![]() ![]() Wuthering Heights is a transcendent, mystifying masterpiece that examines the cruelty of love, and the ways in which the past, scratching at a windowpane with ghostly fingers, never lets us go. With striking force, Emily Brontë’s mesmerizing prose claws at the nature of human folly, defying the gender, religious, and social mores of its day. What follows is an ingenious and darkly captivating narrative of frustrated passion and tortured heartbreak reverberating through the generations, wrought with all the brutality, power, and wildness of the Yorkshire moors. But over the years, their childhood friendship morphs into a desperate, twisted, possessive love, as they wrestle with the violent and tyrannical rule of Cathy’s brother and the confines of social class that keep them apart. When young orphan Heathcliff is adopted by a wealthy gentleman, he quickly forms a close bond with his benefactor’s daughter, Cathy. ![]() The novel was a success all over Europe, and the poet Thomas Gray commented in a letter to Walpole that it made ‘some of us cry a little, and all in general afraid to go to bed o’nights.’ - The British LibraryĬover photo taken from Macmillan Publishers. The Castle of Otranto blends elements of realist fiction with the supernatural and fantastical, laying down many of the plot devices and character-types that would become typical of the Gothic: secret passages, clanging trapdoors, hidden identities and vulnerable heroines fleeing from men with evil intent. Faced with the extinction of his line, Manfred vows to divorce his wife and marry the terrified Isabella himself. The novel begins with the death of Manfred’s son, Conrad, who is crushed to death by an enormous helmet on the morning of his wedding to the beautiful princess Isabella. It tells the story of Manfred, the prince of Otranto, who is keen to secure the castle for his descendants in the face of a mysterious curse. Its first edition, published in 1764, claimed to be a translation of a work printed in Naples in 1529 and newly discovered in the library of ‘an ancient Catholic family in the north of England’. ![]() The Castle of Otranto, by Horace Walpole, is generally viewed as the first Gothic novel. RCL copy is published by Oxford University Press. Cover image from Simon & Schuster edition. ![]()
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