Over the years of my writing career to date, there were two or three novels that I always thought of as the 'ones that got away'.
Until I took the decision to publish it myself, Bird of Passage had always been my orphan child, the book that a few people read and enjoyed and were moved by, but that nobody in the industry wanted. Unlike The Amber Heart, that kept being turned down with fulsome praise, because 'nobody is interested in Poland', no agent or publisher would even read Bird of Passage, in spite of its Scottish setting and Irish background, and in spite of the fact that it tackles some harrowing issues that are still very much current. In short, it was turned down unseen.
My big mistake, I came to realise, was in pointing out that it was something of a homage to Wuthering Heights.
Wuthering Heights would be my desert island book. My 'inheritance' novel because my mother and my aunt loved it too, so it was a part of my childhood. It was the novel I read when I was in my teens and I've never stopped loving it. I reread it almost every year, generally at this time of year. Vitally, it was the inspiration behind Bird of Passage.
This is a reblogging of an old and popular post with some revisions. Because whenever I reread WH, I find something new and intriguing. This year it was narrator Ellen Dean's reference to Joseph, even doggedly religious Joseph, leaving his cake and cheese out 'for the fairies' on Christmas Eve. Which made me think of my Yorkshire grandfather and his great fondness for fruit cake and crumbly Wensleydale cheese. Then I wondered whether our habit of leaving a mince pie and a glass of sherry out for Father Christmas owes something to that much older custom.
I'm a Yorkshire lass, although one with a rich Polish and a rich Irish heritage as well. We lived in Leeds until I was twelve years old. You can read more about my family background in a book called A Proper Person to be Detained (Saraband 2019), part personal memoir, part family history. In that book, you'll find a little speculation about whether Emily may have conceived Heathcliff as a dark Irish child, with his 'gibberish that nobody could understand'. This may have been his native Gaelic, given that Liverpool was full of migrant Irish fleeing famine, including my own forebears, at the time when Emily was writing the novel in 1845. Emily's father was from County Down in Northern Ireland and the sisters would have been well aware of the anti-Irish prejudice that accompanied the influx of migrants.
I was named for the heroine of Wuthering Heights, a doubtful compliment some might say, and I was trundled over the moors in my push-chair to Top Withens, the setting for the Heights in the novel, if not for the house itself. As soon as I was old enough to read and begin to understand the novel, I adored it, although I soon realised that it was a powerful and absorbing evocation of obsessive love, packed with repeated images of cruelty and sadism, with very little of conventional romance about it.
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| Top Withens |
Many years later, when I became an experienced radio dramatist, with 100+ hours of radio drama to my name, I would plead with the BBC to let me dramatise the novel. They commissioned me to dramatise many classics, from Kidnapped and Catriona to The Hunchback of Notre Dame, but for some reason, they never let me tackle Emily's masterpiece. Which was a pity, since so many dramatisations - in my well informed opinion - fell far short of the mark.
Cue forward some years, and after a spell of writing for the stage, I began to focus almost wholly on fiction, with occasional ventures into historical non-fiction. Much of my work at that time was published by Saraband, but I still kept going back to Bird of Passage. Most writers have ‘bottom drawer’ novels. I have several, and most of them should never see the light of day.
Bird of Passage always felt different.
It felt like irritatingly unfinished business. I kept going back to it. Tinkering. Thinking about it. It haunted my dreams. It was as though these characters wanted desperately to tell their story. Interestingly, I knew that one of the characters had a secret, but even I didn't know what that secret was till the very end of the writing process. I woke up in the early hours, thinking 'That's what it was. That's what he needed to remember.' But I had to write the book and edit the book many times over to find out.
Back then, I still had an agent but they seemed to be repelled by anything with a Wuthering Heights connection, even though I would insist that it was only 'inspired by' and not some crass rehashing of the story. Later, no publisher would touch it, in spite of some glowing reader recommendations.
I've often wondered about their wholly and sometimes virulently negative response. Given how many women I know who - like me - love Wuthering Heights, what was their motivation? It wasn't as though they had read it and found it wanting in some way. That would have been excusable. They wouldn't read it at all. Wouldn't you think at least one of them might have thought that they could find a way of marketing it?
Anyway - Bird of Passage languished on the far recesses of my PC. Nobody wanted to know. Nobody had the time to read it. Nobody cared except me. I cared.
I couldn't get Finn and Kirsty out of my mind, so when I took the decision to combine some self publishing with my traditional publishing, this was one of several novels that I felt deserved another life beyond the confines of my computer, my own imagination and the doubtful curation of other people.
That was when I tackled it in a big way, with all the benefit of half a lifetime's experience of writing and editing. When it was finally published, one of my reviewers, Susan Price, pointed out that it is not a retelling. It is a 'reimagining' of Wuthering Heights at a different time and in a different place.'
Bird of Passage wasn't the only trigger, but it was a significant milestone. I think it was then that I knew that the way ahead for me lay in publishing my own books, under my own imprint, albeit with some excellent professional assistance. I needed to be in control.
The evocative cover image by my artist husband, Alan Lees, is exactly what I wanted. It's a very grown up and often desperately sad story set mostly in the Scottish countryside, exploring the kind of mutual passion that is attractive in theory but ultimately destructive. It's a novel with occasional, albeit very subtle, supernatural elements. It's a book about the nature of obsessive love and the terrible, irreparable damage of childhood trauma.
If you love Wuthering Heights (or even if you don't) and if this sounds like your kind of novel, it's available as an eBook and in a nice, fat paperback as well.
The eBook of Bird of Passage will be on special offer at the bargain price of 99p from 11th till 17th December.
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