Inspiration

I first read the story of Wuthering Heights in an adapted form when I was about nine and I was thrilled and horrified in equal measures! I couldn’t forget Lockwood’s dream of Cathy rapping at the window and her hand coming through the glass. I was shocked at the image of Cathy’s coffin being opened on Heathcliff’s death so he could be buried and lie side by side for ever. It remains a favourite book, and I was so pleased when I reread it recently that it still excited and gripped me. Whenever I see wallflowers I think of the gillie flowers growing by the window at the end of the story. Since then I have read the book many times and it never fails to excite me!

This is another Brontë story I read when very young in an abbreviated version although I have read it often since in the original. Which child could not be excited and horrified by poor young Jane’s treatment and experiences with her aunt the ghastly Mrs Reed, that terrible sense of claustrophobia in the red room, Lowood School which now seems more of a prison that a place of education, and the death of Jane’s sweet friend? Who could not be enthralled by the unlikely and doomed romance between Jane and Mr Rochester, and be terrified by whatever or whoever was locked in the attic room, and the sinister Grace Poole?

As a writer, vastly inferior to the Brontës, I have so much admiration for them, I can imagine the sheer hard work of writing such epic and classic novels. Every word would have been written by hand, and the range and scale of their imagination and genius is breath-taking. They truly are an inspiration.

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