Author Description

Emily Brontë is one of the few modern writers in English whose distinction as a novelist is matched by her distinction as a poet. She lived and died more or less completely out of the public eye and only towards the end of the nineteenth century was her writing widely recognized. Wuthering Heights (1847) and the small but vital corpus of poetry have subsequently become some of the most celebrated writing in nineteenth-century literature. This new edition in the 21st-Century Oxford Authors series presents Emily Brontë's work as it was first known to the reading public, together with what manuscript evidence survives of what she had originally intended. It also reproduces the slender amount of personal writing that Emily Brontë left behind and both early criticism and early poems about her. Emily Brontë's sister Charlotte was significant in the initial reception of Emily's work, and this edition allows the reader to see Charlotte Brontë's interventions into her sister's texts and to evaluate them. Centrally, though, this edition is about how Emily Brontë, a remarkably original voice in literature, was first read. Here, primarily, is the Emily Brontë in and of her own lifetime.