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- The first edition of a strange book
- Seeing Cleopatra
- Brilliantly written, says Stevie Nicks
- Love, Revenge, and Self-Destruction
- Nursery Rhymes, Peter Pan and Jane Eyre
- More Recent Articles
Smithsonian Magazine features the first edition of Wuthering Heights which is to be auctioned next week. When Emily Brontë published Wuthering Heights in 1847, several critics used the word “strange.” As the New York Times’ B.D. McClay points out, one review simply began, “This is a strange book,” while others described the novel as “strangely original” and “a strange, inartistic story.” “Wuthering Heights is a strange sort of book—baffling all regular criticism; yet, it is impossible to begin and not finish it,” another observed. “We strongly recommend all our readers who love novelty to get this story, for we can promise them that they never have read anything like it before.” The novel’s first edition was divided into two volumes, released alongside a third volume containing Agnes Grey, a novel by Emily’s younger sister, Anne. Each one was covered with green-grey cloth, with arabesques and floral patterns decorating the cover. The siblings published under the pseudonyms Ellis and Acton Bell. Of the estimated 250 copies printed, only a few complete copies survive with their full-cloth binding intact. On June 30, Christie’s will sell the first edition’s three volumes in one lot at an auction in London, where the collection is expected to go for between $540,000 and $800,000. “The last time one appeared at auction was in 1908, so no collector alive has had a chance to acquire one,” Mark Wiltshire, a books and manuscripts specialist at Christie’s, tells the Art Newspaper’s Maev Kennedy. “Private and public collectors all over the world will want this book.” When Emily and Anne saw the printed editions, they realized that the books contained a numbllings of “Agnes Grey” (“Anges Grey”) and three misspellings of “Heights” (“Heer of errors. Some pages were marked with the wrong numbers, while others contained incorrect or missing punctuation. Perhaps the most egregious mistakes were six misspeghts”). In letters written in the weeks after publication, their sister Charlotte complained that the volumes were full of “errors of the press” that she described as “mortifying.” Writing under the pseudonym Currer Bell, Charlotte had published her own debut novel, Jane Eyre, earlier the same year, and it had been an immediate success. She was deeply protective of her younger sisters, and she was disappointed that their publisher, Thomas Cautley Newby, had allowed so many mistakes to make it to press. “If Mr. Newby always does business in this way,” she wrote, “few authors would like to have him for their publisher a second time.” Newby hoped to capitalize on the popularity of Jane Eyre, but Wuthering Heights, which explored darker themes, didn’t enjoy the same level of success. Readers were “shocked, disgusted, almost sickened by details of cruelty, inhumanity and the most diabolical hate and vengeance,” according to Douglas Jerrold’s Weekly Newspaper. North American Review criticized the novel, writing that “Nightmares and dreams, through which devils dance and wolves howl, make bad novels.” Wuthering Heights follows Catherine Earnshaw, a young girl who lives with her family in northern England, and Heathcliff, an orphan who grows up alongside them. The pair forms an inextricable bond that breeds misery across two generations. The story is set against the dramatic, untamed moors of Yorkshire—which is also where the Brontë siblings grew up. [...] Emily didn’t live to see her novel become so beloved, admired by the likes of Ernest Hemingway, Joan Didion and Virginia Woolf. “The impulse which urged her to create was not her own suffering or her own injuries,” Woolf wrote in 1925. “She looked out upon a world cleft into gigantic disorder and felt within her the power to unite it in a book.” The novel has inspired art, music and film, in addition to literature. “It remains a work that artists return to again and again because of its emotional force, its atmosphere and its psychological intensity,” Wiltshire tells the Associated Press’ Jill Lawless. Few surviving first-edition copies still have their original binding. Wiltshire has only been able to track down five others: Three are in the university libraries of Leeds, Oxford and Princeton universities, according to a statement, while the fourth is housed at the British Library in London. The fifth, which contains Charlotte’s annotations, is missing several pages, and it sold for $86,500 in 2009. (Ellen Wexler)
Another mistake no one seems to be mentioning is the fact that on the title page it says
Wuthering Heights A novel By Ellis Bell In three volumes
When it was in two volumes plus Agnes Grey.
largely inspired by the wild beauty and dramatic landscapes of Top Withens and the Yorkshire moors that the Brontës capture in their work. (Laura Reid)
Another recently-published Brontë-related paper:
Zhiying Zhang
Charlotte Brontë's Villette (1853) is a novel profoundly concerned with the act of looking and being looked at. Vision in the novel is never neutral; rather, it is bound up with power, desire, moral judgment, and gendered discipline. In particular, the ekphrastic episode of the Cleopatra painting in Chapter XIX has elicited substantial critical commentary and functions as a focal point for discussions of gender, spectatorship, Orientalism, aesthetics, and narrative authority. (...)
