A literary pilgrimage to look forward to

iNews suggests 'Six literary pilgrimages in the UK to plan for', such as

Haworth, West Yorkshire – Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

The Brontë siblings lived with their father Patrick in the parsonage at Haworth, a village on the edge of the Yorkshire moors. The family was plagued by tuberculosis: two older sisters died of the disease in 1825, followed by Branwell and Emily in 1848, Anne in 1849 and Charlotte in 1855. Emily wrote one novel, Wuthering Heights, which the poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti called “a fiend of a book”.

Wuthering Heights is the name of a remote house on the moors, the setting for the tumultuous love affair between the passionate Catherine Earnshaw and her adopted brother, the brooding, swarthy Heathcliff.

Where to walk: Start by visiting the Brontë Parsonage Museum, where you can see the table at which Emily, Charlotte and Anne wrote; then walk west to the crags and the abandoned farmhouse Top Withens, said by some to have inspired Emily. (Henry Eliot)

Cairns Post (Australia) tells about Kathy George became a Gothic writer who has recently published a novel called Sargasso.

When I was 16, Wuthering Heights was a setwork book and more than half my class was in love with Heathcliff. Tormented, intense and complex, he remains my favourite literary character to this day. I have a vivid memory of most of us faintly marking the ambiguous paragraph where Cathy and Heathcliff have sex but, to our great disappointment, Miss Young skated nimbly over that part. [...]

I also fell for Jane Eyre, which encompasses everything you could want in a Gothic novel: an orphan battling to find not only love but her place in life; the enigmatic and prickly Mr Rochester, who we grow to love; his imprisoned and mad first wife; and, to top it off, the cremation of the mysterious house, Thornfield. What’s not to love? [...]

Now I have written my own Australian Gothic novel, Sargasso — a Wuthering Heights for the modern-day Australian reader. Sargasso is set in an isolated beach house on the Australian coastline, and concerns the obsessive childhood friendship between Hannah and Flint. Flint is a Heathcliff. He is a tortured and complex soul, poor man, and it was an absolute thrill to create him.

I played around with the hallmarks of Gothic writing. Instead of the bleak English climate, I used the harsh Australian sun; in place of the stately English home or dreary mansion, I created a stunning, architect-designed beach house, which becomes a character in the novel.

The Times reviews The Crichel Boys by Simon Fenwick:

Friends called them “the Crichel Boys”, “the Bears” or “the Bachelors”. To others they were the “hyphenated gentlemen-aesthetes”. They were gay, or bi, or open-minded. Nancy Mitford called them “the Brontës” and the novelist Elizabeth Bowen the “dear old cissies”. (Laura Freeman)

According to La Voce del popolo (in Italian) the Brontës are the clearest example of xenophobia in 19th-century English literature.

Il rapporto con gli stranieri è pure un elemento importante nei romanzi di Agatha Christie e riflette una punta di xenofobia che serpeggia nella società britannica e si nota anche in alcuni grandi classici dell’Ottocento (è, ad esempio, abbastanza ricorrente nelle opere delle sorelle Brontë) (Helena Labus Bačić) (Translation)

Satirical writer Ross O’Carroll-Kelly 'likens his life to Heathcliff’s – especially when it comes to women' in The Irish Times.