The book, an 1847 first edition by Emily Brontë, was the only textually complete copy in the publisher’s binding to appear at auction since 1908. Offered together with Agnes Grey by Anne Brontë, it set a new world auction for the author, a record for any printed book by a woman and the highest price for any work of 19th century literature.
Estimated to sell for $700,000 to $1.15m, the cloth bound copy of Wuthering Heights had been in the same British historic house library since shortly after its publication. Offered in Christie’s The Exceptional Sale: Masterworks Across Cultures, it attracted seven bidders before being hammered at $1.83m (which will be $2.33m for the successful bidder once premium has been added). “This is exactly the kind of book collectors dream about but almost never see,” said Christie’s specialist Mark Wiltshire. “A first edition of Wuthering Heights in original cloth is extraordinarily rare… The vast majority of surviving copies were rebound for collectors or libraries, meaning original cloth examples are now extremely scarce. It’s a true survival – and a landmark for result for Brontë collecting.”
Publisher Thomas Cautley Newby quickly published Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey together in three volumes in 1847 following the enormous success of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. All three sisters published as males under the pseudonym of Bell. Wuthering Heights – published as Ellis Bell – was Emily’s only novel and only 250 copies of the first edition, which is notorious for its typographical errors, are thought to have been printed. ‘The orthography and punctuation of the books are mortifying to a degree: almost all the errors that were corrected in the proof-sheets appear intact in what should have been the fair copies’, wrote Charlotte. Examples in their original full-cloth binding are scarce, with only five other examples known.
The novel shocked some critics when it was published, with one in 1848 lamenting its ‘vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors’. But Wuthering Heights’ brooding tale of Cathy and Heathcliff has never lost its appeal; it has become one of the most written about novels in the English language and inspired several TV shows and movies, the most recent of which is the 2026 adaption starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi.
