EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES BY PAULINE NESTOR

'My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath ... 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'

Emily Bronte's only novel appeared to mixed reviews in 1847, a year before her death at the age of thirty. In the relationship of Cathy and Heathcliff, and in the wild, bleak Yorkshire Moors of its setting, Wuthering Heights creates a world of its own, conceived with a disregard for convention, an instinct for poetry and for the dark depths of human psychology that make it one of the greatest novels of passion ever written.

'Wuthering Heights was hewn in a wild workshop, with simple tools, out of homely materials. The statuary found a granite block on a solitary moor ... with time and labour the crag took human shape; and there it stands colossal' - Charlotte Bronte

Pauline Nestor provides a new Introduction for this Penguin Classics edition of Emily Bronte's masterpiece.

A graveyard nearly encircled the Haworth parsonage, where Emily Bronte lived for most of her thirty years. Emily’s mother died in that parsonage in 1821, when the girl was three. Two years later, Emily and her three older sisters were sent to boarding school, where two of them, Maria and Elizabeth, succumbed to typhus and died. Other than such bare, depressing facts as these, we know very little about Emily Bronte’s life.
Jumping from the life of any writer into his or her work is risky, but usually there is something to narrow the gap just a bit: letters, diaries, or confidences to friends. There is almost nothing like that of Emily’s, so you have few clues as to how she felt about any of these facts. In part this is because Haworth is in Yorkshire, in northern England, far from the cultural circles of London. But even by the standards of a quiet country town, Emily was reclusive. The other surviving children- Charlotte, Branwell, and Anne- at least talked to other people. And since Wuthering Heights was not widely read or appreciated in its day (in fact, it was not generally recognized as a masterpiece until this century), no one bothered to find out anything about its author. The person who was pressed for information was Charlotte, after the success of her second novel, Jane Eyre. In the strong light shed on her, you catch glimpses of her more gifted younger sister.
The Bronte children were left largely to their own devices. Their father Patrick, the vicar, was eccentric and domineering. He spent most of his time in his
study and even took his meals there. The children’s aunt, who moved to the parsonage shortly after their mother’s death, didn’t like the cold, bleak, isolated town of Haworth, and stayed mostly in her room with the fire banked high and the door firmly shut. Discipline was lax; circumstances seemed to foster an independence of spirit.
The practical Charlotte and the submissive Anne went to school and found jobs as governesses; but Emily rarely left home, and little is known of what she did at Haworth. She wandered over her beloved moors, did the ironing, baked the bread, listened to the servants’ stories.
How could such an inexperienced young woman as Emily Bronte have written so convincingly in Wuthering Heights of passionate love? As far as is known, Emily showed no romantic interest in anyone, but there were plenty of examples of the frustrations of love around her. (And surely she got some inspiration from books she read.) A young curate was attentive and flattering to all the sisters and to a friend Charlotte made at school; Anne was the only one who took him seriously, and her heart was broken. Charlotte agonized over an unrequited passion for the married head of the school in Brussels. And then there was Branwell.
A brilliant conversationalist, Branwell started hanging around bars in his teens, and if a stranger stopped by, he would entertain him for the price of a night’s drinks. At first all the family’s hopes were pinned on him, but it soon became clear that he wouldn’t even be able to hold down a job on his own. Anne eventually got him a position as tutor for the Robinson family of Thorp Hall, where she was governess, and he fell wildly in love with the mistress of the place.
Either because the husband found out, or because the wife tired of him, he was dismissed, and spent the rest of his short life addicted to alcohol and opium.
While Branwell was devoting himself to his love affair, his three sisters were busy writing. Charlotte had found some of Emily’s earlier poems, and persuaded Emily to contribute to a book of verse by all three sisters, to be financed by money left them by their aunt. The three picked the pseudonyms of Currer [Charlotte], Ellis [Emily], and Acton [Anne] Bell, and their literary careers began. Turning from poetry to fiction, Charlotte wrote The Professor and Jane Eyre; Emily, Wuthering Heights; and Anne, Agnes Grey- all under their pseudonyms. Charlotte and Anne soon revealed their true identities; while Emily, true to form, forbade her sisters to reveal anything about her.
Two months after the “Bells” were unmasked, in September 1848, Branwell died. His dissipation had been too much for the frail Bronte constitution to bear.
Emily herself caught cold the day of the funeral, the last day she ever went outdoors. Consumption took hold quickly. She wasted away before her anguished sisters but continued to see to her chores, refusing medical attention. On December
19, at the age of thirty, she died, unaware that her only novel would some day be recognized as a masterpiece.
Anne died half a year later, at the age of twenty-nine. Charlotte died at the age of thirty-eight. Patrick Bronte lasted another six years; he had outlived all his children.