Wuthering Heights. A Novel.

BY THE AUTHOR OF "JANE EYRE." [BRONTE, Emily].

$17,500.00

Item Number: 146424

New York: Harper & Brothers, Publishers, 1848.

First American edition (published less than five months after the virtually unobtainable London first edition) of Emily Brontë’s singular masterpiece. Octavo, original publisher’s purple cloth stamped in blind with gilt titles and tooling to the spine. In good condition with splitting and wear to the cloth. Period ownership inscription to the pastedown. Exceptionally rare in the original publisher’s cloth.

"Like Poems, Wuthering Heights was presented to an uncomprehending public without preface, introduction or explanation and it was left to Charlotte, ever her sister's apologist, to insist that it was simply a tale of 'the wild moors of the north of England'… There was a constant litany of complaint about the brutality and violence of some of the scenes [particularly involving Heathcliffe] and about the use of expletives, which, contrary to custom, Emily had written out in full rather than indicated by a dash… An American reviewer wrote in the Literary World: 'Fascinated by strange magic we… are made subject to the immense power of the book… we are spell-bound, we cannot choose but read'" (Barker, 502, 539-40). "Wuthering Heights stands alone as a monument of intensity owing nothing to tradition, nothing to the achievement of earlier writers. It was a thing apart, passionate, unforgettable, haunting in its grimness… Bronte has a sure and certain place for all time" (Britannica). Although the title page of the 1848 Wuthering Heights states, "By The Author of 'Jane Eyre,'" it was, of course, Emily's older sister, Charlotte, who authored Jane Eyre. Not until the famous "Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell, by Charlotte Bronte," in 1850 did Charlotte clearly address the matter of the pseudonyms and the true authorship of the works: "It has been thought that all the works published under the names of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell were, in reality, the production of one person…[O]n [this] occasion…I am advised distinctly to state how the case really stands." The first London edition, was published December 4, 1847; this edition was published April 21, 1848, simultaneously as two parts in wrappers and as a single, clothbound volume. Emily died one year following her only novel's publication.