The author of Fifteen Wild Decembers on her evocative reimagination of Emily Brontë’s life narrated in the 19th century novelist’s own voice
What drew you to write a novel based on the Brontë sisters and Branwell?
Wuthering Heights was the first adult novel I ever read, given to me by my mother from her precious set of Collectors’ Editions that sat on the mantelpiece in our family home. After that, I read Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and then, over the next few years, books by Anne Brontë and Jane Austen. So, long before I ever thought of myself as a writer, the Brontës – and the 19th century novel – were part of my DNA.
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I began writing in my early thirties, about the same time that I moved to Yorkshire. I now lived within travelling distance of the Brontë Parsonage Museum – once the Brontë family home – at Haworth, in the South Pennines. The setting of the house is incredibly atmospheric, situated at the top of the steep village with wild moorland rising directly behind, and the museum is so wonderfully curated that you might imagine the family had just stepped out for a walk, or to attend a service at the church where the Reverend Patrick Brontë, the children’s father, preached; that Emily and her siblings might wander back in at any moment. I found myself drawn to Haworth over and over again, my fascination with the lives lived within the walls of the parsonage growing. How was it possible, I wondered, that some of the most remarkable novels in the English language came to be written in this remote village far from London literary circles, in this little dining room overlooking the windswept graveyard and the church; in secret.
Why did you particularly choose to write in Emily’s voice?
From the very beginning, I was enthralled by Emily’s only novel, mesmerized by the punishing landscape and the half-savage, ungovernable characters that inhabit the pages of Wuthering Heights. At 13, I’d never read anything like it, still haven’t, though it is now some decades since my mother first put the book into my hands. When I finished the novel, I turned back to the beginning to read the Introduction. I learned that Emily Brontë was the daughter of an Anglican clergyman, that she lived almost all of life in isolated Haworth before her death at the age of 30. Emily never married or had any known romantic connections. Reserved to the point of silence in company, she had no friendships and barely mixed outside of her own family. Even as a teenager I sensed an intriguing disconnect between that sequestered existence and a novel so passionate and shocking that it scandalized Victorian society, and still has the power to shock even today. I love the work of all three sisters but feel emotionally drawn to Emily’s untamed spirit, intrigued too by the apparent gaps in the narrative of her life.
What kind of research did you do for the book?
I reread all the novels, immersed myself too in Emily’s wonderful poetry, then spent many months absorbing information about the family and the period from the wealth of biographical texts available. I made notes, drew up a timeline of their respective movements, questioned certain interpretations of events. At an early stage it became clear that much of what we know about the Brontës comes through the prism of Charlotte, Emily’s elder sister. Charlotte was a prolific letter writer and formed friendships beyond the family. She was the only one of the siblings to move in literary circles too, which resulted in Elizabeth Gaskell’s somewhat sensationalized Life of Charlotte Brontë (Mrs Gaskell was a novelist after all!). I needed to strip Charlotte’s voice from the narrative, to turn down the volume on the other chatter in the room and attune myself to Emily’s austere, uncompromising, sometimes imperious, occasionally playful voice.
What is it about Wuthering Heights that you feel made it a successful work for its time?
Wuthering Heights is a novel that reads differently at different points in our lives. Many of us first discover the book in our teenage years, an intense and tumultuous time when a story of wild passions has a particular resonance. The disregard for authority or convention is appealing too – even the “good” characters in the book are unbiddable, do exactly as they please with no regard for the consequences. As adults, we are often shocked by the novel’s violence, the death wish obsessions of the protagonists. The inhabitants of Wuthering Heights threaten one another with knives and lock family members in rooms. They mistreat children and animals, curse one another, dig up the dead and call it love. “It’s not a love story,” we say, shaking our heads in wonder at our teenage selves, who once thought otherwise.
I can find no sense, though, that Emily Brontë, clergyman’s daughter, is inviting us to make a moral judgement. She simply wrote about the place she loved so passionately, and then peopled it with the kind of creatures, who might inhabit such a land. Here we are, her characters seem to say. The Earnshaw family emanate directly from that bleak landscape, even the adopted orphan Heathcliff, though he arrives ostensibly from Liverpool. They rise up from the peat and the boggy ground until it reclaims them; are as immoral as a stony outcrop, a stretch of windswept moorland.
We know Emily was a walker and she captured the landscape, the moors, the rivers so well in Wuthering Heights. Tell us about capturing the essence of Yorkshire, the sense of that place in the north of England, in your book.
When I moved to Yorkshire, I was immediately entranced by the vast and rugged landscapes of the north. I’d grown up in southeast England where the countryside is soft, pretty, ordered, a land of hops and hedgerows and oast houses, with dwarf apple and cherry trees planted in neat rows in the fields. Even then, I lived in the suburbs, had no real notion then of how to access the countryside, made do instead with the pockets of wildness that children seek out wherever they live. The moors that surround Emily’s home were her lifeblood, to the extent that she suffered breakdowns almost every time she had to leave Haworth. The terrain in that part of the county is quite different from the Yorkshire Dales, or even the North York Moors. It is a land of peat and heather and bog, “no life higher than the grasstops, or the hearts of sheep”, as Sylvia Plath put it. I spent many hours walking in Emily’s footsteps on the moorland above Haworth, in different seasons and in all weathers. I wanted to learn the landscape for myself, to note which wildflowers were in bloom, listen for bird calls, feel that waterlogged, peaty soil give beneath my boots. Much of Fifteen Wild Decembers was written in the pandemic though. Never knowing when I might next be able to visit, I made copious notes and took hundreds of photos. The Ordnance Survey map I used at home to “plan” Emily’s walks began to fall apart along the folds.
What was the biggest challenge in attempting to novelise an artist’s life, and their relationship with their family members (in this case the sisters and the brother), keeping in mind their intellectual development as they grow up together?
When writing about the life of any historical figure, there comes a point where a novelist must choose the line they wish to take. With Emily, this became about silence and the power of the imagination. I wondered how it might feel to live in a world that places no value on your extraordinary inner world, what happens to words when they aren’t used; the force behind those tamped-down expressions of self when they finally surface. A necessary part of this is discarding other possible approaches, or at least drawing attention from them. It can be difficult to jettison months of research to lighten the narrative load, but you learn to be ruthless.
I also had to remind myself to stay in the moment. When the young Brontë children played with Branwell’s set of toy soldiers they could not know that the stories they invented would affect the rest of their lives, at times to the point of sickness. Like other children they would have argued with their siblings, changed the rules to suit themselves, or wandered off halfway through a game.
Likewise, when Emily, Charlotte and Anne sat down to write their novels, they had no inkling that their works would one day be famous across the world. In fact, they were in desperate straits. Branwell, once the hope of the family, had become addicted to alcohol and laudanum, while Charlotte was distraught with unrequited love for her old school master.
The Reverend Brontë was ageing and going blind, and on his death the Parsonage would revert to the church governors, leaving the family homeless. To escape the misery of working away from home as teachers or governesses, the sisters had attempted to set up at school of their own but failed to attract a single pupil. When they paid to have a collection of their poetry published, it sold just two copies. So, the novels were written in desperation, delusion even, in secret too, a last-ditch attempt to ward off poverty and the kind of work the sisters found unbearable. When writing about this period of their lives, I needed to convey the fact that the parsonage was not some sort of idyllic writing retreat tucked beneath the moors, but a place where seismic emotions and fervid hopes and fears were at play, all beneath the roof of that small house.
Arunima Mazumdar is an independent writer. She is @sermoninstone on Twitter and @sermonsinstone on Instagram.
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