BRONTË BIRTHPLACE
As a child, broadcaster and journalist Christa Ackroyd was inspired by the story of the Brontë sisters. Here she explains why a crusade to save their birthplace for generations means so much
If anyone ever asks me my favourite book I answer without hesitation… Wuthering Heights. It is both violent and dark, and certainly not a love story no matter how Sir Laurence Olivier portrayed it in the first of many screen adaptations.
Instead, Wuthering Heights is a story of jealousy and obsession, of anger and of prejudice, shown towards the young boy found wandering the docks of Liverpool and brought home to live with the Earnshaw family high on the Pennines in Yorkshire. Who Heathcliff is and where he comes from remain a mystery in Emily Brontë’s one and only novel, as does his ethnicity, even though he bemoans the fact that had he been born with ‘fair hair and fair skin’ he could have risen above the cruelty shown towards him after his protector Mr Earnshaw dies.
But prejudice of birth was certainly at the heart of the story and why wouldn’t it be? Anti-slave campaigner and Yorkshire MP William Wilberforce was Patrick Brontë’s sponsor at Cambridge. And we know Patrick shared many of the issues of the day with his three young girls, issues which were placed at the very heart of the books they wrote. Gender inequality, poverty, lack of self-esteem and opportunity were the very foundations of the seven novels the sisters produced in secret. And may I suggest remain as relevant today almost two centuries later.
Emily Brontë was as complex as the book she authored. Prone to anger, it is known she was furious when elder sister Charlotte discovered her secret poems and announced plans to publish them in a book. She was also a loner, preferring the company of her animals and the moors to the company of strangers.
Indeed, when sent away either for education or for employment she suffered such severe homesickness it was thought she would die if they did not bring her home to the parsonage and its wild surroundings.
Small wonder her ghostly character Kathy, who haunts the pages of Wuthering Heights, dreams she has died and gone to heaven and was so distraught she begged the angels to return her to the moors and awoke ‘sobbing with joy’.
As it was, Emily died as she lived, stubborn and strong to the end, refusing to see ‘no meddling doctor’ when tuberculosis set in until it was too late. After her death, Charlotte wrote of Emily that ‘an interpreter ought always to have stood between her and the world’’. She was different indeed. But oh so powerful to a young girl like me.
When I was that young girl I
