Ghostly Heights

My mother, Kathleen, at Haworth, back in the late 1940s.

I love a good ghost story, don't you? Especially at Christmas.

It's just one more reason why I love Wuthering Heights so much. (See previous post!) There are convincing supernatural elements to the story, subtle and always queried by the narrators, but they stay with the reader long after the book is finished and this reader, at any rate, is in no doubt about what Emily herself believed.

The first and perhaps most memorable incident is the appearance of the ghostly Catherine Linton, invading Mr Lockwood's nightmare. 'Why did I think of Linton? I had read Earnshaw twenty times for Linton,' he writes afterwards. She hovers outside, tapping on the window of her own bedroom, trying to get in, and prompting Lockwood - with an early intimation of the intense cruelty, physical and mental, that permeates the novel - to rub her wrist over the broken glass in an effort to dislodge the unwelcome apparition. Catherine declares that she has 'been a waif for twenty years.' As indeed she has, if one assumes that she can't rest without her soul mate. 

In the last part of the novel, just at the point where Heathcliff's revenge is almost complete, something or someone intervenes. Throughout the novel, Nelly Dean, who tells most of the tale to Lockwood, has characterised herself as superstitious as well as religious. She can only relate in disturbing detail what she sees - or rather what she perceives that Heathcliff watches  - something that she cannot see. 

Most dog or cat owners - me included - will know the uneasy realisation that the animal is watching something that moves about, but it's something that you can't see. 

At this point, towards the end of the novel, most readers can't help bur remember a much earlier scene in which Catherine, after Heathcliff's unexpected return, and the inevitable renewal of hostilities between him and her husband, is driven to distraction by her own self imposed suffering, fracturing her personality.

'Look!' she cried eagerly, 'that's my room with the candle in it, and the trees swaying before it; and the other candle is in Joseph's garret. Joseph sits up late, doesn't he? He's waiting till I come home that he may lock the gate. Well, he'll wait a while yet. It's a rough journey, and a sad heart to travel it; and we must pass by Gimmerton Kirk to go that journey! We've braved its ghosts often together, and dared each other to stand among the graves and ask them to come. But, Heathcliff, if I dare you now, will you venture? If you do, I'll keep you. I'll not lie there by myself: they may bury me twelve feet deep, and throw the church down over me, but I won't rest till you are with me. I never will!'

She paused, and resumed with a strange smile. 'He's considering - he'd rather I'd come to him! Find a way, then! not through that kirkyard. You are slow! Be content, you always followed me!'

And only a little later, in a final, heartrending scene between the two, Heathcliff cries: 

'You teach me now how cruel you've been - cruel and false. WHY did you despise me? WHY did you betray your own heart, Cathy? I have not one word of comfort. You deserve this. You have killed yourself. Yes, you may kiss me, and cry; and wring out my kisses and tears: they'll blight you - they'll damn you. You loved me - then what RIGHT had you to leave me? What right - answer me - for the poor fancy you felt for Linton? Because misery and degradation, and death, and nothing that God or Satan could inflict would have parted us, YOU, of your own will, did it. I have not broken your heart - YOU have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine. So much the worse for me that I am strong. Do I want to live? What kind of living will it be when you - oh, God! would YOU like to live with your soul in the grave?'

We remember that 'be content, you always followed me' during those final disturbing scenes when it's clear that Heathcliff is at last within sight of his heaven, one only to be attained by following his Cathy. Afterwards, Joseph will swear that he sees 'two on ’em looking out of his chamber window on every rainy night since his death', and a little shepherd boy will tell Nelly that 'there's Heathcliff and a woman yonder, under t' nab, un' I darnut pass 'em.'

We should always remember that the final lines of the novel are written by a person who, visiting their graves, cannot imagine 'unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth'. Beautiful as they are, these are written by the supremely prosaic Mr Lockwood.

I think Emily had other ideas. 

Needing My Fix of Wuthering Heights

Top Withens, the site, if not the building, that inspired Wuthering Heights.

Every so often, I find myself needing to reread  Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights all over again. I love this novel so much. Something reminded me about it today and (having read several paperback copies to bits over the years) I've just transferred the file to the newer of my Kindles. I don't know why but from time to time, these days, I also find myself acutely, almost painfully homesick for Yorkshire - but I think it's the Yorkshire of my childhood and that's a hard place to visit! 

I was born in Leeds. When I was young, we used to visit Haworth - my parents and myself - and we would walk over the moors to the already derelict farmhouse called Top Withens, said to be the site - if not the actual building - of Wuthering Heights. This was my mother's favourite novel as well and the reason why she chose to call me Catherine which isn't a family name at all. In fact family legend has it that my parents trundled me over the moors in a baby buggy, before I could walk and there is an old black and white snapshot to prove it. 

Ponden Hall  - much quoted as the model for Thrushcross Grange - is actually much closer to the appearance of the Heights, albeit not its situation. Browsing online today, I was enchanted to discover that you can stay there for Bed and Breakfast and they have an Earnshaw Room with - oh joy! - a box bed like Cathy's. 

I now want to go and stay there so much that it hurts. 

We'll see what this year brings. 

Here I am, right in the middle of a deeply Scottish writing project and I can feel my Yorkshire roots tugging at me, reminding me of something else I'm longing to write. Isn't that always the way of it? 

But really, Wuthering Heights has influenced so much of my writing - not least in my Scottish novel Bird of Passage which was always intended, not as a rewriting, for that would be impossible and undesirable, but a reimagining,  a 'homage' to the original if you like. 

One reviewer, Susan Price, describes it as a dialogue with the older book, and I like that idea very much. Sometimes it feels as though I've spent my whole career in a kind of dialogue with Wuthering Heights, never quite getting to the end of it as a source of inspiration.