The new Heathcliff's background

The Yorkshire Post looks into 'Heathcliff and the ghosts of slavery' inspired by the latest on-screen Heathcliff's skin colour.

The Sills owned a farmhouse called High Rigg End situated on the flanks of Whernside, Yorkshire’s highest mountain. Their fortune came not from farming, however, but from the ownership of plantations on the Caribbean island of Jamaica.
That the Sills brought slaves to Dentdale to work as their servants is not merely local folklore. It has been shown by the discovery of a Liverpool newspaper advertisement in 1758 placed by one Edmund Sill of Dent in which a “handsome reward” was offered for the return of a slave who had escaped. He was said to be named Thomas Anson, “a Negro Man, about five feet six inches high, aged 20 years or upwards”.
For those people who’ve heard the story it comes a shock to find that slavery was not something which happened thousands of miles away but was present in one of the most picturesque corners of the Yorkshire Dales. Now, the tale is likely to become widely known because of a new film version of Wuthering Heights in which the part of Heathcliff is played by a black actor, James Howson from Leeds.
The casting of Heathcliff as black may seem like PC gone mad. After all, the role was played by Laurence Olivier in the first film adaptation in 1939, and since then the wild romantic hero has been played at least half a dozen times, by actors like Ralph Fiennes and ex-007 Timothy Dalton. They all had one thing in common. They were white.
This is despite the author, Emily Brontë, describing Heathcliff’s skin colour “as dark as though it came from the Devil”. Until now, this description somehow never registered with film producers. Heathcliff – the greatest romantic character in 19th century English literature – black? Surely not.
However, the idea of a dark-skinned Heathcliff was not a wild flight of Emily Brontë’s imagination. There is evidence that she based the character on real events in Dentdale.
But how could that be? As the crow flies, Dentdale is the best part of 50 miles from the famous parsonage at Haworth where Emily Brontë wrote her dramatic love story. The answer is that between 1824 and 1825 Emily and her sisters Maria, Elizabeth and Charlotte were sent to the Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan Bridge, on the main route from Leeds to Kendal but, more pertinently, it was fairly close to Dentdale and a place which had known connections with the Sills family’s social circle.
The link between the Sills and Wuthering Heights has been known to Brontë scholars for some time, and in 2002 an annotated edition of the novel, by Christopher Heywood of Sheffield University, was published showing a black Heathcliff on its cover.
Much of the story has been traced by Dentdale historian, Kim Lyon. She began researching the rumours of the Sills’ slaves back in the 1970s and came across an intriguing story. It related to their adoption of a white orphan boy called Richard Sutton, who was described as a “foundling” when brought to Dentdale by Edmund Sill.
Rather than bringing him up with the Sills’ three sons and one daughter, however, he was kept with the slaves.
When she began researching the Sills of Dentdale, Kim soon found herself on the trail of similarities between Richard Sutton and Emily Brontë‘s Heathcliff. Both were orphans taken in by well-off families, both were badly treated, and both lived fairly wild lives.
In a short book called The Dentdale Brontë Trail which Kim Lyon self-published in 1985, she wrote that by 1805 Edmund and Elizabeth Sill were dead, as were their three sons. Only an unmarried daughter, Ann, survived them and she inherited huge estates which included some 20 farms in Dentdale and neighbouring Deepdale, as well as the Sill family’s fine new Colonial-style residence called West House, half a mile from their farm of High Rigg End.
Sutton, meanwhile, rose from being the foundling brought up with the slaves to become the Sills’ estate manager. But more interestingly as far as the Brontë connection is concerned, he had what Kim described as an “enigmatic relationship” with Ann.
Sutton now lived in the bleak location of High Rigg End, while Ann lived the life of a lady at West House, just as Heathcliff lived in the remote moorland farmhouse of Wuthering Heights and Catherine Earnshaw resided at Thrushcross Grange.
Kim wrote that Sutton’s character “was not of a very high moral standing on other peoples’ eyes. He had so displeased Ann that, on one occasion, she’d had him flogged.” Yet her will proved that she was fond of him, because she left him High Rigg End as well as another property and one-tenth of her income.
The parallels between fact and fiction are obvious, although in her book Kim suggested that Emily Brontë combined another scandal from Dentdale for the story of Catherine and Heathcliff’s doomed romance. She appears to have mixed the relationship between Richard Sutton and Ann Sill with local gossip that Ann fell in love with a black coachman.
The coachman subsequently disappeared without trace, and it is said that Ann’s brothers had decided such a union would be inappropriate. A century later, in 1902, a human skeleton was found beneath flagstones in the cellar of West House. The implication is that this was the remains of Ann’s lover.
Today, the Sills’ homes can still be seen in Dentdale. West House is now known as Whernside Manor, where local legend has it there were iron rings on cellar walls for chaining up slaves. The current owners have found no evidence of this, however.
There is a small display about slavery in the Dent Village Heritage Centre but questions about the Sills’ keeping of slaves at West House go unanswered. “It’s all a long time ago,” is the evasive response.
This has left the legend of the slaves to magnify in size. One version is that locals won’t talk about it because many of the slaves were murdered together, and the River Dee which drains Dentdale turned bright red with their blood. Another is that some long-established Dentdale families are, in part, descended from the slaves.
But there’s no denying that the remote location brings the story of Catherine and Heathcliff to life. As Kim Lyon wrote in conclusion, “The astounding comparisons that can be made can be accepted or ignored… These observances are not written as a dictate, but as an exploration into an absorbing literary mystery that has intrigued Brontë scholars for years.” (Roger Ratcliffe)

