Backlisted - Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

Episode Date: October 28, 2025

For this year's Halloween episode, we take a windswept walk across the Yorkshire moors with Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights — not as a tale of doomed romance, but as a novel steeped in gothic horror, mystery and the supernatural. With our resident spooky authorities, Andrew Male and Laura Varnam, we explore the book’s darker undercurrents, ghostly visitations, and the uncanny wildness of Brontë’s imagination. There's also lots of Brontë backstory - so whether you're a lifelong devotee or only know it from Kate Bush and damp film adaptations, please join us for our Halloween special.And, yes we do cover the only question that really matters: who’s your favourite Brontë? *For £150 off any Serious Readers HD Light and free UK delivery use the discount code: BACK at seriousreaders.com/backlisted * To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops. * For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm *If you'd like to support the show and join in with the book chat, listen without adverts, receive the show early and get extra bonus fortnightly episodes and original writing, become a patron at www.patreon.com/backlisted *You can sign up to our free monthly newsletter here  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

That's annoying. What? You're a muffler. You don't hear it? Oh, I don't even notice it. I usually drown it out with the radio. How's this? Oh, yeah.

Way better. Save on insurance by switching to Bell Air Direct and use the money to fix your car. Bell Air Direct, insurance, simplified. Conditions apply. This episode of Backlisted is supported by Serious Readers. Which is fitting because that's what we are. I find my eyes get tired in the evenings,

and it's easier to read during daylight. And a Serious Reader's HD Essential Light gives you the full spectrum of daylight, suddenly every word is sharp, the contrast is better, and the strain just goes. Which means I can read longer and moan less. And that's good for everyone. Backlisted listeners get £150 off the HD Essential plus free UK delivery with the code back at Seriousreaders.com forward slash back. And you've got 30 days to try it at home risk free.

That's Seriousreaders.com forward slash back and use the code BACK. And now, on with the show. Skeleton Dan, played by the Eiffon Cancer Dan. Hello and welcome to Backlister, a podcast which raises the spirits of old books and obliges them to take on new life. The story we're recounting on this year's Halloween episode is Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte, first published in 1847 by Thomas Newby in the UK

and the following year by Harper and Brothers in the US. I'm Andy Miller, author of the Year of Reading Dangerously and Inventry and Unreliable Guide to My Record Collection. And I'm Dr. Una McCormack, science fiction writer and Associate Fellow of Homerton College, Cambridge. Backlisted has been running for 10 years. In our time, That's right. I said, in our time, everyone.

We've built up an incredible community of listeners, patrons and guests, plus a library of 250 shows containing everything from the weird tales of M.R. James and Daphne Dumorriere, to the discomforting novels of Shirley Jackson and Elizabeth Jane Howard, to the sacred monsters of Henry James and Beowulf. and those are just the Halloween specials of which this episode 251 is the latest and may perhaps prove to be the most disturbing yet we shall see one easy way to avoid the Halloween curse is to support the podcast and to listen to episodes from our backlist by following backlisted on whatever podcast app you use really helps bring the show show to the attention of new listeners.

In other words, please subscribe to Backlisted. Indeed, subscribe to Backlisted. Now, joining us on today's show to discuss Wuthering Kites by Emily Bronte, a work of weird fiction by perhaps the weirdest of the weird sisters, as the women were nicknamed by the residents of their hometown, a Backlisted's own family of blood, Laura Varnham and Andrew Mail. Hello. Hello.

Hello? Or should I say what? Welcome back, Andrew and Laura. It's horrible to be back, Andy. It's terrible. It's awful to have you. Andrew and Laura are very own Burke and Hair back again to dig up a few bones for us to anatomize. We're laying it on thick tonight, I think. Well, it's Halloween. It's Halloween. You can't on Halloween. When can you, right? Andrew Mail has been writing about music, film, books and TV for the last

30 years for which his reward is to interview Van Morrison tomorrow morning. That's incredible. Well, you know, he's hoping. I mean, he's bailed on me before, but I'm sure that it's, you know, it's going to happen tomorrow morning. We'll conjure him up. And I promise not to get my Van Morrison questions and my Heathcliff conversation points mixed up. It'd be interested to see how much overlap there is, I think. Well, exactly. What do you imagine, Andrew Heathcliff would be like as an interviewee. Very, very, very like Van Morrison. Not willing to talk about his back catalogue. Focus on the future. That's a fan fiction. There's an image to conjure with. We're expecting him to appear opposite Merle O'Bron or someone, well, you anyway, it'd be good. Right,

sorry, Una, on you go. Having appeared on Radio 4's boring talks and many excellent podcasts, including backlisted justifiably earning the Subricade by which he's known around the world Mr Halloween. Hi Mr. Halloween. Welcome back. Welcome back indeed.

