I really feel mostly for poor Hareton, a complete innocent in it all and utterly oblivious to all going on, but this too is deliberate. Social class is writ large all over the book, and indeed, Heathcliff shows nothing but contempt for the middle classes, the people who took him in and wants to make everyone pay for the fact that he was of lower status. He does this by ensuring that he and his kin inherit all the land and belongings of those he detests, while ensuring those same people were brought low and made to toil in the fields. This is his revenge. Joseph said, when he was a a teenager that Heathcliff had his foot in the first part of the Broad Way to destruction, a warning and a biblical reference to what happens to those who take the easy path or the hard path in the life. The broad way is the easy path. It is the road to hell. It is no wonder this book was so shocking and controversial at the time. Sadly, it’s the type of book that would never get published today, and I would not be surprised if this book were to be cancelled at some stage. I had to laugh at someone’s comment who thought there were no themes, and plot, and no cohesion, and that they as a writer knew how not to write a book and felt that they could write better than Brontë. As horrible as the characters were, and the lack of redemption, it was utterly gripping and haunting. Not iin a ghostly way, althougn that is strongly prevalent in the book, but in terms of the impression it made on me. Certainly, one of the best books I’ve ever read in my life.

A good read

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