This Top Five Classics edition of Emily Brontë ' s Wuthering Heights includes: 12 starkly beautiful woodcut illustrations by renowned artist Clare Leighton (the inspiration for the sets of the classic 1939 Laurence Olivier– Merle Oberon film adaptation)The complete, unabridged, carefully proofed and formatted textCharlotte Brontë ' s preface and biographical notice to the 1850 editionA helpful Introduction and Author Bio Wuthering Heights was released in 1847 in the shadow of the instantly successful Jane Eyre , published two months earlier by her older sister Charlotte. It enjoyed only mixed reviews— but the reactions were intense, foreshadowing the eventual stature the novel would claim in the pantheon of English literature, surpassing in many readers' eyes even her sister' s magnum opus. Though Emily would not live to see it, Wuthering Heights would become synonymous with passionate gothic romance and tragic love, establishing Heathcliff and Catherine as the most poignantly doomed couple in fiction since Romeo & Juliet, but with far darker consequences for everyone involved.