Wuthering Heights: In Modern English

by Emily Brontë, Avery Frost (Translator)

WUTHERING HEIGHTS IN MODERN ENGLISH

Yes, it’s that book. The one everyone says you should read. The original toxic love story that spawned entire genres of dark romance.

Here’s the Wuthering Heights is unhinged, devastating, and has been absolutely wrecking readers for 175 years. It’s a masterpiece.

The Victorian prose, though? That’s the part that makes it feel like homework.

This edition fixes that.

Same gothic moors. Same obsessive passion. Same “wait, did that just happen?” moments. Just in language that doesn’t require you to stop and decode every other sentence.

What’s The prose. That’s it.

No scenes cut. No plot watered down. No study guide summary. Every chapter, every character, every devastating moment, just written so you can actually experience why this book has been breaking hearts since 1847.

You get the full story without “hitherto,” “countenance,” and sentences that take three reads to figure out. You get Brontë’s genius without the barrier.

Still Wuthering Heights. Just readable.

The Story

When Mr. Lockwood rents a remote estate on the Yorkshire moors, he expects peace and solitude. Instead, he finds Wuthering Heights, a house thick with secrets, resentment, and a landlord who seems to despise everyone, including himself.

As his housekeeper tells him the estate’s history, Lockwood uncovers a tale of obsessive love and revenge spanning two generations. At its center are Heathcliff, an orphan brought to the Heights as a child, and Catherine Earnshaw, the wild, passionate girl who became his entire world.

Their bond should have been unbreakable. But class barriers, pride, and Catherine’s choice trigger a chain of events that destroys nearly everyone in their orbit. Heathcliff’s revenge is patient, calculated, and devastating. But even he can’t escape the ghost of the one person he ever loved.

Perfect For Readers Who

Obsessive, all-consuming love that crosses every line • Childhood bonds that turn complicated and toxic • Long-game revenge plots where everyone pays the price • Atmospheric gothic settings (windswept moors, crumbling estates, literal ghosts) • Morally complex characters who make catastrophic choices • Class barriers that ruin everything • Romance with actual stakes and consequences • Stories where “happy ending” was never an option

Who This Edition Is

You’ve been meaning to read this forever but kept stalling outYou love the idea of Wuthering Heights but don’t want the prose to feel like workYou’re tired of pretending you’ve finished the classicsYou want the full experience, not a summary, not a study guide, but the actual book in language that flowsBecause these stories deserve to be enjoyed, not endured.

Part of The Readable Classics series
Translated by Avery Frost

380 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 20, 2026

About the author

Emily Brontë was an English novelist and poet whose singular contribution to literature, Wuthering Heights, is now celebrated as one of the most powerful and original novels in the English language. Born into the remarkable Brontë family on 30 July 1818 in Thornton, Yorkshire, she was the fifth of six children of Maria Branwell and Patrick Brontë, an Irish clergyman. Her early life was marked by both intellectual curiosity and profound loss. After the death of her mother in 1821 and the subsequent deaths of her two eldest sisters in 1825, Emily and her surviving siblings— Charlotte, Anne, and Branwell—were raised in relative seclusion in the moorland village of Haworth, where their imaginations flourished in a household shaped by books, storytelling, and emotional intensity.
The Brontë children created elaborate fictional worlds, notably Angria and later Gondal, which served as an outlet for their creative energies. Emily, in particular, gravitated toward Gondal, a mysterious, windswept imaginary land she developed with her sister Anne. Her early poetry, much of it steeped in the mythology and characters of Gondal, demonstrated a remarkable lyrical force and emotional depth. These poems remained private until discovered by Charlotte in 1845, after which Emily reluctantly agreed to publish them in the 1846 collection Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, using the pseudonym Ellis Bell to conceal her gender. Though the volume sold few copies, critics identified Emily’s poems as the strongest in the collection, lauding her for their music, power, and visionary quality.
Emily was intensely private and reclusive by nature. She briefly attended schools in Cowan Bridge and Roe Head but was plagued by homesickness and preferred the solitude of the Yorkshire moors, which inspired much of her work. She worked briefly as a teacher but found the demands of the profession exhausting. She also studied in Brussels with Charlotte in 1842, but again found herself alienated and yearning for home. Throughout her life, Emily remained closely bonded with her siblings, particularly Anne, and with the landscape of Haworth, where she drew on the raw, untamed beauty of the moors for both her poetry and her fiction.
Her only novel, Wuthering Heights, was published in 1847, a year after the poetry collection, under her pseudonym Ellis Bell. Initially met with a mixture of admiration and shock, the novel’s structure, emotional intensity, and portrayal of violent passion and moral ambiguity stood in stark contrast to the conventions of Victorian fiction. Many readers, unable to reconcile its power with the expected gentility of a woman writer, assumed it had been written by a man. The novel tells the story of Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw—two characters driven by obsessive love, cruelty, and vengeance—and explores themes of nature, the supernatural, and the destructive power of unresolved emotion. Though controversial at the time, Wuthering Heights is now considered a landmark in English literature, acclaimed for its originality, psychological insight, and poetic vision.
Emily's personality has been the subject of much speculation, shaped in part by her sister Charlotte’s later writings and by Victorian biographies that often sought to romanticize or domesticate her character. While some accounts depict her as intensely shy and austere, others highlight her fierce independence, deep empathy with animals, and profound inner life. She is remembered as a solitary figure, closely attuned to the rhythms of the natural world, with a quiet but formidable intellect and a passion for truth and freedom. Her dog, Keeper, was a constant companion and, according to many, a window into her capacity for fierce, loyal love.
Emily Brontë died of tuberculosis on 19 December 1848 at the age of thirty, just a year after the publication of her novel. Her early death, following those of her brother Branwell and soon to