Despite the wave of enthusiasm, the stone cottage where Patrick Brontë was born lies in ruins

The Orange County Register interviews Karen Powell about her novel Fifteen Wild Decembers.

Q. Please tell readers about your novel, “Fifteen Wild Decembers.”

Like many readers, I first discovered Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights” as a teenager. I was mesmerized by the wild moorland landscape she described and the equally wild characters that inhabited it.

When I finished reading, I turned to the introduction and was surprised to learn that the author of this passionate, violent novel had led a seemingly uneventful life. The daughter of an Anglican clergyman, Emily lived almost all of her life in Haworth, a remote village in the southern Pennines, hundreds of miles from literary London. She had no friends outside the family and was deeply reserved, silent to the point of rudeness when forced into company. Emily never married and there is no evidence of any romantic connections before her death at the tragically young age of 30.

I was intrigued right away by the disconnect. I wondered how someone of Emily’s background could write a novel which scandalized Victorian readers – a contemporaneous reviewer suggested the author should have committed suicide rather than continue! – and still has the power to shock to this day.

I started writing in my early thirties, around the same time that I moved to Yorkshire. Now within driving distance of Haworth, I was able to explore the wild landscape that Emily had described for myself. And, of course, to visit the Brontë Parsonage Museum, which was once home to family. The museum is so wonderfully curated that you almost expect to find Emily and her sisters working on their novels at the original dining table, in a room which overlooks the graveyard and the church where their father, the Reverend Patrick Brontë, preached.

I began to understand that Emily’s life here was far more tumultuous than I’d first thought. She and her sisters lived under the constant threat of both penury and homelessness – when their elderly, half-blind father died the parsonage would revert to the church governors, while their attempts to earn a living through teaching or governess work had ended miserably. Added to this, their brother Branwell, the only son and once the great hope of the family, had become addicted to both alcohol and laudanum after a disastrous love affair with a married woman. Visitors to the parsonage are often struck by how tiny it is. There would have been nowhere to hide from Branwell’s despair and the ensuing chaos of addiction. Emily’s home in Haworth was hardly an idyllic writing retreat and yet…

I don’t recall the precise moment I decided I must write her story, but the idea must have lurked somewhere in my teenage brain and then started to evolve during those visits to Haworth.

Q. The Brontës grew up in Yorkshire and you live in North Yorkshire. Was knowing the landscape of the area essential to understanding the family?

It would be a tall order to write about Emily Brontë without having some familiarity with the moorland that surrounds her home in Haworth. Emily was so viscerally attached to this landscape that she suffered breakdowns almost every time she was forced to leave.

After Emily’s death, Charlotte wrote: “My sister loved the moors. Flowers brighter than the rose bloomed in the blackest of the heath for her; out of a sullen hollow in a livid hillside her mind could make an Eden. She found in the bleak solitude many and dear delights; and not the least and best loved was—liberty. Liberty was the breath of Emily’s nostrils; without it, she perished.”

In order to imagine my way into Emily’s mind, it was essential to walk in her footsteps, to learn this landscape – so different to the softer, more ordered countryside of the south-east of England where I grew up – for myself. I’ve spent many hours now on the moorland that rears up directly behind Emily’s parsonage home. It’s a very particular terrain: peaty, boggy, windswept, with a bleak beauty of its own: “No life higher than the grasstops, or the hearts of sheep,” as Sylvia Plath once described it. Aside from the reservoirs down in the valley, and the signposts in both English and Japanese to Top Withens, a ruined farmhouse and the alleged inspiration for Wuthering Heights, little can have changed since Emily walked here.

Q. What’s something about your book that no one knows?

I listened to Taylor Swift almost exclusively while editing “Fifteen Wild Decembers,” to the extent that major scenes in the book are now inextricably linked in my mind with certain songs, with entire albums.

I could write about this at great length if anyone was ever interested, have a habit of telling people even if they aren’t. And don’t get me started on The Eras Tour.

Q. You’re writing historical fiction, not history. Can you talk about the difference?

You won’t find me deep in the archives trying to unearth new primary sources. To my mind, that’s a job best left to the historians. As a novelist, my work is to absorb and assess the information available – in the case of a family as famous as the Brontës, a great deal of research has already been carried out by people with far more expertise than me – and then to let my imagination work its way into any intriguing gaps in the narrative.

For example, in the prologue of “Fifteen Wild Decembers,” we meet 24-year-old Emily on a boat to Brussels. This trip was instigated by Charlotte, ostensibly so that the two sisters could improve their teaching qualifications at a Belgian school. Charlotte’s fictionalized account of Brussels in her novel “Villette” and her extant letters give us a good idea of what this adventure meant to her. As far as I’m aware though, there is no record of Emily’s state of mind on that boat trip. Given that she loathed to be away from her Yorkshire home, and was possibly already suspicious of Charlotte’s motivations, I hazarded a guess that her mood was less than sunny.

Similarly, we know exactly what the young Charlotte Brontë thought about Cowan Bridge School for Daughters of the Clergy because she reproduced it to devastating effect in “Jane Eyre,” and spoke bitterly about it for the rest of her life, but there is scant record of Emily’s presence at the school, let alone her feelings. Blanks in the historical record such as these are irresistible to a novelist! (Erik Pedersen)

BBC News features the Rath Literary Festival.

