Emily Brontë and Walter Scott

Writer Michael Stewart has written an article on the 'horrifying inspiration' behind the novels of Walter Scott and Wuthering Heights for The Sunday Post.

I’m not the first person to see Walter Scott’s influence more specifically on Emily Brontë, nor am I the first to find parallels between Scott’s novel, Waverley, and Emily’s Wuthering Heights. Her enthusiasm is well documented.

We don’t know which novels Emily read, only that she was an avid reader of his work, as was her sister, Charlotte. Scott’s novel The Black Dwarf (1816) features an unrequited love of the dwarf, Sir Edward Mauley, that is similar to Heathcliff’s for Catherine.

Both the dwarf and Heathcliff have demonic and vengeful personalities. The setting of Rob Roy (1817) is as wild as the moors that surround Wuthering Heights. Flora’s passion in Waverley (1814) is reminiscent of Catherine’s stormy passion.

Scott was a huge influence on the development of the Gothic genre. One of the best-known Gothic scenes in English literature is found in Emily Brontë’s only published novel, Wuthering Heights (1847). [...]

The ghost explains that she is Catherine Linton and has “come home, I’d lost my way on the moor!” He sees a child’s face and in his fear he pulls the child’s wrist on to the broken glass, rubbing it “to and fro till the blood ran down and soaked the bed-clothes”.

It is a chillingly effective scene and one that has been pored over by fans and scholars of the Brontës and it features in every one of the film and TV adaptations of the book. It even inspired Kate Bush to write her debut single, which includes a poem by Bush to celebrate Emily Brontë’s legacy. But to what extent is this scene a product of Emily’s imagination? Or was an earlier text an influence?

Scott was a lifelong student of folklore, and Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft Addressed To JG Lockhart, Esq. (1830) found many readers during the 19th Century and influenced the Victorian vogue for the Gothic. The book is divided into 10 parts, each taking the form of a letter from the author to his son-in-law, JG Lockhart. Isn’t Lockhart very similar to Lockwood, incidentally?

It looks at attitudes to demonology from Biblical times up to the 19th Century. He also writes about ghosts, and other tropes familiar to the Gothic genre. The book was a best-seller, although reception from critics was mixed. It was a book the Brontës would almost certainly have read with great interest. [...]

Unlike the phantom in the nobleman’s nightmare, Lockwood’s phantom wants to pull herself into the bed, not pull him out of it but in this passage, there is a great deal of similarity with the scene that would become iconic, not just in the Gothic tradition, but in the whole of European literature when another “little, ice-cold hand” will cast a chill over Wuthering Heights.

The Brussels Brontë Blog discusses Villette.