Wuthering Heights, Fourth Edition (Norton Critical Editions)

Rating:
Summary: Does it get any better than this?
Review: Having read a number of books in my life, I must say I was not convinced this was one I could enjoy when it popped up on my mandatory reading list for my first year in university.
How wrong one can be.
Ever since Catherine visited MR Lockwood on that stormy night at the Heights, I have been completely spellbound by this novel. I have tried to rationalize my affection and utter amazment over this book, but I have so far not succeeded. To give a reweiv with any kind of substance when it comes to the theme of this book would be pointless. After having read the book over and over again,and having watched the movies made about it, I still cannot tell you what this novel is really all about. Don`t get me wrong, the plot is easy enough to follow, but the underlying drama is something that keeps haunting me. Maybe that was what Emily Bronte wanted. For the reader to put down the book and forever be spellbound by what he or she had read. I know I am.
Maybe, in our sedated worlds, we long for this kind of emotion, this kind of passion. Not just in our love lives, but in our lives in general. The story touches timeless subjects, it erases the line between heaven, hell and the world we know. It might even suggest that heaven and hell are right here on earth among us all.
It is utterly compelling and I would recomend it to anybody. Give it a couple of chapters before you judge it, and I asure you it will be the reading experince of a lifetime.

This publishment is even more rewarding because you can read the different analysis of the book in the Critical Edition part of the book.

Rating:
Summary: A ghost story with the feel of ancient tragedy
Review: I read this book aloud to my wife 23 years ago. At the time, I was working as an apprentice at a winery on the Rhine River. There was an old medeival castle across the river from our room. It was the perfect setting, as we two were the only English speaking people in the town. I think now is the right time to review the book, because I can only recall the feelings left behind by this powerful work of literature. Most of the plot and many of the characters have been long forgotten, leaving only the residue of strong emotion. I have read many works of powerful fiction by the world's great authors since then. But not one of them affected me emotionally the way this extraordinary tale did. I remember one gray German morning finishing the chapter where Heathcliff digs up the body of his beloved Catherine because he has gone mad in his desire to hold her close once more. And then off to the Altenkirch Schwanenkellerei I went. I spent the rest of the day working quietly in the cellars of the winery, deep inside the mountain with mold hanging all about, and brooding over the maniacal behavior of these highly romantic, insane characters. I've never been able to shake the feeling entirely. There is something so entirely timeless about this work, as though it were a piece of ancient literature, old far beyond the 1840s setting, something so utterly classical and piercingly primordial, it's as though you already had the genesis of this material in your DNA and it only required this story to bring it back to life within you. You recognize the spell it weaves because it speaks to the humanity in you so clearly, it is as though you have been secretly drugged. The English language has rarely been utilized as well as it has here, and I dare say you would need to go back to Shakespeare to find its parallel. Romanticism reached its high water mark with this novel. Ms. Brontë has now become immortal because of her creation, and in the Pantheon of world literaure, she stands among the Titans. If you are a native speaker of the English language, you can hardly consider yourself educated if you have not read this astounding novel of romantic love and uncontrollable passion.

Rating:
Summary: A ghost story with the feel of ancient tragedy
Review: I read this book aloud to my wife 23 years ago. At the time, I was working as an apprentice at a winery on the Rhine River. There was an old medeival castle across the river from our room. It was the perfect setting, as we two were the only English speaking people in the town. I think now is the right time to review the book, because I can only recall the feelings left behind by this powerful work of literature. Most of the plot and many of the characters have been long forgotten, leaving only the residue of strong emotion. I have read many works of powerful fiction by the world's great authors since then. But not one of them affected me emotionally the way this extraordinary tale did. I remember one gray German morning finishing the chapter where Heathcliff digs up the body of his beloved Catherine because he has gone mad in his desire to hold her close once more. And then off to the Altenkirch Schwanenkellerei I went. I spent the rest of the day working quietly in the cellars of the winery, deep inside the mountain with mold hanging all about, and brooding over the maniacal behavior of these highly romantic, insane characters. I've never been able to shake the feeling entirely. There is something so entirely timeless about this work, as though it were a piece of ancient literature, old far beyond the 1840s setting, something so utterly classical and piercingly primordial, it's as though you already had the genesis of this material in your DNA and it only required this story to bring it back to life within you. You recognize the spell it weaves because it speaks to the humanity in you so clearly, it is as though you have been secretly drugged. The English language has rarely been utilized as well as it has here, and I dare say you would need to go back to Shakespeare to find its parallel. Romanticism reached its high water mark with this novel. Ms. Brontë has now become immortal because of her creation, and in the Pantheon of world literaure, she stands among the Titans. If you are a native speaker of the English language, you can hardly consider yourself educated if you have not read this astounding novel of romantic love and uncontrollable passion.

Rating:
Summary: Tragedy Born of Jealous Love
Review: I thought this book was tragic in that two people who obviously love each other very much and have so much in common that they actually refer to themselves as the other person, end up spending most of their lives in other relationships trying to make the other lover jealous or hating their choices. Ultimately, Heathcliff's desire for revenge was hard for me to understand because I suppose I have never loved anyone enough to go that far. And the end was especially tragic because he actually begged Cathy's ghost to haunt him for the rest of his life: "...drive me mad! Only do not leave me in this dark alone where I cannot find you."

Rating:
Summary: Bizarre, cracklingly brilliant, a moment in literary history
Review: Is there anybody out there who hasn't heard of Heathcliff, the dark villian/hero of this high pitched and utterly committed work of madness? Oh, I love it. It was difficult for me at first. I'm a writer, but not a natural reader. But once I was into this book, once I stopped asking questions of the narrative and just entered the shadowy world of Catherine and her doomed household, I was quite literally spellbound. Bronte died believing this book was a failure. What a dreadful irony that this quiet, disciplined woman who lived out her life in a cold parsons' house with her brilliant sisters, her drunken brother and her eccentric father (The man memorized Paradise Lost: imagine. And outlived all his children!) never even had an inkling that this outpouring of her heart and soul would become a classic, overshadowing even her sister's highly successful Jane Eyre. Both Bronte sisters had the capacity to create archetypes -- to imprint upon the culture seminal patterns that endure to the present time. One last point: the father was Irish. Madness and genius in the blood, indeed. Enjoy it. I read it over every year or so, sometimes twice in a row. I study it; I watch all the film versions. I just love it, the way it works, its strange cruelty and enchantment.

Rating:
Summary: wuthering heights editions
Review: Rather than delve on the contents of this strangest and strongest of English novels, so intensely poetic in its haunting darkness and otherness, I'll comment briefly on the best editions available for a good first contact:
1. Oxford World's Classics: authoritative text, good annotation,
excellent introduction.
2. Penguin's Classics: same as above, everything looks a little shorter but is excellent nonetheless.
3. Norton's Fourth Edition: OK, the text is still a little idiosyncratic,but the notes are much improved, and so is everything else (with the anthology of poems, and the critical essays). A very fine study edition but also suitable for a first contact, although annotation is still on the scarce side
4. Hoeveler(New Riverside) and Heywood (broadview) are worse choices: Riverside annotation isn't very good (see the magnificent blunder about Milo in Chapter 9), and Heywood is too much idiosyncratic and controversial, althogh very researched and erudite.