Emily Bronte must be turning in her grave to see the paperback edition of Wuthering Heights brought out to tie in with the bloodlust for all things Twilight and branded 'Bella and Edward's favourite book.' The sweet, fey teen lovers of the Twilight world - one vampire, one human, as the genre dictates - have evidently not been reading Emily Bronte's tale of doomed lovers properly, or they would have noticed that Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliffe are properly gothic: as nasty a pair of pieces of doomed, destructive work as ever stalked a moor in darkness looking for trouble.
The cover of the new edition is saccharine and sickly: a luminous white crocus beaming its light across a bland back background. It's sufficient to have readers reaching for the sickbucket, and does nothing to prepare the gentle reader - because Twilight fans, whether teens or those rather more embarassingly elderly, are likely to be gentle, romantic souls - for the emotional carnage contained within. Wuthering Heights is one of the greatest, darkest romances ever written, but it is a terrible tale of two selfish, unpleasant people devasting each other's lives and those of everyone they meet in the process of consuming each other. If the Twilight tie-in edition of Wuthering Heights had the cover its contents merited, the floral decoration on the front would be either carnivorous, or a bouquet of barbed wire.
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