Christie’s June 30 Exceptional Sale in London offers many fine lots, among them, a bespoke cigar humidor of Cuban amboyna, fruitwood and ivorine inlay gifted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to Winston Churchill during the war (£25,000-£40,000); a sabre-toothed tiger skull discovered in a Pleistoscene sinkhole in Florida in 2008 (£1,000,000-£1,500,000); and by no means least, a rare first edition of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights , published, fascinatingly, as a three-volume set, the first two of which are devoted to that novel, the third of which is her sister Anne’s novel, Agnes Grey . Pictured top, a portrait of the author of Wuthering Heights at about twenty-five, painted by her brother, Patrick Branwell Brontë.

The three volume set carries carry a pre-sale estimate range of £400,000-£600,000 ($529,600-$794,220), but for a host of reasons, as the hammer strikes Christie’s lectern sometime after 4:30 British Summer Time (11:30 Eastern) on June 30, the effervescent speculation in the press is that this particular first edition will run higher than that. Some of the more breathless estimates bandied about in the last weeks range up into seven figures. Pictured below, the three-volume first edition, Lot 35 in the Exceptional Sale.

Whatever number the hammer price attains, the intensity of interest that this lot generates is deep and longstanding. Working from the inside of these volumes out to their remarkably well-preserved cloth bindings – more on which, below – the first, main element of value is that it’s Emily Brontë’s enduring and revolutionary literary masterpiece at issue.

The significance of her achievement within English and global literature is difficult to overstate. Of the three sisters, Sister Emily’s exquisitely modern gift to literature and to us – via her characters Catherine and Heathcliff and the Earnshaw and Linton families – was to show that we are all conflicted, riven, subject to great swings of emotion and roundly challenged by simply living out our lives in a largely stormy world, whatever quotient of that may be of our own manufacture.

Emily Brontë’s telling of this narrative premise was, also, far ahead of its time, unadorned, stripped bare, always in immediate reach of the brutal facts of her characters’ relations and complications with each other. The very dialogue she gives them cuts to the point of those many conflicts – it’s all fire and motion, there’s virtually no digressive froth to the narrative. Neither Emily Brontë nor her famous characters waste a minute outside their conflicts. They lived them.

Wuthering Heights is meant to be a hard story, illuminating with breathtaking depth the disastrous human cost of hard emotions within hard lives. With the West Riding of Yorkshire’s wind-whipped moors, its great houses and wild weather as the ur-Victorian-gothic backdrop, the book’s prose is nothing short of cinematic – its brooding austerity carries a visceral immediacy that begs for visual treatment.

Which brings us to the second – 20th- and 21st-century – level of Wuthering Heights’ wholly justified fame. The novel has been adapted at last count into some thirty-five films and television series, including four films in Hindi, Mexican and Venezuelan telenovelas, a series in Polish, and a Spanish adaptation directed by no less a cinematic surrealist than Luis Buñuel, as well as a dozen stage productions and not least, an opera, not to mention a bouquet of subsequent satiric treatments and a (British) No. 1 pop hit by singer Kate Bush in 1978. The most recent – and controversial – adaptation is the Emerald Fennell film released in February 2026. All that is simply the evidence of the novel’s global reach and its timelessness – or put another way, its eternal cultural relevance – at work.

Mark Wiltshire, Christie’s formidable literary scholar and rare books specialist, aptly sums that up in his description of Wuthering Heights as “canonical,” quickly adding, “and it will always be.” Pictured below, a portrait of his sisters by Patrick Branwell Brontë, circa 1834.

Wiltshire has found just a handful of other Wuthering Heights first editions in similar original-binding condition, which, being owned by institutions such as the Bodleian, simply do not come up for sale.

“Just two hundred and fifty were printed," Wiltshire says. "This particular set resided in a private library in a house in England since shortly after publication, until now. The Brontë sisters’ books were immensely popular and were read by a lot of people, which is why so many have had to be rebound or repaired, so it’s very rare to get an early edition, much less a first edition in the original cloth binding, with no pages missing and not otherwise damaged. Effectively, there are few to be found, except in institutions or private libraries such as the one from which this lot comes. The last Wuthering Heights first edition of similar quality was sold at auction in 1908." With not a little irony, Wiltshire adds, "Collectors have been waiting for this since before they were born.”

Emily Brontë’s publisher, Thomas Cautley Newby, didn’t know that his author “Ellis Bell” was not a man. As he sloppily flailed his first edition of Wuthering Heights into print in the late autumn of of 1847, Newby only knew that a rival London publisher had met with immense success in that October by publishing a book called Jane Eyre , written by one “Currer Bell." Newby was further unaware that “Currer Bell” (Charlotte) and Newby’s two Bells, “Ellis” and “Acton” (Emily and Anne) were related. He just wanted a book out there by somebody with the last name Bell. Mark Wiltshire’s estimate is that Newby was able to pull the edition together in the (for the 1847 day) swift span of some six weeks from the publication of Jane Eyre .

Taking Newby’s mid-19th-century marketing comedy to yet a higher level – and thus adding to the extreme rarity of Lot 35 – the publisher left little time for proofreading, which resulted in some seriously manic punctuation strewn throughout and various misspellings – including, as Mark Wiltshire drily points out, “misspelling the name of the house from which the book takes its name, Wuthering Heights.”

Textually – and thankfully not on the spine or the title page – Newby’s first edition drops the letter “i” in “Heights,” hard as that may be to fathom. For their part, the tightly-bound, demanding, well-schooled sisters were deeply disapproving of their publisher’s sloth. But such fine evidence of the erroneous human touch in the publishing process is, of course, cherished by collectors of this day. In the image of the volumes in Lot 35 above, it’s obvious that Wuthering Heights was read and handled far more often by the family who owned it than was Agnes Grey . The khaki-to-ochre tint on the Wuthering Heights volumes’ spines is wear. But that wear apparently did not much etch the spines’ gold lettering, considered a good metric of a well-kept book.

We could suggest that, unconsciously, Newby was absolutely right in his haste to publish what he thought were the Bells, although for entirely different reasons than anything he thought he knew about marketing. A scant year after the publication of her novel, in December 1848, Emily Brontë would cease burning her ferocious trail across the literary firmament, dying at thirty of tuberculosis, leaving her masterwork as her first and final statement in prose. Sister Anne would die the year after Emily, in 1849.

In some way, at that point, Charlotte knew that she and her siblings should be set free. Having outlived them, in 1850, Charlotte Brontë, immensely popular as “Currer Bell,” publicly finished destroying the literary glass ceiling that she and her sisters had been so busily, secretly smashing. She published a corrected edition of Wuthering Heights , putting her sister Emily’s name to the book and laying bare in a foreword note the three sisters’ assumption of male noms de plume .

That sisterly correction, among a host of other elements as intangible and yet as instantly recognizable as great literary talent, is also part of what drives Lot 35 in Christie’s Exceptional Sale into its current stratosphere.