Biofictional Nelly

More scholarly approaches to Wuthering Heights derivatives:

An (Auto)Biofictional (Re )Writing of a Brontë Classic: Alison Case’s Nelly Dean (2016)

by Isabelle Roblin, University of the Littoral Opal Coast

Neo-Victorian Studies, Vol. 15 No. 1 (2024): Special Issue: Beyond Biofiction: Writers and Writing in Neo-Victorian Media

Alison Case’s Nelly Dean (2016) is in many ways typical of the numerous re-writings of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847). In this contemporary novel, constructed as a monologic epistolary retelling of its famous hypotext, Nelly is given the opportunity to tell Mr. Lockwood her side of the story, as well as to provide new information about her relationships to the other characters, especially Hindley Earnshaw. Moreover, the double interrogation of who exactly Nelly is writing for and why she is writing looms larger and larger as the story develops. This article focuses on the analysis of this self-reflexivity and on the promotion of Nelly Dean from second-hand narrator in Wuthering Heights to writer of her own biography in Case’s eponymous novel.