‘Wuthering Heights’ by Emily Brontë With more than 20 film and TV adaptations of Wuthering Heights, the classic story between Heathcliff and Catherine has been told in a number of ways—including a song by Nicks. While she was inspired to write “Wild Heart” after watching an adaptation of the story on the big screen, she’s been a fan of the books since her college days. “I first read Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights when I was in college in California in the late 1960s,” Nicks shared. “They are two of my favorite books because they’re just so brilliantly written. The beauty of both these classics is that they were fantastic when I was a teenager and they still appeal to me now as a 63-year-old woman.” While those classic novels left a lasting impression on Nicks, literature wasn’t her only creative influence. Film also played a major role in shaping her songwriting. In fact, the singer has shared that seeing Wuthering Heights inspired her to write the title track for her 1983 album, Wild Heart. “I’d written “Wild Heart” early on,” Nicks recalled. “I remember singing it during a Rolling Stone cover shoot for Bella Donna [which came out in 1981] and I wrote it completely and utterly about the movie Wuthering Heights. I wrote it about Heathcliff and Cathy, and the fact that they were one person, that they couldn’t be together and they couldn’t be separate, and about the power and the drama of the closing death bed scene… All those amazing things he says to her.” (Julianne MacNeill)
Tell us about Possession from your perspective … Tonally, it’s Modern Gothic. A woman travels to a remote location. A foreboding ‘house on the hill‘. She has this vague feeling that something terrible is about to happen (spoiler – it does). It’s the same set-up as Jane Eyre, Dracula, or The Woman in Black, but it centres around the experience of a woman of colour in the present day. (Tamika Mitchell)
A new Brontë-related paper: Alia Rehman, Hira Javed and Iram Ayaz Liberal Journal of Language & Literature Review, Vol. 4 No. 1 (2026)
The paper discusses a thematic and psychological analysis of the notions of love and revenge in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, with particular attention to the figure of Heathcliff. It aims to study how intense frustrated love becomes transformed into destructive vengeance and the way such a vicious circle furthers violence, suffering, and ruination throughout generations. Qualitative research methodology is employed in this study because close textual reading and thematic analysis, as its tools, are necessary to trace causes, development, and consequences of revenge within the narrative. Analysis reveals that the vengeful behavior of Heathcliff originates from social alienation, class prejudice, childhood abuse, and emotional betrayal, mainly Catherine Earnshaw’s denigrating her emotional commitment for social status. The research further discusses an intriguing connection between obsessive love and revenge; it indicates how passion, when strangled by social mores, acts as a catalyst for cruelty and moral degeneration. Most importantly, this study suggests that Brontë had denounced revenge as a self-deprecating impulse, and how such a cycle of revenge is retarded in the second generation through mutual comprehension, forgiveness, and nourishing love. By placing revenge as the central thematic force of the novel, this research contributes to a deeper understanding of Wuthering Heights as a psychological and moral exploration of human passion, suffering, and the possibility of redemption.
Sussex Express lists things to do this summer in West Sussex such as this exhibition: The Newlands House Gallery in Petworth has collated works and personal artefacts to create a mesmerising exhibition, Paula Rego: Visions of English Literature, showing until 6th September. Paula Rego was one of the great printmakers and storytellers of our time and she took inspiration from a range of literary sources such as fairy tales, nursery rhymes, literary classics and folklore. This summer exhibition draws upon three of Paula’s major printmaking works: Nursery Rhymes, Peter Pan and Jane Eyre to illustrate her striking and unexpected portrayal of these well-known stories. Paula Rego: Visions of English Literature, 22nd May – 6th September The Yorkshire Post has another article detailing why the plans for a wind farm at the heart of Brontë country are not a good idea.
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