The first literary festival to take place in Rathfriland will this weekend celebrate the Brontë family's connection to the area.

Rath Literary Festival will feature authors, poets and music in celebration of the area's contributions to the arts, both past and present.

The famous sisters' father was a clergyman in nearby Drumballyroney before moving to Yorkshire.

Organiser Ada Elliot told BBC News NI he had been "perhaps been overlooked" in the telling of the Brontë family story.

Patrick Brontë was born Patrick Brunty in County Down in March 1777 - St Patrick's Day - explaining his first name - and changed his surname when he moved to England.

Three of his children - Charlotte, Emily and Anne - became authors, with Charlotte writing Jane Eyre and Emily writing Wuthering Heights - both gothic romances set in the north of England, with strong psychological components.

Anne Brontë wrote The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, which explores themes of social duty and the place of women in the Victorian world.

"Although the girls are not part of Rathfriland he (Patrick) has a long history here," festival organiser Ada Elliott told BBC Radio Ulster's Your Place and Mine programme.

"Rathfriland is a spectacular area. We're very proud of it and that's why we want to celebrate it."

Historians through the years have speculated on whether Patrick Brontë's Irish roots might have influenced his daughter's writing, and even whether they might have had Irish accents.

County Down celebrates those links.

A signposted Brontë interpretive trail runs for 10 miles from an interpretive centre around Rathfriland and its surrounds, allowing visitors to drive through the area and imagine how the windswept Mournes might have influenced the father of girls whose writing was mystical, passionate and wild.

But local historian Uel Wright believes more could be done.

"If you come here you cannot fail to see Brontë signs everywhere," he told BBC News NI. "Roads, homeland, library, nursery, steakhouse - all Brontë."

Despite the wave of enthusiasm that led to those celebrations in the 1990s, the stone cottage where Patrick Brontë was born lies in ruins.

Mr Wright hopes public money can be used to restore it and celebrate the link.

"My theory is that unless there's another generation of interest and enthusiasm to keep the Irish Brontë heritage alive, we're going to lose something very important."

Mr Wright's great-great-uncle William Wright wrote a book on the Brontës in Ireland.

Mr Wright believes those stories were based in oral history, in which his ancestor had a great interest, and he will examine them at a talk on Sunday in the schoolhouse where Patrick Brontë taught.

"The whole Irish part of the story has gone out of fashion but with the upsurge of interest in oral history let's say - this is what we have in Ireland," he says.

"Let's celebrate it."

Later on Sunday author Martina Devlin, who has written a novel based on Charlotte Brontë's honeymoon in County Offaly, will speak in the original church where he preached before leaving Ireland in 1802.

The Rath Literary Festival started on Friday and runs until Sunday. It has been organised by the Rathfriland Women's Institute, Rathfriland Regeneration and Hilltown Community Association and will feature music and a one-woman show imagining the sisters in the modern day, by Pauline Vallance.

Poets will read poems inspired by 19th Century women caught up in the criminal justice and mental health systems, and a walking tour will tell the stories of famous Rathfriland residents down the years.

The festival was the brainchild of Margot Groves, who said: "We are delighted to be bringing such a wealth of talent to Rathfriland. There is something for everyone to enjoy no matter which genre they prefer."

And did the Brontë sisters have Irish accents?

"It wouldn't be surprising," says Uel Wright.

"Patrick never made great pretensions with his accent.

"I don't suppose we'll ever really know but it wouldn't be beyond the realms of possibility." (Nalina Eggert)

Art Guide features the current exhibition Writers Revealed: Treasures from the British Library and the National Portrait Gallery, London, at HOTA, Queensland, Australia.

The sheer historical scope of Writers Revealed might initially seem a daunting prospect for visitors to this unprecedented exhibition at HOTA. Covering six centuries, it presents manuscripts, letters, illustrations and rare editions from many of the most influential authors in English literature.

All pieces are taken from the British Library and the National Portrait Gallery, London. Among the items on display is a manuscript from the 16th-century poet Thomas Wyatt (the oldest piece in the exhibition), a portrait of Shakespeare believed to be the only one painted in his lifetime, and Jane Austen’s handwritten notes about her 1814 novel Mansfield Park. The extraordinary artefacts keep coming in an exhibition that was several years in the making.

“I’m particularly excited to see the handwritten draft for Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, shown alongside the iconic portrait of the author by George Charles Beresford,” says Yarmila Alfonzetti, who oversaw the organisation of the exhibition at HOTA. “The handwritten manuscript for Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë is paired with a portrait of the Brontë sisters which was long thought to be lost, but was found folded on top of a wardrobe.” (Barnaby Smith)

The i Paper has romance writer Milly Johnson recommend her five favourite classic romance novels, and one of them is

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

“This is my favourite book of all time. It follows a young woman with a sad, loveless past as she becomes the governess to the ward of a saturnine, brooding rich man with a secret that blights his life. In Jane, he finds love and relief from his torture. But his secret is exposed on their wedding day and a heartbroken Jane has to leave him.

“This is a book with everything: a relatable heroine, an imperfectly perfect hero, a love rival, triumph over adversity – even a little of the supernatural. And of course, that sublime happy ending.” (Anna Bonet)

The Bronté Sisters UK's new video explores the restored Brontë Birthplace in Thornton. A room-by-room tour of the modest house where Charlotte, Emily, Anne, and Branwell Brontë were born, now transformed into a community space and museum.