It was my 35th birthday last Wednesday. I spent the day in question with my incredible Mumma, swimming in the cold blue Cornish Sea and feasting at Jude Kereama’s Kota after years of wishing and planning. On Friday I went North to celebrate with Kim. We had decided to meet at Billy’s, a childhood friends’ home that while not quite in the middle, is at least on the journey between St Ives and Edinburgh.
When discussing the weekend and making plans with Billy he suggested a trip to Haworth and the Brontë Parsonage Museum. It was one of those moments when you realise how well known and understood you are by a friend. The idea was beyond perfect.
I first read Wuthering Heights as a young teenager. Reading isn’t easy for me as I am dyslexic and Wuthering Heights isn’t the easiest book to read. But if you picked up my copy today you would know instantly that I love it. The dog-eared pages, water stains, and sellotape holding the book together reveal the love of a lifetime.
Emily Brontë’s passionate raging against societal constraints, and the evocative longing for somewhere and something wild, crawled deep inside my teenage self and became a formative building block in who I am. I can’t say I love Catherine but her weaknesses, forged at the hands of patriarchal sexism and expectations, breaks my heart. I can’t say I love Heathcliff but his viscous and desperate violence, forged by cruelty and racism, break my heart. Catherine and Heathcliff aren’t, to me at least, characters meant to be loved or idolised. Rather they are characters’ whose actions and fates scream out for a better world and a fairer time. A time in which these two people could have loved passionately and wildly but without tragedy. A time in which perhaps their creator too could have had equality, love, passion, freedom, and the Yorkshire moors.
In the front room of the Parsonage in Haworth the museum curators have set up the Brontë’s furniture much as they might have had it. Tables, chairs, a cunning little lap writing desk are all laid out as though the Brontë sisters have just stepped away. The information on display tells us that this is the room in which Charlotte, Emily, and Anne wrote, and the room in which Emily died, likely on the very sofa currently occupying one wall.
Standing there the magnitude of this is hard to take in. Within this elegant but unassuming room Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, Agnes Grey, The Tenants of Wildfell Hall, and Villette found life. To borrow from Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton: this is the room where is happened. In this room literature was changed forever. In this room three women committed to page words that would change what it meant to be a woman. And in this room the world lost the chance of any further stories when Emily Brontë died, aged only 30.
Anne and Charlotte also died tragically young, Anne at 29 and Charlotte at 38. In their short lives these three women changed the world forever. And from their home in the pretty Yorkshire village of Haworth their imaginations, characters, and stories travelled forth through time until I picked up Wuthering Heights, a shy and quiet teenage girl in North London in the mid 1990’s and found something that spoke to me. Something incredible, real, and powerful.
To travel to their village, to their home, to their room, for my 35th birthday felt like a pilgrimage. As a woman artist I am laying the next brick on the road the women who came before me fought to make. As a woman I stand on the shoulders of women whose lives, sacrifices and daring make my life possible. As myself, I am shaped by the women, real and fictional, alive and dead, that made me who I am. Emily Brontë is among those women and celebrating her and her exceptional sisters seems to me the perfect way to begin the next year of my life.
And so, I will leave you with this, from Emily herself:
To Imagination
When weary with the long day’s care,
And earthly change from pain to pain,
And lost and ready to despair,
Thy kind voice calls me back again:
Oh, my true friend! I am not lone,
While thou canst speak with such a tone!
So hopeless is the world without;
The world within I doubly prize:
Thy world, where guile, and hate, and doubt,
And cold suspicion never rise;
Where thou, and I, and Liberty,
Have undisputed sovereignty.
What matters it, that, all around,
Danger, and guilt, and darkness lie,
If but within our bosom’s bound
We hold a bright, untroubled sky,
Warm with ten thousand mingled rays
Of suns that know no winter days?
Reason, indeed, may oft complain
For Nature’s sad reality,
And tell the suffering heart how vain
It’s cherished dreams must always be;
And Truth may rudely trample down
The flowers of Fancy, newly-blown;
But, thou art ever there, to bring
The hovering vision back, and breath
New glories o’er the blighted spring,
And call a lovelier Life from Death,
And whisper, with a voice divine,
Of real worlds, as bright as thine.
I trust not try phantom bliss,
Yet, still, in evening’s quiet hour,
With never-failing thankfulness,
I welcome thee, Benignant Power;
Sure solacer of human cares,
And sweeter hope, when hope despairs!
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I have just started reading Jane Eyre (for the umpteenth time!) with one of my 15 year olds ... her suggestion ... love this post ... love the Bronte sisters .... they all died far too young. xxx