Emily Brontë as mentor and inspiration

The writer Elizabeth Baines, author of The Birth Machine and Body Cuts, contributes to the Writer's Choice series on NormBlog. Her choice is Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights:

Which book has been most important to me? Well, how would I choose? Jane Eyre or David Copperfield, both of which, aged eleven, I bought from Woolworth's with my saved-up pocket money and which most certainly coloured my emotional landscape and increased my (already formed) determination to write? (...) But wait - wasn't I once asked this question before, and didn't I answer unhesitatingly, 'Wuthering Heights', because this novel, with its striking structure - a narrative within a narrative, yet containing other narratives, a layering of voices and perspectives - has probably had the greatest impact on my own writing? (...)

This week, all these years later, having had teenage children of my own, I read the novel again. (...) I began to realize: this was not the kind of novel I had thought it and that I believed it was generally held to be - that is, romantic or gothic. Indeed, framing the 'gothic' story as it does with the calm and rational voices of Nelly Dean and Lockwood, it is a novel which anatomizes the destructive, adolescent and selfish nature of gothic passions. (...)

So. I had forgotten that I had once cited Wuthering Heights as a main influence on me as a writer, and it turned out that in any case I'd misread it. But as I put down the novel this time I realised how far I had absorbed its real meanings and how much it had indeed influenced my writing. (...) As a twenty-first century writer I'm inevitably more interested than Brontë in voice, and prefer the more psychologically authentic-seeming interior monologue, but I know now who my mentor is for sure. (Read the complete post)

Another blogger with an Emily weakness is NeoVamp that has designed the following notebook: Inner Dimension Emily Brontë.

10 x 7 cm, collage made from an Emily Bronte portrait. 40 pages in intense blue cut one by one separately, embellished with beads and closure ribbon.

Categories: Brontëites, Websites, Wuthering Heights