Wuthering Heights

William M. Sale, Jr.'s first Norton Critical Edition of Wuthering Heights in 1962 was a pioneering effort that established a reliable text, provided backgrounds and contexts, and recovered selected reviews and criticism. For the second edition ten years later, he replaced several of the critical essays with newer ones and added brief commentary of his own concerning the relationship of Emily Brontë's earlier Gondal poems and her novel. For the third edition in 1990, the first after Sale's death, I retained his textual and explanatory notes and much of the background material, but rearranged it and added materials to distinguish between the composition, publication, and reception of the first edition and the one edited by Charlotte Brontë in 1850. Because biographical, textual, and critical and cultural studies of the past quarter of a century have provided more and better information about the Brontës and their times, we can better situate Emily's novel among those of her sisters and also better understand the cultural context of someone reading the 1847 or 1850 editions of Wuthering Heights. This edition's selective bibliography provides a guide to the Brontë scholarship which has made possible the fourth Norton Critical Edition of Wuthering Heights. I give primacy to the 1847 edition, because given both the independence of Emily's mind and art and the qualifications Charlotte's edition made to the work, it is helpful to read Wuthering Heights first as it appeared in 1847 and then to deal with it as edited and promoted by the then better-known Charlotte.