Audiobook · read by volunteers
Wuthering Heights
Emily Brontë (1818–1848)
Read by Lady Maria, JemmaBlythe, Zachary Brewster-Geisz, Jennifer Stearns, Martina, hosmer_angel, Michelle Crandall, Larysa Jaworski, Lee Ann Howlett, Geoff Cowgill · 34 chapters · 11 h 33
About the book
On the bleak Yorkshire moors stand two houses, Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange, and the lives of two families are bound together by love, hatred and revenge. Heathcliff, an orphan brought home by old Mr. Earnshaw, grows up beside Catherine in wild closeness, but pride, ambition and cruelty drive them apart. What follows reaches over two generations, in a story told through the eyes of a housekeeper and a visiting tenant. Emily Brontë's only novel is a work of extraordinary force: fierce, strange and utterly original. The moor is a living presence, and the passions of the characters seem as wild as the weather. It is among the most haunting novels in English, and a rewarding listen.
Introduction
Emily Brontë (1818-1848) was the middle of the three Brontë sisters who became famous as novelists, and the daughter of a clergyman in a Yorkshire village. Wuthering Heights was published in 1847 under the pseudonym Ellis Bell, the same year as Charlotte's Jane Eyre and Anne's Agnes Grey. It was her only novel, and she died the following year at the age of thirty.
On its first appearance the book disturbed many reviewers. They found its violence, its unconventional structure and its refusal to moralise hard to accept, and they wondered who could have written it. In the decades that followed, opinion changed. Today it is widely considered one of the great English novels, admired for its intensity, its complex narration and its extraordinary evocation of place.
The story is told through nested narrators, so that events reach the reader after passing through several voices. This gives the book an air of mystery, and it invites the listener to judge what is told. The result is a work that is at once a love story, a tale of revenge and a study of the effects of cruelty across generations.
The recording has thirty-four chapters and lasts about eleven and a half hours. It is read by LibriVox volunteers. It is a powerful choice for anyone who has not yet visited the moors, or who wishes to return. The book is strong stuff, and listeners should expect cruelty as well as romance. Yet its power is undeniable, and hearing it read aloud brings out the rhythm of the dialogue and the wildness of the setting in a way that silent reading rarely does.
Public domain
Emily Brontë died in 1848: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text