The House of Dead Maids

We have discovered via Becky's Book Reviews a new book by Clare B. Dunkle based on Wuthering Heights that will be published in 2010:

The House of Dead Maids (working title), a Wuthering Heights prequel which will probably be scheduled for early 2010.

Ginee Seo of Atheneum (Simon & Schuster) acquired The Sky Inside and The House of Dead Maids for her own imprint of Ginee Seo Books and asked me to write The Walls Have Eyes for her.

Becky's Book Reviews interviews the author and gives more information:

And I was very very intrigued to see that you’re working on a prequel for Wuthering Heights! Can you share any little tidbits—tease us a bit with what’s in store for readers—I must say I’d be eager to read both of those!

The Wuthering Heights prequel draft is done, and I think it horrified my editor when she got it—something like sending a rabid Chihuahua through the mail. It's based on a lifetime of mulling over that book; you might say its my own literary criticism of Emily Bronte's novel, but written in the form of another novel.

My take on Heathcliff is that he has no place in Wuthering Heights. He doesn't want to be there, nobody else wants him there, and aside from causing misery to everyone (including himself), he is largely powerless. Think about how the novel progresses: we're pretty sure Edgar would have married Cathy whether Heathcliff had come along or not, that she likely would have died having their first child, and that Cathy II and Hareton would have wound up engaged in order to unite the family fortunes. Heathcliff can't endure these turns of events, but they take place in spite of everything he does to prevent them. By the time Lockwood comes back to visit his landlord, Heathcliff has vanished from the book, leaving scarcely a trace.

For all Heathcliff's brilliance and ruthlessness, he can't change one bit of the plot. Clearly, then, he's a character who belongs in another story, a story where the ghostly and demonic forces that surround him make sense and where he can be who he really wants to be. I give the little boy Heathcliff that story in my prequel. And, just as an act of misplaced kindness at the beginning of Wuthering Heights delivers this imp into Emily Bronte's story, a similar act of misplaced kindness at the end of my book removes Heathcliff from his proper milieu and sets him on the path to Wuthering Heights.

Apparently, where Heathcliff is concerned, kindness doesn't pay. He never asks for it, and he certainly doesn't understand it.

Categories: Books, Sequels, Wuthering Heights