Emily Brontë

Wuthering Heights

£55

Illustrated By Rovina Cai

Introduced By Patti Smith

Wuthering Heights defies easy classification and stands alone as a uniquely powerful novel that transcends genre. Patti Smith, the singer-songwriter and poet, has written a new, lyrical introduction to this edition, in which she sums up Emily Brontë’s complex gifts.

Wuthering Heights

£55

Book Details

Presentation Box & BindingBound in printed and blocked buckram
Plain slipcase

Dimensions9½ inches x 6¼ inches

FontSet in Adobe Caslon

Pages352 pages

AuthorEmily Brontë

Illustrated ByRovina Cai

IllustrationFrontispiece and 8 colour illustrations

Publication Date09/10/2014

Editor's Notes

Lockwood is an unwanted guest, forced by a snowstorm to pass the night at the lonely and inhospitable house of Wuthering Heights. A child’s ghost pleads at the window to be let in; a waif who has wandered the moor for 20 years. Lockwood’s screams bring the fierce and brooding master of the house, Heathcliff, who is at first angry, and then, startlingly, sobs and begs for the ghost to return.

This is the unforgettable opening to a passionate love story, a haunting Gothic tale, a stark depiction of rural isolation and cruelty…

About the Illustrator

Rovina Cai

Rovina Cai is an Australian illustrator currently based in the United States. She studied illustration in the MFA Illustration as Visual Essay programme at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. Her work is a combination of graphite drawing and digital colouring, and she delights in creating poetic images that evoke a sense of intrigue and mystery. Rovina’s work has been featured in publications such as Spectrum Fantastic Art, American Illustration and Communication Arts.

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About the Illustrator

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Emily Brontë (1818–48) grew up in the parsonage at Haworth, Yorkshire, the fifth of six siblings. Her father was an impoverished parson, and, after their mother’s death when Emily was three, the children were brought up with the help of their aunt. After a brief spell at a charitable school for clergymen’s daughters – where Emily’s two eldest sisters contracted the tuberculosis they died from in 1825 – the remaining Brontë siblings, Charlotte, Branwell, Emily and Anne, were educated at home. An attempt at 17 to attend the school where Charlotte was teaching, Roe Head, ended in illness; Emily returned home and Anne took her place at school. After this point, Emily began more seriously to compose and collect her poetry; aside from a stint in 1842 at a school in Brussels, she did not return to formal education.

Writing under the pseudonyms Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, Charlotte, Emily and Anne published Poems at their own expense in 1846; though they sold only two copies, the sisters were not discouraged. Emily’s Wuthering Heights was published in 1847, as part of a three-volume set with Jane Eyre and Agnes Grey, in the hope that the success of Jane Eyre (published by itself two months earlier) would encourage readers to try the other ’Bell’ novels. But sales of Wuthering Heights were poor, and the novel was treated with hostility until Swinburne’s championing of both Emily’s novel and poems began to change critics’ views. Emily did not live to see her literary reputation improve; she died of tuberculosis at the age of 30.

Patti Smith is a writer, performer and visual artist. She gained recognition in the 1970s for her revolutionary mergence of poetry and rock. Her seminal album Horses (1975) has been hailed as one of the top albums of all time. She was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2007. Smith’s books include Witt (1973), Babe (1978), The Coral Sea (1996), Woolgathering (1992), Auguries of Innocence (2005) and three books of memoirs, the National Book Award-wining Just Kids (2010), chronicling her relationship with artist Robert Mapplethorpe, M Train (2015) and The Year of the Monkey (2019). Patti has introduced the Folio editions of Wuthering Heights (2014), De Profundis (2020) and Faceless Killers (2023).

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