Wuthering Heights

”《咆哮山莊》敘述的是一個愛情和復仇的故事。
　　咆哮山莊的主人、鄉紳恩肖先生帶回一個身分不明的孩子，取名希斯克里夫，他奪去了主人對小主人亨德利和他妹妹凱瑟琳的寵愛。主人死後，亨德利為報復把希斯克里夫貶為奴僕，並百般迫害，可是凱瑟琳卻和他親密無間、青梅竹馬。後來，凱瑟琳受外界影響，改而愛上畫眉田莊的文靜青年埃德加。希斯克里夫憤而出走，三年後致富回鄉，而凱瑟琳已嫁埃德加。希斯克里夫為此進行瘋狂報復，利用賭博奪走了亨德利的家財。亨德利酒醉而死，兒子哈里頓則成了奴僕；他還故意娶了埃德加的妹妹伊莎貝拉為妻，並施以迫害。內心痛苦不堪的凱瑟琳在生產中死去。
　　十多年後，希斯克里夫又施計強使埃德加的女兒小凱瑟琳，嫁給自己即將死去的兒子小林敦。埃德加和小林敦都死了，希斯克里夫最終把埃德加家的財產也據為己有。復仇得逞了，他卻始終無法從對死去的凱瑟琳的戀情中解脫，最終不吃不喝、苦戀而亡。小凱瑟琳和哈里頓繼承了山莊和田莊的產業，兩人終於相愛，在畫眉田莊安頓下來。”

Nominated as one of America''s best-loved novels by PBS''s The Great American Read

Wuthering Heights, first published in 1847, the year before the author''s death at the age of thirty, endures today as perhaps the most powerful and intensely original novel in the English language. "Only Emily Bront ," V.S. Pritchett said about the author and her contemporaries, "exposes her imagination to the dark spirit." And Virginia Woolf wrote, "It is as if she could tear up all that we know human beings by, and fill these unrecognisable transparencies with such a gust of life that they transcend reality. Hers, then, is the rarest of all powers. She could free life from its dependence on facts, with few touches indicate the spirit of a face so that it needs no body; by speaking of the moor make the wind blow and the thunder roar."

Emily Jane Brontë was the most solitary member of a unique, tightly-knit, English provincial family. Born in 1818, she shared the parsonage of the town of Haworth, Yorkshire, with her older sister, Charlotte, her brother, Branwell, her younger sister, Anne, and her father, The Reverend Patrick Brontë. All five were poets and writers; all but Branwell would publish at least one book.

Fantasy was the Brontë children’s one relief from the rigors of religion and the bleakness of life in an impoverished region. They invented a series of imaginary kingdoms and constructed a whole library of journals, stories, poems, and plays around their inhabitants. Emily’s special province was a kingdom she called Gondal, whose romantic heroes and exiles owed much to the poems of Byron.

Brief stays at several boarding schools were the sum of her experiences outside Haworth until 1842, when she entered a school in Brussels with her sister Charlotte. After a year of study and teaching there, they felt qualified to announce the opening of a school in their own home, but could not attract a single pupil.

In 1845 Charlotte Brontë came across a manuscript volume of her sister’s poems. She knew at once, she later wrote, that they were ＂not at all like poetry women generally write...they had a peculiar music-wild, melancholy, and elevating.＂ At her sister’s urging, Emily’s poems, along with Anne’s and Charlotte’s, were published pseudonymously in 1846. An almost complete silence greeted this volume, but the three sisters, buoyed by the fact of publication, immediately began to write novels. Emily’s effort was Wuthering Heights; appearing in 1847 it was treated at first as a lesser work by Charlotte, whose Jane Eyre had already been published to great acclaim. Emily Brontë’s name did not emerge from behind her pseudonym of Ellis Bell until the second edition of her novel appeared in 1850.

In the meantime, tragedy had struck the Brontë family. In September of 1848 Branwell had succumbed to a life of dissipation. By December, after a brief illness, Emily too was dead; her sister Anne would die the next year. Wuthering Heights, Emily’s only novel, was just beginning to be understood as the wild and singular work of genius that it is. ＂Stronger than a man,＂ wrote Charlotte, ＂Simpler than a child, her nature stood alone.＂