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The Borough Press
an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018
In the compilation and introductory material © Kate Mosse 2018
Terminus © Louise Doughty; Anima © Grace McCleen; A Bird, Half-Eaten © Nikesh Shukla; Thicker Than Blood © Erin Kelly; One Letter Different © Joanna Cannon; The Howling Girl © Laurie Penny; Five Sites, Five Stages © Lisa McInerney; Kit © Juno Dawson; My Eye Is a Button on Your Dress © Hanan al-Shaykh; The Cord © Alison Case; Heathcliffs I Have Known © Louisa Young; Amulet and Feathers © Leila Aboulela; How Things Disappear © Anna James; The Wildflowers © Dorothy Koomson; Heathcliff Is Not My Name © Michael Stewart; Only Joseph © Sophie Hannah
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
Jacket design by Holly Macdonald © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018
Jacket photographs © Sally Mundy/Trevillion Images, © Shutterstock.com petals
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
These stories are entirely works of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in them, while at times based on historical events and figures, are the works of the authors’ imaginations.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008257439
Ebook Edition © July 2018 ISBN: 9780008257453
Version: 2018-06-25
For EB, in whose
footsteps we walk
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Foreword by Kate Mosse
Terminus – Louise Doughty
Anima – Grace McCleen
A Bird, Half-Eaten – Nikesh Shukla
Thicker Than Blood – Erin Kelly
One Letter Different – Joanna Cannon
The Howling Girl – Laurie Penny
Five Sites, Five Stages – Lisa McInerney
Kit – Juno Dawson
My Eye Is a Button on Your Dress – Hanan al-Shaykh
The Cord – Alison Case
Heathcliffs I Have Known – Louisa Young
Amulet and Feathers – Leila Aboulela
How Things Disappear – Anna James
The Wildflowers – Dorothy Koomson
Heathcliff Is Not My Name – Michael Stewart
Only Joseph – Sophie Hannah
Footnotes
Notes on the Contributors
A Note on Emily Brontë
About the Publisher
‘My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I’m well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff! He’s always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being.’
THERE IS A HANDFUL of books that exist beyond their time and space, beyond the circumstances of their invention: novels that are significant, novels that are beloved. Familiar friends. Their characters step off the pages of the novel and into the real world, into a public conscience to be used ever after as shorthand for a certain sort of person. Archetypes, I suppose. Stories that seem bigger than the books that contain them. Wuthering Heights is such a book. Cathy and Heathcliff are such characters.
Published in 1847, Wuthering Heights is a novel that changes its character and colour with every reading, yet remains uniquely and absolutely itself. It is variously a Gothic novel of obsession and revenge; a story of ghosts and bad dreams; a novel of opposites – light and shade, wild Nature versus taming civilisation, storm versus calm, violence versus tenderness, revenge versus forgiveness, the North versus the South; a novel of race and class, of the powerlessness of women’s and children’s lives; a novel about poverty, property, and wealth; a novel about how the sins of the fathers (and dead or powerless mothers) are visited on the next generation; a story of two houses – Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange – on the Yorkshire Moors; a story of the shifting of time and how the land goes about its business indifferent to human emotions; a novel of order and disorder; of violence and the consequences of violence, of hate and the consequences of hate. Most of all, of course, it is