The Arts Desk reviews the new film:

Director Andrea Arnold (Fish Tank, Red Road) makes a strong case however for returning to the plundered literary treasure chest. Rather than abandoning the cruel, urban sensibility of her previous features, she sustains its bolshy gaze, making little or no allowance for the conventions of costume drama.
Language – the fist with which Brontë makes her case – hangs uselessly, like a withered limb
It’s a good fit. While an Arnold take on Jane Eyre or Villette would make no sense (though a re-think of Austen’s social satire on her terms might be rather bracing), in Wuthering Heights Arnold recognises a dramatic kinship, bringing to the fore a frenzy that is only barely contained in the novel. Her camera roams with hand-held stumblings, uncovering memories strewn like the fleshy remnants of battle across the moors. It lingers close and long on beetles and birds, the animal life whose strivings and labourings give little more pause to the wind than those of the Earnshaws give the Fates. No soundtrack here (Mumford & Sons’ intrusion into the very last frame is a serious misstep), just the physical force of the gale pushing its way into the ear. Rain, mud and excrement duly play their supporting roles, forcing themselves across the porous boundaries of the domestic interior, the heath rejecting the tumorous human growth of the Heights. [...]
There are few current directors better placed than Arnold to make a go of Brontë’s novel, to justify the retelling of the too-familiar tale. There’s innovation certainly, but also – rather better concealed – an awful lot of authenticity here. Perhaps the greatest compliment I can pay Arnold is to say that the film’s faults are almost all those of the novel itself. Her Wuthering Heights is a film of unwavering conviction. Excess, irrationality and the blunt pain of being human all assault the viewer on cue. With the film over two hours long however, concision is one skill she would have done well to learn from Brontë. (Alexandra Coghlan)

The Independent (Ireland) talks to Andrea Arnold:

Taking on Wuthering Heights, she says was less a decision than a compulsion. But then it's like that for all of her films. The way she describes the arrival of inspiration sounds almost like a haunting.
"It was almost out of my control, it's the same with my own ideas as well, it's like it comes and then it knocks on your door and it knocks and knocks and does not go away. It wants to be heard and you have to go along with it. It draws you in." [...]
Wuthering Heights had started troubling her dreams the first time she saw the original film as a child. It was the enigmatic, almost problematic, soul of the story which really appealed to her when she was offered the director's job.
The film had been in development for some time, but the original director left and the producers came to her. "I sort of leapt at it," she says, explaining how she completely rewrote the script to accommodate her strong voice. "Even though I really didn't know what I was going to do, or how I was going to deal with it. It's not a book you can push into shape very easily.
"It's one of those things you almost can't do justice to. I must have been mad, but I just couldn't help it. I just had to go on this journey."
The result is a beautiful, almost intensely sensual film, rich in visual poetry, and visceral texture, "spit and blood and tears and mud and violence and sex," which bring the viewer right into the physical experience of each scene.
If there are themes in common with Fish Tank; an intense exploration of adolescent sexuality being among the most striking, Arnold doesn't necessarily see it. When I raise the subject with her, she seems surprised. Does she have particularly vivid memories of her own adolescence? I ask.
"It's not something I consciously think about, but ... now I'm thinking, God, am I interested in adolescent sexuality? Maybe I am! I haven't noticed. But now you say that -- my next project is along similar lines." (Julia Molony)

Vogue UK interviews Kaya Scodelario:

"We stayed very true to the ages of the book, when you fall in love at 14, or when you're a teenager, it's different to anything you'll ever feel again in your life," she said. "There's this beautiful innocence and you're just surrounded by it all. I've fallen in love and had my heartbroken, and of course it was different to Cathy, but I understand that feeling where you lose yourself. You stop talking to your friends, something in you changes. I find it easy to act being in love. I've experienced that and analysed it. Most people think of Wuthering Heights as romantic, it's really not about that at all."

The Paris Review discusses unread books:

I have never got through Jane Eyre or Giovanni’s Room or Journey to the End of the Night or Zeno’s Conscience or Pierre—I have never got through chapter one of Pierre. (Lorin Stein)

The Los Angeles Times pauses to think about babies and the classics:

This is one reason infants are so rare in literary classics. Think about it. "Moby-Dick," no babies, "Pride and Prejudice," no babies, "The Catcher in the Rye," "Jane Eyre" "The Great Gatsby," "The Sun Also Rises," pretty much the entire canon of William Shakespeare, no babies. (Mary McNamara)

Not very prominently but there are at least two babies in Jane Eyre: Bessie's and Jane's own (not counting her dreams).

We wonder if the participants at the local quiz night reported by The Telegraph and Argus would have known that?

What is the closest country to the North Pole? In which river did Amy Johnson die? Which Brontë sister wrote Napoleon And The Spectre?
These were among the 100 questions fired at a packed school hall as it hosted a quiz night. (Helen Mead)

The Flintshire Chronicle reports that We Are Three Sisters arrives today at the New Vic Theatre, Etruria Road, Newcastle-under-Lyme.

The Philadelphia Daily News mourns the death of a local 'patron of the arts' who was a Brontëite. Associated Content has an article on 'The Brontë Sisters on Relationships'. Regency Delight and Mia Folkmann (in Danish) discuss Jane Eyre adaptations. A Gold of Fish writes about the novel.