The First Edition of Emily Brontë’s ‘Wuthering Heights’

By Ellen Wexler

When Emily Brontë published Wuthering Heights in 1847, several critics used the word

“strange.” As the New York Times’ B.D. McClay points out, one review simply began, “This is a

strange book,” while others described the novel as “strangely original” and “a strange, inartistic

story.” “Wuthering Heights is a strange sort of book—baffling all regular criticism; yet, it is

impossible to begin and not finish it,” another observed. “We strongly recommend all our

readers who love novelty to get this story, for we can promise them that they never have read

anything like it before.”

The novel’s first edition was divided into two volumes, released alongside a third volume

containing Agnes Grey, a novel by Emily’s younger sister, Anne. The siblings published under

the pseudonyms Ellis and Acton Bell. Of the estimated 250 copies printed, only a few complete

copies survive with their full-cloth binding intact. On June 30, Christie’s will sell the first edition’s

three volumes in one lot at an auction in London, where the collection is expected to go for

between $540,000 and $800,000. “The last time one appeared at auction was in 1908, so no

collector alive has had a chance to acquire one,” says Mark Wiltshire, a books and manuscripts

specialist at Christie’s.

When Emily and Anne saw the printed editions, they realized that the books contained a

number of errors. Some pages were marked with the wrong numbers, while others contained

incorrect or missing punctuation. Perhaps the most egregious mistakes were six misspellings

of “Agnes Grey” and three misspellings of “Heights”. In letters written in the weeks after

publication, their sister Charlotte complained that the volumes were full of “errors of the press”

that she described as “mortifying.”

Writing under the pseudonym Currer Bell, Charlotte had published her own debut novel,

Jane Eyre, earlier the same year, and it had been an immediate success. She was deeply

protective of her younger sisters, and she was disappointed that their publisher, Thomas

Cautley Newby, had allowed so many mistakes to make it to press. “If Mr. Newby always does

business in this way,” she wrote, “few authors would like to have him for their publisher a

second time.” Newby hoped to capitalize on the popularity of Jane Eyre, but Wuthering Heights,

which explored darker themes, didn’t enjoy the same level of success.

The story is set against the dramatic, untamed moors of Yorkshire, which is also where

the Brontë siblings grew up. The Brontës’ childhood was marked by tragedy, as most family

members died young from tuberculosis. In 1850, after Emily’s death, Charlotte’s publisher

released a second edition of Wuthering Heights. Charlotte fixed the errors from the first edition

and revealed her sister’s identity in a biographical notice. Emily didn’t live to see her novel

become so beloved, admired by the likes of Ernest Hemingway, Joan Didion and Virginia Woolf.

Few surviving first-edition copies still have their original binding. Wiltshire has only been

able to track down five others: Three are in the university libraries of Leeds, Oxford, and

Princeton universities, according to a statement, while the fourth is housed at the British Library

in London. The fifth, which contains Charlotte’s annotations, is missing several pages, and it

sold for $86,500 in 2009.

(Available at: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/the-first-edition-of-emily-brontes-wuthering-heights-contained-incorrect-page-numbers-missing-punctuation-and-three-misspellings-of-the-word-heights-180989005/ – text specially adapted for this test).