A fictional dive into the tragic yet productive lives of the three Brontë sisters and their brother, Branwell.
The title comes from a line in one of Emily’s poems, and British author Powell attempts throughout to capture Emily’s gothic lyricism along with her viewpoint of the Brontës’ relationships with each other and the Victorian world they inhabited. Emily begins her narration in 1842 when she arrives to join her older sisters—Maria, 10; Elizabeth, 9; Charlotte; 8—at Cowan Bridge, the model for the dismal boarding school where Jane Eyre spends her early years. Before long, Maria and Elizabeth have died from contagions they catch at the school. Death dominates this book. No one lives long, and the deaths are frequently gruesome. The surviving sisters come home to their father’s parsonage among the Yorkshire moors. There, they share with Branwell and youngest sister Anne a childhood strictly religious yet rich in ways to grow their imagination. Sibling rivalry works in tandem with sibling devotion from childhood through adulthood. Anne is the quiet, steady observer whose chance for a normal bourgeois life ends with the early death of her conventional suitor. Always-hungry Charlotte is aggressive and ambitious but somewhat sociable. Her authorial success is touted here mainly for its financial, not literary, value. Introvert Emily, who rarely talks outside the family circle, is the family’s creative genius and iconoclastic thinker, and Branwell’s early promise of brilliance is derailed by his emotional imbalance. Powell’s Emily bases the character of Heathcliff not on Branwell, but on a darkly handsome, crudely masculine farmer she first encounters as a boy on the moor, then as a man in increasingly suggestive scenes in which they never directly interact. To Emily, happiness is an elusive, even impossible option. Even her imaginative play offers more solace than joy.
Even fans of the Brontës’ wonderful novels won’t find much to cheer for in Powell’s depressing account.