‘No life higher than the grasstops/or the hearts of sheep’

United by Pop interviews writer Karen Powell about her novel Fifteen Wild Decembers.

Out of the Brontë sisters, why did you pick Emily to focus on? Is it because you like her work the most out of the Brontë sisters? Or is it because you connect with her the most?

Wuthering Heights, Emily’s only novel, was the first adult book I ever read. Perhaps I was expecting something dreary, a polite Victorian drama. Instead, I found myself immersed in a savage landscape inhabited by wild people who spit at one other, dig up the dead, threaten each other with knives, and lock family members in rooms. Everyone does exactly as they please, with no regard for the consequences, a storm of unregulated emotion that was both enthralling and familiar to my teenage self. I’d never read anything like it. Decades later, with a lot more novel reading under my belt, I still haven’t, so although I find all the Brontë siblings fascinating, it was always going to be Emily. [...]

When writing Fifteen Wild Decembers, you must have consulted many references. Was it then difficult to make sure the book reads like a story instead of an autobiography?

The research period was quite intense, with many notebooks, and a vast spreadsheet mapping who was where at any given time, and what was happening in the wider world. I am a novelist though, write for a reader who cares only for a compelling, emotionally authentic narrative. It took a few attempts to jettison any unnecessary weight from the manuscript, to find a line through Emily’s life that might be interesting to someone unfamiliar with, or even disinterested in, the Brontë story. I wanted to retain the known facts, while at the same time allowing my imagination to work its way into any intriguing spaces.

The complicated relationship between the sisters is written so well. How did you manage to capture sisterhood so well?!

I’ve never known siblings who don’t clash. And here were four adult siblings, each strong-willed in their own way, all living under one roof, at least some of the time. Anyone who has visited what is now the Parsonage Museum will know that it’s a small house. There’s no remote wing to storm off to in high dudgeon, no attic room in which to conceal uncomfortable truths. Throw into the mix the debilitating strain of poverty, unrequited love, thwarted ambitions, a failed love affair, laudanum addiction, an ageing parent with failing eyesight, and you have a recipe for conflict.

But there was intense attachment too, forged in childhood through their extraordinary imaginations. Long after the untimely deaths of Branwell, Emily and Anne, a servant reported hearing Charlotte walk around the dining room table at night, just as she and her sisters once did while reading aloud their work to one another. The thought of her utter aloneness in that echoing room is devastating to me.

The descriptions of the landscape are gorgeous. When writing these descriptions, did you have to go to a similar setting to write them well?

I’ve lived in Yorkshire for over twenty years now, was already familiar with much of the countryside, but the landscape around Emily’s home at Haworth, the famous setting for Wuthering Heights, is quite different from the Dales, say, or the Wolds. Bleakly beautiful, it’s a land of heather and peat and sucking bog, with ‘no life higher than the grasstops/or the hearts of sheep’ (Sylvia Plath). I walked in Emily’s footsteps in all weathers and seasons, learning the landscape she loved so passionately that she suffered physical and mental breakdowns on the few occasions she was persuaded to leave it. Aside from the reservoirs in the Worth valley, and the signposts in both English and Japanese to sights associated with the Brontës, little can have changed.

But much of the book was written during the pandemic. With restrictions on movement likely to be imposed at any moment, my visits to Haworth became even more precious. I took endless photos, became vigilant about noting which wildflowers were in bloom, identifying that bird call I’d heard while my boots got stuck in the peat for the umpteenth time. Back at home, the Ordnance Survey map which helped me ‘plan’ Emily’s own walks across the moors began to fall apart along the folds. Travel to Brussels, where Emily and Charlotte spent some time, was impossible though. The city had to be conjured from reference books and my own imagination. (Tacye)

CrimeReads recommends '5 Books for Mystery Lovers Who Want to Be Transported' including

The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde

Charles Yu wrote “Every book of Fforde’s seems to be a cause for celebration,” and The Eyre Affair is the book that kicked off the party. Fforde’s riotously original debut introduces us to Thursday Next, a LiteraTec Special Operative with a mind that can’t be swayed. In the book’s alternate England, literary obsession is the status quo. The debate over Shakespeare’s identity has given rise to an entire movement of door-to-door proselytizers, and the theft of the original manuscript of Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit is front-page news. Operative Next, searching for the manuscript thief, gets pulled into a mystery that takes her everywhere from her hometown of Swindon to the inside of Jane Eyre itself. Each twist and turn in the plot’s intricate path is an opportunity for Fforde to dazzle the reader with another of his imaginative ideas, from hate crimes between rival surrealist and impressionist gangs to pet dodos (resurrected from extinction through home cloning technology). His deep love of classic literature shines through every page. Perfect for bibliophiles looking for a laugh-out-loud read. (Paz Pardo)

BFI reviews the film Raging Grace.

Raging Grace incorporates a wealth of classic mystery elements familiar from Jane Eyre, The Woman in White or Bluebeard: significant sleepwalking, forced confinement of an inconvenient female relative in a madhouse, poison administered drop by drop (in parallel with Grace’s favourite prank of putting strawberry jam in the ketchup), and dreams which might be real competing with troubling realities written off as tall tales. Even some social-realistic elements – Grace has to sleep in a wardrobe so Joy can keep her job and a roof over their heads – would be an easy fit for 19th century melodrama. (Kim Newman)