Wuthering Heights

Wuthering Heights (Wordsworth Classics)

Introduction and Notes by John S. Whitley, University of Sussex. Wuthering Heights is a wild, passionate story of the intense and almost demonic love between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, a foundling adopted by Catherine’s father. After Mr Earnshaw’s death, Heathcliff is bullied and humiliated by Catherine’s brother Hindley and wrongly believing that his love for Catherine is not reciprocated, leaves Wuthering Heights, only to return years later as a wealthy and polished man. He proceeds to exact a terrible revenge for his former miseries. The action of the story is chaotic and unremittingly violent, but the accomplished handling of a complex structure, the evocative descriptions of the lonely moorland setting and the poetic grandeur of vision combine to make this unique novel a masterpiece of English literature.

Review book

Of course, I’m not referring to one of the best novels (I don’t say “best-loved” novels, because it’s not a lovable reading, but an all-important, soul-searching and unforgettable one). As the noted critic A. C. Swinburne said in 1883: “It may be true that not many will ever take it to their hearts: it is certain that those who do like it will like nothing very much better in the whole world of poetry or prose”.
So it has been for more than a century. Nobody should miss this strangest and strongest of English novels, so hauntingly beautiful and intensely poetical in its dark and eerie otherness. By the way, don’t miss Emily Brontë’s poems, or a good selection of them.

The issue now, is this PARTICULAR paperback edition (Wordsworth Classics, 2000). What do we get and what not, how does it compare to the other editions in the marketplace.

To begim with, it’s ONE OF THE THINNEST EDITIONS EVER, light on your pocket and cheap as airborne luggage (6/8 inch vs., say, one full inch for Penguin Classics edition). The mass-market paperback, is as bad as you fear, and then some… for its paper quality and binding. A bit surprisingly, printing quality is good enough. The Introduction (18 pp) by John S. Whitley is not bad, perhaps one bit askew for the intended readership (I don’t feel myself at ease with those Freudian interpretations). The Bibliography is good and so is the annotation at the end of the book, three pages in small type that aren’t user-friendly, specially in the handling of the dialect tirades.

So, it looks like a good edition, were it not for the outrageous material production; but then, Penguin’s and Oxford’s aren’t so much better as paper quality and binding go, although their type is easier on the eyes and the printing quality a little better. And, mind, when I speak of bad quality paper, it’s a matter of Penguin browned pages in only five years, and Oxford’s little better behaving of slightlier browned pages in ten years. Wordsworth Classics pages haven’t got brown so far but they sure will do (when you make paper out of whole timber logs, it always happens).

The worst thing, by far, is the text itself. It’s a careful and accurate 1850-type text, that follows that of the by then very distinguished Haworth Edition (1900), the same text used by Barnes&Noble Classics noteworthy hardcover edition. Of course, there are texts far worse than that, namely Modern Library, Chatham River and
Time-Warner ones, not to mention Gutenberg Project’s most corrupted electronic text.

As you probably know, the 1850 text was edited, or more precisely, in all good will tampered-with, by Charlotte Brontë (who didn’t like her sister’s novel at all). The changes in the text from the 1847 edition were pervasive, and detrimental: there were some hundred of small stylistical or grammatical “improvements”, now as useless as then; a toned-down, sweetened version of York dialect paragraphs that looks decidedly funny and almost as hard to understand; the punctuation was brought in line with Victorian practice (which isn’t ours, anyway): professional, light and discrete, syntactical in concept, instead of Emily’s rather inconsistent usage, rethorical in concept, as 18th century’s prose and specially poetry had been. Even WORSE was the urgent need to save printing space at all costs, which resulted in the disparition of more than 600 paragraph beginnings (I mean just the paragraphing, not the paragraph contents!). Overall, it makes for a worse and distorted reading experience. Many of us (I don’t know HOW many) think 1850 is a no-go textform, and would like to see it no more in the intricate textual history of this work.

TO SUMMARIZE: I recommend strongly NOT to buy this edition, in spite of its real merits. And then what?
If durability is not a must and budget is tight, go for either Penguin’s Classics (Pauline Nestor) or Oxford’s World Classics (Patsy Stoneman).
If durability is a must, and budget is not so tight, then go for one of the best context-oriented, “study” editions: Broadview Press (Beth Newman),
Longman Cultural (Alison Booth) or Norton Critical (Fourth Edition) (Dunn).
If what you are after is a nice hardcover edition, the options are greatly reduced:
you may try Barnes&Noble, with the selfsame ignoble text as Wordsworth Edition, or go for a good copy of the 1978 Franklin Mint edition, the one with the Alan Reingold lithographs, with a very good 1847 text and no Introduction or annotation other than Charlotte Brontë Preface (NOT to be read BEFORE the novel) and full and right glosses as footnotes for the dialectal tirades (the first edition to do so, as far as I know).