Wuthering Heights (Modern Library Torchbearers)

The classic tale of tormented love and the inexorable pull of the past, from one of history’s greatest literary talents—the inspiration for the film Wuthering Heights, directed by Emerald Fennell and starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi

Features an introduction by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, New York Times bestselling author of Mexican Gothic

When young orphan Heathcliff is adopted by a wealthy gentleman, he quickly forms a close bond with his benefactor’s daughter, Cathy. But over the years, their childhood friendship morphs into a desperate, twisted, possessive love, as they wrestle with the violent and tyrannical rule of Cathy’s brother and the confines of social class that keep them apart. What follows is an ingenious and darkly captivating narrative of frustrated passion and tortured heartbreak reverberating through the generations, wrought with all the brutality, power, and wildness of the Yorkshire moors.

With striking force, Emily Brontë’s mesmerizing prose claws at the nature of human folly, defying the gender, religious, and social mores of its day. Wuthering Heights is a transcendent, mystifying masterpiece that examines the cruelty of love, and the ways in which the past, scratching at a windowpane with ghostly fingers, never lets us go.

The Modern Library Torchbearers series features women who wrote on their own terms, with boldness, creativity, and a spirit of resistance.

Emily Brontë (1818–1848) was the second-youngest child of the Brontë family, who held the parsonage of the town of Haworth, England. Together with her siblings, Charlotte, Branwell, and Anne, Brontë wrote fantastical stories and poems. The three sisters published poems and novels under the names Currer, Acton, and Ellis Bell. Wuthering Heights was published in 1847; Brontë died a year later of tuberculosis, and the true authorship of Wuthering Heights was not revealed until the publication of the second edition in 1850.