Wuthering Heights

Wuthering Heights was published in London in December 1847 by Thomas Cautley Newby, in three volumes, under the name Ellis Bell. It filled the first two; the third was Agnes Grey, by Ellis Bell’s sister Acton. Behind the pseudonyms were Emily and Anne Brontë of Haworth in Yorkshire, who the year before had published a volume of poems as Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell and sold two copies. Newby required the sisters to advance fifty pounds towards costs, printed the book carelessly, and did not return the money. Jane Eyre, by the third sister, had appeared two months earlier and was selling, and Newby was content to let readers suspect that all the Bells were one hand. Emily Brontë was twenty-nine. She died of tuberculosis on 19 December 1848, almost exactly a year after publication, leaving no account of what she had written or why. In 1850 Charlotte prepared a new single-volume edition with a biographical notice of her sisters and a preface of her own, in which she apologised, in effect, for the book’s roughness and softened Joseph’s dialect for readers south of the Pennines.

It is a novel about two houses four miles apart and two generations, and it is told at two removes by people with no authority. Lockwood, a fashionable tenant who understands almost nothing he sees, sets down in his diary what Nelly Dean, the housekeeper, tells him; Nelly reports conversations at which she was not always present; letters and overheard speeches are nested inside that again. There is no authorial voice anywhere in the book, and nobody in it is permitted to say what it means. What holds it together is an almost legal exactness. Lockwood’s diary opens in 1801, the datestone over the door reads 1500, and the dates, the ages and the descent of the two properties are consistent to the calendar and to the inheritance law of the period — a thing demonstrated by the barrister C. P. Sanger in a short paper of 1926 that has never been overturned.

Two warnings. Heathcliff is not a romantic hero: he hangs a dog, marries to injure, takes both estates by entirely lawful means, and spends the second half of the book revenging himself on children. And the second half is not an appendix. Readers who stop when the first Catherine dies have read half a novel and missed the answer to it. Keep the two Catherines apart, and notice that the three names Lockwood finds scratched on the window ledge in the third chapter are the whole plot in miniature.

This edition gives the complete text in the continuous numbering from one to thirty-four used by the single-volume editions, rather than the count that restarts at the second volume of 1847. Joseph’s dialect is left as it stands, not modernised. Charlotte’s preface and biographical notice belong to her rather than to Emily, and are not included here.