Emily Brontë published Wuthering Heights in December 1847 under the pseudonym Ellis Bell. She died of tuberculosis a year later, at thirty, having written one novel. It was savaged by reviewers as brutal, savage, and morally incoherent. It is now generally considered one of the greatest novels in English.
A new tenant, Mr Lockwood, rents a quiet country house at Thrushcross Grange on the Yorkshire moors and finds himself the unwilling neighbour of a darker house, Wuthering Heights, four miles across the heather. There he meets a strange, half-mad family. The housekeeper at the Grange tells him the story behind it: thirty years earlier, a foundling boy named Heathcliff was brought to the Heights from the streets of Liverpool, raised as part of the family, fell violently in love with the daughter Catherine, was driven out by her brother, returned three years later rich and patient, and spent the rest of his life destroying both the family that wronged him and the family that married her.
The B2 adaptation runs across twenty chapters and keeps the famous nested structure — Lockwood writes down what the housekeeper Nelly Dean tells him by the fire over several winter evenings. The novel's grammar (passages of free indirect speech, time-shifts inside a single conversation) is part of what makes it canonical and what makes it B2: a level lower would have to flatten the voices into something far less haunting.
Emily Brontë's English is concentrated, dialectal in places, and structurally complex. Nelly's story-within-a-story sits inside Lockwood's diary, which sits inside the omniscient framing — a triple frame the original keeps almost without comment. B2 is the level at which the layered narration starts to read as design rather than as obstacle. The Yorkshire dialect of Joseph the servant has been lightly modernised; the central voices are kept.
Upper intermediate. You read literary novels, follow nuance, handle conditional and subjunctive. You can argue, summarise, and reflect in writing. The plateau is behind you.
Yes — every book in the Storica catalog is available in all seven supported languages: French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, and English. Wuthering Heights was originally written in English, but you choose your reading language when you start.
B2. Upper intermediate. You read literary novels, follow nuance, handle conditional and subjunctive. You can argue, summarise, and reflect in writing. The plateau is behind you.
About one month at fifteen minutes a day. The adaptation runs to 25 short chapters — short enough to read before bed, long enough to actually move your level.
No. Storica's adaptation is the version you read. We keep the characters, plot beats, and tone of the original — and rewrite the language to fit the level. If you've read the original before, you'll recognise the story; if you haven't, the adaptation is a complete reading of the book.
Pick up where you left off. There are no streaks, no penalties, and no notifications begging you back. Day 12 is still Day 12 a week later.
Wuthering Heights is rated B2, so we'd suggest starting with one of our A0 or A1 books first if you're brand-new to your target language. Check our shelf at /library/ — the readers there are short, gentle, and built specifically for week one.
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