Oh please. I have moved on from that. Well, welcome back, Andrew. Thank you so much for coming. And we're also joined by Laura Varnum. Laura Varnum is the lecturer in Old and Middle English Literature at University College, Oxford.

As an academic, she has published books on the medieval church and the mystic Marjorie Kemp and she is an expert on the life and works of Daphne du Maurier who she habitually refers to as the fourth Bronte sister. I do. There'll be a lot of that.

Laura is also a poet and is working on a collection inspired by the women of Beowulf. Her memoir of appearing regularly with Andrew on Halloween episodes of Batlisted entitled, I Walked with a Zon will be published next year. Full of spooky tales and real behind-the-scenes stories.

Exactly. Laura, you found a particularly unusual, backlisted adjacent thing yesterday, and you have now managed to bring neighbours into the backlisted orbit. I have indeed. I was watching neighbours yesterday, and I was absolutely thrilled to discover the character of L. Robinson,

who is the daughter of Paul Robinson, played by the wonderful Stefan Dennis, the arch villain of Neighbours. Paul's daughter, Elle, was reading a book. And that book was, backlisted fans, Birding by Rose Rewain. Former backlisted guest, wonderful, wonderful novel, such a favourite of all of us.

I nearly fell off the sofa, I screamed, I took screenshots, I put them all over the internet, and Rose was delighted, because she is also a fan of Neighbours. So this was just the most incredible intersection of all my interests. Backlisted and neighbours just came together.

How did, do you think Elle, the character rather than the actress or the producers, is it in keeping with her character that she would read the excellent novel Birding by Rose Rhone? I think it is because Elle is a journalist. So I suspect that Elle reads excellent newspapers as well as writing for them. And I'm sure she's a podcast listener.

So I suspect she listened to backlisted and decided to read the novel as a result of that. That is my head canon as to how this happened. You exist in the neighbour's universe, Andy. I do. I do. Well, if I can affect that transition completely, I'll finally be a happy man. If I cross from this realm to that one, to Ramsey Street, that would be good, thanks.

Now, you may not think of Wuthering Heights as a Halloween tale. It's one of the greatest novels in the literary canon, of course, and much studied and analysed. as such. But over the next hour or so, we hope to illuminate the ways in which the book can be read as a tale of mystery, imagination and horror. If you haven't read Wuthering Heights, but think you know it from film and TV adaptations, you may be surprised. In the words of the reader's guide to Wuthering Heights at Wutheringheight's.com.uk, many people, generally those who have never read the book, consider Wuthering Heights to be a straightforward, if intense, love story

Romeo and Juliet on the Yorkshire Moors. But this is a mistake. Really, the story is one of revenge. It follows the life of Heathcliff, a mysterious gypsy-like person from childhood, about seven years old, to his death in his late 30s. Heathcliff rises in his adopted family and then is reduced to the status of a servant running away when Catherine, the young woman he loves, decides to marry another. He returns later, rich and educated, and sets about gaining his revenge on the two families that he believe ruined his life. You want it darker? Well, the life of Emily Bronte and that of her family is one of the bleakest and most tragic in the history. of English letters. From the start the myth that has attached itself to the literary sisters of how earth has tended either to obscure or simplify the facts of the matter. That this was in some ways

encouraged by Charlotte Bronte herself, her father Patrick and her first biographer Elizabeth Gaskell is all part of a story that contains romance, art and nature, yes, but also failure, poverty, squalor, scandal, religious fervor, fatal passions, adultery, violence, infant mortality, madness, alcohol and drug addiction, disease and premature death. Please exit through the gift shop. When we come back, we will shoulder our knapsacks and set off across the moors towards a remote, wind-swept pile lit. only by a guttering candle. Who were the spectral figures on the horizon, beckoning us on? What do they want?

And why, why does one of them resemble Cliff Richard? Right, okay, Una. Over to you, please. Downhill from here, right. Yeah. So we should begin by asking, Andrew, can you hazard a guess at when you first became aware of Wuthering Heights or the Brontes? Oh, first became aware of it.

probably would be watching the Lawrence Olivier and Merle O'Bron 1939 film when I was a kid. And I think maybe a couple of years after that, I read the book. To be more accurately, I read the first half of the book, as I think a lot of people have, and then kind of abandoned it where I was startled to discover that where the film ended, the book still had about two thirds to go. The first time I read the book all the way through was last week because this is basically my first encounter with the complete tale of Wuthering Heights. And so if I have any readings of it or interpretation of it, they are all as a 58-year-old man and not as a kind of, you know, romantic teenager caught up in the supposed romance of Kathy and Heathcliff. Well, and furthermore, of course, you are here, we are very happy to say, as our resident student of the Macarbra and so forth.

