13 December: Wuthering Heights

On this date in 1847, Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte was published. A timely one for me, since at time of writing I’m re-reading it for my book club! 10 things you might not know about Wuthering Heights:

1. It was self published. After the novel was rejected by numerous publishers, Emily and Anne paid £50 (a lot of money in them days!) to publish two novels in one volume – Wuthering Heights and Anne’s novel Agnes Gray. They used the pseudonyms Ellis and Acton because female writers weren’t respected at the time. Even so it wasn’t a great success. Emily, who died of tuberculosis a year later, died thinking her book was a failure.
2. The original manuscript for the book has never been found.
3. It certainly came in for some harsh criticism at the time, due to the subject matter – bearing in mind it was published in Victorian times. “How a human being could have attempted such a book as the present without committing suicide before he had finished a dozen chapters, is a mystery. It is a compound of vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors,” wrote one magazine.
4. In 1850, Emily’s sister Charlotte published a revised edition. She did quite a bit of editing, which included toning down the Yorkshire dialect, realising that, while people in Yorkshire would get it, people in the south would find it incomprehensible. She also wrote a preface outing Emily and Anne as female authors, and explaining the wildness of Wuthering Heights as a result of Emily being a "nursling of the moors", and that phenomenon many writers will be familiar with, that Emily’s creative gift "strangely wills and works for itself."
5. Emily’s inspiration for the novel was literally on her doorstep. The back door of her father’s parsonage opened onto the moors. Emily, a loner and a nature lover, spent much time walking in the wild landscape she went on to write about. Wuthering Heights the house is thought to have been inspired by a nearby farmhouse called Top Withens, which was located on a windswept, isolated hillside. It’s a ruin now, but in Emily’s time it would have been a working farm. High Sunderland Hall, another nearby house, lends some of its architectural details to the fictional house. The ruins of Top Withins are a popular destination for Wuthering Heights fans.
6. Her own family provided some inspiration, too. While she was writing it, her brother Branwell was living at home after a failed love affair and descending into alcoholism and drug misuse, rather like the character Hindley Earnshaw does after the death of his wife.
7. While Wuthering Heights is lauded as one of the greatest love stories of all time, it probably isn’t a love story at all, but more of a Gothic novel. The story of Heathcliff and Cathy’s relationship only takes up half of the book with most of the narrative happening after her death. And let’s face it, Heathcliff isn’t the kind of lover any mother would want their daughter to take up with – he is obsessive and violent. Some scholars even suggest that he’s not unlike a Vampire.
8. The book has a significant body count. Twelve characters die in all, and some scholars believe the number twelve is significant. Two characters die of TB, the disease that would take Emily herself a year later. Catherine succumbs to “brain fever” which was a recognised illness at the time. Modern doctors would probably put her symptoms down to meningitis.
9. The story has been dramatised on several occasions, starting 100 years ago in 1920 with a silent film which is now lost. Actors who have portrayed Heathcliff on screen include Laurence Olivier, Ian McShane, Richard Burton, Timothy Dalton and Ralph Fiennes. Merle Oberon, Juliette Binoche and Rosemary Harris are among the actresses who have portrayed Cathy.
10. We can’t end before mentioning the Kate Bush song which she released when she was just 18. It was inspired by the Olivier–Oberon film. The song is sung from Catherine's point of view, She pleads at Heathcliff's window: "Let me in! I'm so cold!" and tells of her "bad dreams in the night". The song was covered by Pat Benatar in 1980. Kate Bush isn’t the only music artist to use the novel for inspiration. Genesis released an album called Wind & Wuthering in 1976 which includes the tracks Unquiet Slumbers for the Sleepers and In That Quiet Earth, which are taken from the last line of the book. Jim Steinman’s song It's All Coming Back to Me Now was inspired by it, too, and Marillion’s Cover My Eyes (Pain and Heaven) makes reference to Cathy with the lyric "Like the girl in the novel in the wind on the moors".

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