One of the surviving first-edition copies of Emily Brontë’s lone novel, “Wuthering Heights”, has recently been sold for a world record £1,206,500 ($1,613,718) at a Christie’s auction in London.
The winning bid price, announced on June 30, is the highest ever for any printed book by a woman and any 19th-century literary work, surpassing previous estimates of £400,00-600,000 ($534,871-802,307), according to the British auction house.
First to be auctioned since 1908
The greenish-grey, cloth-bound book set, featuring two volumes of the 1847 gothic classic “Wuthering Heights” and a copy of Anne Brontë’s “Agnes Grey”, was the first to go under the hammer in 98 years.
“Regarded as one of the finest surviving examples in private hands, the set remains in its original 1847 publisher’s cloth binding,” Christie’s wrote on Instagram.
“No other textually complete copy of Wuthering Heights in publisher’s cloth has appeared at auction since 1908.”
The two novels first hit the press in 1847 — well before Emily and Anne’s older sister, Charlotte, finished “Jane Eyre” — and were full of typographical errors, including several misspellings of heights and Agnes.
The Brontë sisters adopted male noms de plume — Ellis Bell for Emily, Acton Bell for Anne, and Currer Bell for Charlotte — to avoid Victorian-era gender prejudice.
Charlotte only revealed their true identities after Emily’s death in 1848.
‘Book collector’s dream’
Mark Wiltshire, a specialist in books and manuscripts at Christie’s London, described the first edition of “Wuthering Heights” as a “book collector’s dream”, given its rarity and condition.
An estimated 250 first-edition copies were only ever printed, including five others still preserved in their full-cloth binding.
Among the five, three sit in libraries at University of Leeds, University of Oxford, and Princeton University, while Anne’s annotated copy is kept at the British Library in London.
Another copy, annotated by Charlotte, was sold at a Christie’s auction in New York in 2009.
“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,” Wiltshire said in a Christie’s statement.
“It is an honour to have been entrusted with such an exceptional work.”
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Timeless classic
Set in the moors of West Yorkshire in the late 18th century, “Wuthering Heights” follows the toxic, ill-fated relationship between an orphan named Heathcliff and his strong-willed foster sister, Catherine.
The novel saw a significant resurgence among bibliophiles ahead of the release of Emerald Fennell’s eponymous film adaptation starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi in February this year.
In the United Kingdom alone, as many as 10,670 copies of “Wuthering Heights” were sold in January, a 469-per-cent increase from the same period in 2025, The Guardian reported, citing Penguin Classics.
“I can’t remember the last time a film adaptation generated this much excitement for the book,” Jess Harrison, publishing director for Penguin Classics, told the British daily at the time.
“There seems to be a real yearning among readers for intense, maximalist, tragic love stories.”
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