Heathcliff's Tale

First an admission. It took me a while and a few goes before I appreciated Wuthering Heights. I still can't describe myself as a massive fan, but I will fiercely defend Emily Bronte as the writer.

Emma Tennant's Heathcliffe's Tale did sound like the kind of book I love, as I enjoyed reading her Pride and Prejudice spin off when I was first getting into Austen. However, I found this book did a great disservice both to the source material and to the Bronte family.

Wriiten in the 18th century style, this is the tale of Henry Newby, who visits Haworth Parsonage on a mission to find the elusive Ellis Bell, along the way finding fragments of original manuscripts which tell additional parts of the story of Heathcliffe and also illuminate who may have written the manuscript and their inspiration. It is all very confused and confusing and places Bramwell, the brother of Emily Bronte in the forefront of candidates for the author of the novel. I'd heard of the theory of Bramwell as the author previously, and wasn't really impressed, I'm afraid I was even more disappointed that a female author placed him as the author. There is little sense of the family in the book anyway, at the point it's set Charlotte is elsewhere and the other Brontes have all died aside from Patrick and the servant. Worse still, the novel is supposedly inspired by a potential incestuous relationship between Emily and Bramwell and the found manuscript includes and explanation whereby Heathcliffe is the bastard son of Mr Earnshaw and Cathy his incestuous daughter by Catherine! I thought this aspect was sensationalised and unnecessary. The relationship is already forbidden by way of the class differences and the fact that Heathcliffe's parentage is unknown, he can have an interesting backstory and motivation without it being incestuous and Emily can be as passionate and complicated as Bramwell, enough to write WH especially without making the backstory all about ‘Byronic' passions between her and her brother.

I found Nelly Dean by Alison Case a much better exploration of the world of WH.