Pg. 99: Emily Brontë's "Wuthering Heights"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights.

Patsy Stoneman, a leading authority on the nineteenth-century novel, especially on the works of Elizabeth Gaskell and the Brontë sisters, applied the test to the Oxford World’s Classics edition for which she has written the Introduction.

About Wuthering Heights, from the Oxford University Press:

First published in 1847, Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights is set on the bleak Yorkshire moors, where the drama of Catherine and Heathcliff, Heathcliff's cruel revenge against Edgar and Isabella Linton, and the promise of redemption through the next generation, is enacted.

Stoneman's bottom line about page 99:

Overall, the page suggests complex interactions between characters of very different motivations and moral attitudes, played out in dramatic and vivid language and promising unpredictable developments. If you read on, you are likely to get deeply involved; you will have to try to solve puzzles and to make judgements, in situations which raise fierce emotions.

And do read on, because Professor Stoneman gives three particular reasons why page 99 is an especially enticing peek into this classic novel.

The Page 99 Test: Wuthering Heights.

--Marshal Zeringue