Introduction by Diane Johnson Commentary by George Henry Lewes, Virginia Woolf, and E. M. Forster   Wuthering Heights, first published in 1847, the year before the author’s death at the age of thirty, endures today as perhaps the most powerful and intensely original novel in the English language. The epic story of Catherine and Heathcliff plays out against the dramatic backdrop of the wild English moors, and presents an astonishing metaphysical vision of fate and obsession, passion and revenge. “Only Emily Brontë,” V. S. Pritchett said, “exposes her imagination to the dark spirit.” And Virginia Woolf wrote, “Hers . . . is the rarest of all powers. She could free life from its dependence on facts . . . by speaking of the moor make the wind blow and the thunder roar.
