'Wuthering Heights, The Companion Edition' Restores the 1847 First-Edition Text, the Novel as Emily Brontë's First Readers Received It, Before the 1850 Edition Smoothed It

NEW YORK, Oct. 30, 2026, In December 1847, Thomas Cautley Newby published a three-volume novel set whose first two volumes were Wuthering Heights, by "Ellis Bell." Reviewers found it powerful, coarse, savage and baffling in roughly equal measure. Its author, Emily Brontë, died almost exactly a year later, aged thirty, and in 1850 her sister Charlotte reissued the novel with a famous preface defending it, and a revised text: Charlotte corrected some of the first edition's many printing errors, but she also regularized Emily's spelling and punctuation and softened the Yorkshire dialect of the servant Joseph for southern readers. Most modern reprints descend from Charlotte's 1850 edition. A new Companion Classics edition, Wuthering Heights, The Companion Edition, returns to the beginning: the complete novel, all thirty-four chapters, 115,872 words, unabridged, in the text of the 1847 first edition, taken from Project Gutenberg eBook #768 and collated against Internet Archive scans of the 1847 Newby printing (24 of 34 chapters located in the scans' text by their opening phrases, with token agreement of 0.48-0.95). The edition follows 1847, the only text published in Emily Brontë's lifetime, documents the 1847 printing's famous errors and every emendation in a provenance note, and modernizes nothing silently.

The story needs no smoothing: a foundling carried home from Liverpool to a moorland farmhouse; Catherine Earnshaw, who scratches three versions of her own name in a window ledge and tells her housekeeper "I am Heathcliff"; and a thirty-year reckoning between two households, the Earnshaws of Wuthering Heights and the Lintons of Thrushcross Grange, told twice over, by Lockwood, a tenant who misreads everything he sees, and by Nelly Dean, the housekeeper who was part of the story she tells.

Around the novel, the companion material, all of it original to this edition, includes an introduction on the Bells, the 1847 publication and the 1850 reissue; a Who's Who of fourteen entries that untangles the two Catherines and the two households, with the family tree written out in plain sentences; four explainers, the narrative frame and how far to trust its two narrators, a Yorkshire dialect glossary for Joseph's speeches, moorland farming life in the two houses, and the period money and property law the plot runs on; a short life of Emily Brontë; a reading schedule; and thirty-six discussion questions, thirty-two in chapter-group sets plus a whole-book set, spoiler-fenced by part, so the second Catherine's story arrives in Brontë's own order.

Alongside the book, the Wuthering Heights, Book Club Kit offers the edition's discussion material as a printable PDF (23 pages, US Letter) for reading groups: a three-meeting plan; the Who's Who and the explainers in full; all thirty-six discussion questions arranged by meeting; and the signature activity "The Ledge and the Tree," which asks every reader to draw the two family trees from memory and write Catherine's three names from the window ledge, then score the attempt again at the final meeting. The kit is available for $7 through the editor's Payhip store: https://payhip.com/horaceharriottjr

Wuthering Heights, The Companion Edition is available now as an eBook ($9.99) through Payhip: https://payhip.com/horaceharriottjr, and in The Classics and Companions Shop on the editor's Linktree. Print editions follow on Amazon (paperback, $14.99; hardcover, $24.99). The text is public domain worldwide (Emily Brontë died in 1848); all companion material is original to this edition. This is an independent publication, not affiliated with or endorsed by any Brontë estate, museum, or modern adaptation.

About the editor

Horace Harriott Jr. is a New York-based author and editor of more than two dozen books, including The Side Hustle Handbook, Master Playbook and The Ultimate Commissary Cookbook. This edition is part of his Companion Classics series of reading-together editions of public-domain classics.

About the book

Wuthering Heights, The Companion Edition, Emily Brontë (author), Horace Harriott Jr. (editor). Companion Classics, independently published, October 2026. Text: the first edition (Thomas Cautley Newby, London, December 1847, as "Ellis Bell"), via Project Gutenberg eBook #768, collated against Internet Archive scans of the 1847 printing; 34 chapters in the 1847 two-volume division; 115,872 words; interior proof 455 pages, 6 x 9 in.