Critics often comment on the importance of landscape in Wuthering Heights, and in this edition, Christopher Heywood locates the text more precisely than previous editions amid Yorkshire’s limestone north and moorland south, drawing out the importance of the region’s slaveholding society. Heywood also makes an important contribution to scholarship arguing persuasively for a re-structuring of the chapter and section breaks. Finally, this edition includes a variety of appendices that help to illuminate the novel’s historical background.
Comments
“Christopher Heywood invites us to take a fresh look at this oft-interpreted novel, throwing new light on its literary ancestry, and providing a wealth of material about the ‘plantation economy’ of northern England in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. His introduction situates the work firmly in its place and time, putting particular emphasis on the complex of family and social histories out of which Bronte wove her story. In Heywood’s provocative reading, Heathcliff sheds the demonic aura with which he is invested by other critics, and takes on tragic dimensions, becoming ‘a martyr and hero of social change.’ This Broadview edition of Wuthering Heights makes a valuable contribution to the continuing debate about the origins, structure, and meaning of one of the greatest—and most enigmatic—novels in English.” — Herbert Rosengarten, University of British Columbia
