Emily Brontë

                               Wuthering Heights

                               [Charlotte Brontë]

           Editor's Preface to the New Edition of »Wuthering Heights«

I have just read over »Wuthering Heights« and, for the first time, have obtained
a clear glimpse of what are termed (and, perhaps, really are) its faults; have
gained a definite notion of how it appears to other people - to strangers who
knew nothing of the author; who are unacquainted with the locality where the
scenes of the story are laid; to whom the inhabitants, the customs, the natural
characteristics of the outlying hills and hamlets in the West-Riding of
Yorkshire are things alien and unfamiliar.
    To all such »Wuthering Heights« must appear a rude and strange production.
The wild moors of the north of England can for them have no interest; the
language, the manners, the very dwellings and household customs of the scattered
inhabitants of those districts, must be to such readers in a great measure
unintelligible, and - where intelligible - repulsive. Men and women who,
perhaps, naturally very calm, and with feelings moderate in degree, and little
marked in kind, have been trained from their cradle to observe the utmost
evenness of manner and guardedness of language, will hardly know what to make of
the rough, strong utterance, the harshly manifested passions, the unbridled
aversions, and headlong partialities of unlettered moorland hinds and rugged
moorland squires, who have grown up untaught and unchecked, except by mentors as
harsh as themselves. A large class of readers, likewise, will suffer greatly
from the introduction into the pages of this work of words printed with all
their letters, which it has become the custom to represent by the initial and
final letter only - a blank line filling the interval. I may as well say at once
that, for this circumstance, it is out of my power to apologize; deeming it,
myself, a rational plan to write words at full length. The practice of hinting
by single letters those expletives with which profane and violent persons are
wont to garnish their discourse, strikes me as a proceeding which, however well
meant, is weak and futile. I cannot tell what good it does - what feeling it
spares - what horror it conceals.
    With regard to the rusticity of »Wuthering Heights« I admit the charge, for
I feel the quality. It is rustic all through. It is moorish, and wild, and
knotty as a root of heath. Nor was it natural that it should be otherwise; the
author being herself a native and nursling of the moors. Doubtless, had her lot
been cast in a town