Women writers of neo-Victorian fiction

Church Times reviews Karen Powell's Fifteen Wild Decembers.

Writing in our post-feminist culture, Karen Powell has her own version of Emily narrated in the first person, as in Charlotte’s Jane Eyre and Anne’s Agnes Grey. This gives a sharp focus to the events described, but also imposes a limit to their interpretation by the sole narrator.

Much scholarly ink has been spilt over the sources of Wuthering Heights, such as Scott, Byron, and the Gothic stories in Blackwood’s Magazine; and Powell reminds the reader of the importance to Emily of seminal works such as King Lear and Paradise Lost. But, for all its literary freight, which the theorists would call “neo-Victorian intertextuality”, Fifteen Wild Decembers succeeds as a free-standing narrative, casting its spell over the reader, whether or not she has read the Brontës’ novels and their sources, and having the creative audacity to offer a clue to the “true” source of Emily’s classic.

From start to finish, much of the energy generated by this narrative is related to movement — on board ships, in trains and coaches, and on foot, as we are taken briskly across the moors. Even in interior scenes, a sense of imprisonment leads to nervous pacing to and fro. The tension between movement and stasis, between the narrator’s longing for freedom and love of home, is expressed physically, in her selective mutism, for example, and her propensity for lying on the ground. She is blocked, thwarted, hemmed in, even by the siblings she loves the most.

Christian readers will notice that most of the clergy who populate Emily’s world are unprepossessing. The sisters “made a point of despising” Papa’s curates at Haworth, according to Emily, who is of the earth, earthy. In Chapter 8, the boy who throws something at her at Ponden Clough, cutting her cheek, is “bare-foot, goat-sure, dressed in rough, country clothes the colour of mushrooms”. Longing to retaliate, she haunts the place that spring and summer, but fails to see the boy “rising out of the heather again”. [...]

In her acknowledgments, Powell singles out Juliet Barker’s group biography of the Brontë family as a source of inspiration. Barker’s achievement was to separate the myth from the reality, achieved by long and painstaking archival work. Powell emulates Barker by covering the whole family in her chronological narrative, including the servants and the much misunderstood Papa, that redoubtable pastor and reformer.

She also stands in a line of women writers of neo-Victorian fiction, such as Sarah Perry in The Essex Serpent, who draw on the four elements in their exploration of the unconscious. Charlotte Brontë married one of Papa’s curates and ended Jane Eyre with the word “Jesus”. The last word of Wuthering Heights is “earth”. (Dr Michael Wheeler)

Karen Powell is also the guest on this month’s Church Times' Book Club Podcast, where Sarah Meyrick interviews her about her novel.

Buxton Advertiser reports that,

The George at Hathersage, a 500-year-old coaching inn, will reopen on June 13 after being closed for eight months. (Tom Hardwick)

claiming in the headline that it was 'once visited by Charlotte Brontë', who probably alighted from her coach there when she visited Ellen Nussey in Hathersage.