Read Wuthering Heights by email.
You have started this book before. This time you will finish it.
A London gentleman rents a house on the Yorkshire moors, pays one disastrous visit to his landlord, and spends a snowbound convalescence hearing the housekeeper explain the strange, furious household up at Wuthering Heights. Her story — Heathcliff, Catherine, and two generations of consequences — is the wildest novel of its century. Emily Brontë wrote one book and died at thirty; this is it.
Two or three minutes a day, and every installment opens with a line reminding you where you left off.
Seven months from now, you will have read Emily Brontë.
212 installments, one an email
- First published
- 1847
- Installments
- 212
- Each installment
- 2–3 min
How long it takes
- Words
- 115,965
- Reading time
- 8 hours 3 minutes
- At 5 minutes a day
- 3 months
- At 10 minutes a day
- 7 weeks
- At 20 minutes a day
- 3 weeks
At 240 words a minute, the average for adult silent reading. Use your own speed
Why read Wuthering Heights?
Nothing else in Victorian fiction sounds like Wuthering Heights. Its first reviewers were genuinely alarmed by it — the love at its center is closer to possession than courtship, nobody in it is reliably likable, and the weather never improves. It outlived every polite novel published alongside it, because Emily Brontë was after something bigger than a romance: what happens when two people decide they are the same person, and the world disagrees.
The novel's famous structure is half the pleasure. Everything arrives secondhand: Mr. Lockwood, the mildly ridiculous tenant, writes down what the housekeeper Nelly Dean tells him, and Nelly was in the room for forty years of it. The household Lockwood meets in the opening chapters — a snarling landlord, a beautiful widow, a rough young man nobody introduces — is deliberately bewildering, and the whole book is the story of how it got that way.
We serialize the complete novel in Emily Brontë's original text, broken at her own chapter seams, with a “Previously” recap on every installment — which is quietly the ideal way to keep the two Catherines and three surnames straight.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long does it take to read Wuthering Heights?
About eight hours straight through (115,965 words). By email, it's 212 daily installments of 2–3 minutes each — about seven months, or faster at a premium pace of two or three installments a day.
Is Wuthering Heights a love story?
It contains one of the most famous passions in literature, but calling it a love story is like calling a moor a lawn. It is also a revenge story, a ghost story, and — in its second half, which many first-time readers don't see coming — something unexpectedly close to a story of repair.
I've heard the two Catherines are confusing. Are they?
In a paperback, sometimes. In serial form, almost never — you meet each character a few minutes at a time, and every installment opens with a recap that keeps the thread. The early confusion at the Heights is deliberate on Brontë's part; the novel itself untangles it.
Which edition is this?
Emily Brontë's original English text (no translation needed), in the carefully typeset Standard Ebooks edition, drawn from the public-domain text. Joseph's Yorkshire dialect is preserved exactly as she wrote it.
How is it different from Jane Eyre?
The sisters published in the same year under the same pen-surname, and the books could not be less alike. Jane Eyre is a first-person voice you trust completely; Wuthering Heights is a story you assemble from witnesses. Charlotte's book asks what a person owes herself; Emily's asks what two people can do to everyone around them.
How does it arrive?
One email a day at the hour you pick, with a one-line recap of the previous installment at the top. Free. Unsubscribe or pause anytime.
Standard Ebooks edition, public domain. Texts from Standard Ebooks and Project Gutenberg editions. Not affiliated with either.