New Delhi: After recovering from Emerald Fennel’s slap in the face, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights once again proves why it is considered one of the best novels ever written.
Victorian literature continues to be relevant and groundbreaking, and the Brontës are once again leading it. A rare first edition of Wuthering Heights and Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey, both written in 1847, sold at a Christie’s auction in London for a whopping £1,206,500.
The sale, which took place on 30 June, set a new world auction record for Emily Brontë. According to the auction house, it also marked the highest ever sale of any printed book by a woman, as well as being the priciest ever sale for any 19th-century literature.
Christie’s shared the news with a post on Instagram.
“Literary history has been rewritten at Christie’s London,” the caption read.
Wuthering Heights is Emily’s only novel; it was originally published under the pen name Ellis Bell. It is a gothic fiction, which explores the themes of tragedy, grief, and romance through Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, two of English literature’s most tumultuous characters.
The auctioned version is considered to be one of the finest surviving pieces of the first edition owned by a private individual. According to Christie’s, it is one of six other known pieces to remain in its original 1847 publisher’s cloth binding. The auction house added that no other textually complete copy of Wuthering Heights in publisher’s cloth has appeared at an auction since 1908.
“This is exactly the kind of book collectors dream about but almost never see. A first edition of Wuthering Heights in original cloth is extraordinarily rare. It’s a true survival–and a landmark result for Brontë collecting. It is an honour to have been entrusted with such an exceptional work,” Mark Wiltshire, Specialist, Books & Manuscripts, Christie’s, said.
Prior to the auction, Forbes predicted the high-stakes auction with a pre-sale estimate ranging between £ 400,000 and £ 600,000, adding “some of the more breathless estimates bandied about in the last weeks range up into seven figures.”
Wiltshire told Forbes that Emily’s novel is “canonical,” and that “it will always be.”
“Collectors have been waiting for this since before they were born,” he added.