Read Wuthering Heights in Daily Email Installments
A London gentleman rents a house on the Yorkshire moors, pays one disastrous visit to his landlord, and spends a snowbound convalescence hearing the housekeeper explain the strange, furious household up at Wuthering Heights. Her story — Heathcliff, Catherine, and two generations of consequences — is the wildest novel of its century. Emily Brontë wrote one book and died at thirty; this is it.
One installment a day: 212 days — about seven months. Pause, rewind, or stop anytime.
Start reading — freeWhy read Wuthering Heights?
Nothing else in Victorian fiction sounds like Wuthering Heights. Its first reviewers were genuinely alarmed by it — the love at its center is closer to possession than courtship, nobody in it is reliably likable, and the weather never improves. It outlived every polite novel published alongside it, because Emily Brontë was after something bigger than a romance: what happens when two people decide they are the same person, and the world disagrees.
The novel's famous structure is half the pleasure. Everything arrives secondhand: Mr. Lockwood, the mildly ridiculous tenant, writes down what the housekeeper Nelly Dean tells him, and Nelly was in the room for forty years of it. The household Lockwood meets in the opening chapters — a snarling landlord, a beautiful widow, a rough young man nobody introduces — is deliberately bewildering, and the whole book is the story of how it got that way.
We serialize the complete novel in Emily Brontë's original text, broken at her own chapter seams, with a “Previously” recap on every installment — which is quietly the ideal way to keep the two Catherines and three surnames straight.
What an installment looks like
1801.—I have just returned from a visit to my landlord—the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with. This is certainly a beautiful country! In all England, I do not believe that I could have fixed on a situation so completely removed from the stir of society. A perfect misanthropist’s heaven: and Mr. Heathcliff and I are such a suitable pair to divide the desolation between us. A capital fellow! He little imagined how my heart warmed towards him when I beheld his black eyes withdraw so suspiciously under their brows, as I rode up, and when his fingers sheltered themselves, with a jealous resolution, still further in his waistcoat, as I announced my name.
“Mr. Heathcliff?” I said.
A nod was the answer.
“Mr. Lockwood, your new tenant, sir. I do myself the honour of calling as soon as possible after my arrival, to express the hope that I have not inconvenienced you by my perseverance in soliciting the occupation of Thrushcross Grange: I heard yesterday you had had some thoughts—”
“Thrushcross Grange is my own, sir,” he interrupted, wincing. “I should not allow anyone to inconvenience me, if I could hinder it—walk in!”
The “walk in” was uttered with closed teeth, and expressed the sentiment, “Go to the Deuce”: even the gate over which he leant manifested no sympathising movement to the words; and I think that circumstance determined me to accept the invitation: I felt interested in a man who seemed more exaggeratedly reserved than myself.
Questions
How long does it take to read Wuthering Heights?
About eight hours straight through (115,965 words). By email, it's 212 daily installments of 2–3 minutes each — about seven months, or faster at a premium pace of two or three installments a day.
Is Wuthering Heights a love story?
It contains one of the most famous passions in literature, but calling it a love story is like calling a moor a lawn. It is also a revenge story, a ghost story, and — in its second half, which many first-time readers don't see coming — something unexpectedly close to a story of repair.
I've heard the two Catherines are confusing. Are they?
In a paperback, sometimes. In serial form, almost never — you meet each character a few minutes at a time, and every installment opens with a recap that keeps the thread. The early confusion at the Heights is deliberate on Brontë's part; the novel itself untangles it.
Which edition is this?
Emily Brontë's original English text (no translation needed), in the carefully typeset Standard Ebooks edition, drawn from the public-domain text. Joseph's Yorkshire dialect is preserved exactly as she wrote it.
How is it different from Jane Eyre?
The sisters published in the same year under the same pen-surname, and the books could not be less alike. Jane Eyre is a first-person voice you trust completely; Wuthering Heights is a story you assemble from witnesses. Charlotte's book asks what a person owes herself; Emily's asks what two people can do to everyone around them.
How does it arrive?
One email a day at the hour you pick, with a one-line recap of the previous installment at the top. Free. Unsubscribe or pause anytime.
Pick your delivery hour, confirm your email, and installment 1 of 212 arrives with the next send. Free, and unsubscribe anytime.
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