Saturday, June 27

Jacob Burns Film Center, Pleasantville, NY

14.00 h  Wuthering Heights 1939

1939. 104 m. William Wyler. Park Circus. US. English. Rated NR.

Laurence Olivier, Merle Oberon, David Niven, and Geraldine Fitzgerald star in William Wyler’s Academy Award-winning adaptation of Emily Bronte’s tale of passion, hatred, and revenge.

Hailed as a “timeless masterpiece,” Wuthering Heights is the story of a tortured love affair between Heathcliff and Cathy, her escape by marriage to the wealthy Edgar and Heathcliff’s savage retaliation upon the woman he loves. Olivier portrays Heathcliff the jilted lover who bides his time before extracting his vicious vengeance; Oberon is Cathy, object of Heathcliff’s affections; Niven is Edgar, who steals Cathy from Heathcliff; and Fitzgerald is Isabella, Edgar’s sister who Heathcliff marries in an attempt to gain a measure of revenge.

Wyler’s film was nominated for seven Academy Awards and won the Oscar for Best Cinematography.

Join us after the film for a Q&A with Professor Deborah Lutz, author of This Dark Night – Emily Brontë, A Life, the new acclaimed biography of Emily Brontë. Copies of the book will be on sale courtesy of The Village Bookstore.

   

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)