We will come on to discussing, placing it in that context in a moment. I just wonder briefly, I would just like a snapshot of how it felt to be reading that particular book at this point in your life. it was I found it reading it felt like being trapped I mean this kind of contributes it to the sense of it as a work of uncanny fiction the book itself feels haunted

reading it feels like you're trapped inside a curse or a dark fairy tale or or and this is a this is a positive I stress a world of constant screaming nightmare I mean, like, even the supposed good people within the book, like Lockwood or Nellie Dean, are not good. I mean, one of Lockwood's first actions is his decision to pull Kathy's wrist, the ghost of Kathy, the form of Kathy, onto a broken window pane and pull it against the glass until she starts bleeding. You know, Nellie Dean withholds two of the most crucial pieces of information within the book, you know, that probably, contribute to um you know certainly somebody's death and kind of and and and possibly the whole

undoing of of the narrative i mean i was i was kind of startled by how truly dark it was given that i'd only read the first you know the first bit and i'd only kind of known it through popular culture you know heathcliff is this is almost like a sort of high functioning zombie a lot of the time you know so driven by hate and revenge. So you found it relatable is what you're saying at this point in your life. I see. Okay, that's... I found it startling. I found it.

I think one of the most amazing things about it is that the idea of what Wuthering Heights is and how Wuthering Heights exists within our popular culture and the actual experience, and I stress the word experience of reading the book, because it is an almost physical experience to sort of go through reading it.

I mean, maybe people who kind of came to it at a younger age or an earlier time don't feel that way. But I was kind of shocked by how sort of visceral and unpleasant it felt at times. I'm going to ignore the anxiety of drifting into self-parody because I've done that many years ago. And I'm going to mention all the devils are here again, which we made a joke up last time. I've just mentioned it. You can't stop me.

And I've mentioned all the devils are here because I described that recently as being an ungovernable text and actually that applies to Wuthering Heights. Wuthering Heights will not fit in any shape you want it to, even the one we're proposing to do on this show and that's why it's so incredible. We should go straight to Laura and repeat the original question as ever. Can you pinpoint or even vaguely remember when you might have first become aware of Wuthering Heights or the Bronties? So I think it was when I was about 14 and I read Jane Eyre first and I think it really shifts your or kind of cements your feelings about these novels which one you read first like I think it I think it matters which one you read first and I read Jane Eyre first at the same time as I was reading demori as those are you playing bingo have a drink now that's my it's my second demoree of the night I won't be the last you are that's why you're well always welcome And I'd read Rebecca, and I think I'd already read DiMario's first novel The Loving Spirit,

the title of which comes from an Emily Bronte poem. And that novel of four generations is structured around Emily Bronte quotations. So I'd come across her. And then I read Wuthering Heights. And I, God, I thought it was weird, just so bloody weird. And now, I was right about it being, weird because it's weird in the old English sense, weird coming from the old English word meaning, meaning fated, meaning prophetic, meaning something, as Andrew was saying, you can't

escape from it, you are trapped inside it and you're pushed through it, you're pulled through it. And there's this moment at the beginning where Lockwood talks about how he's gone up to Wuthering Heights basically because he'd been about to sort of take part in some kind of Jane Austen novel where there was a woman he was interested in and as soon as she she looked at him he decided oh we couldn't do anything here and there's this description where he says as soon as this woman he was interested in looked at him he confesses with shame that he shrunk icily into himself like a snail at every glance retired colder and father and that's how the novel made me feel it made me go oh i want i want to hide from this i can't i can't cope with this it's too

much. It's too brutal. It's too violent. It's too savage and I don't know what to do with it. So I'm just going to push it away and think a bit more about Jane Eyre because that feels safer. But what a book. What an amazing book it is. Una, one of the pleasures of studying this again for this show was thinking of Jane Eyre is in some way like an easy listening cover version of Wadhaarheights. But anyway, we'll come on to that. Una, come on. You and I have both, I know we've both got origin stories for this. When do you think you first became Bronte aware? Oh, well, very basic. 1978, Kate Bush, yeah? Six years old.

You see that happening in front of you. That's going to impose itself on your consciousness. If you knew that song and you heard that song, given that it is literally a version of part of the plot of Wuthering Heights, at that point, you know about the book, at least at some level. When did you expand that into the full Bronte universe? So I'm fairly sure my adolescent reading was a bit spotty, but I'm fairly sure I read Wuthering Heights and Janeer as an adolescent.

But my real Bronte encounter was about 11 years ago when I was on maternity leave. and I read the whole Bronte Urve kind of from the professor through to Villette there I was sort of you know it's two in the morning I'm not going anywhere

let's do something that by the end of this nine months I feel I will have achieved something I don't know if I was just extremely tired but I began to read Wuthering Heights as an episode of Rising Damp and that got me through some quite Quite low moments. I'm going to apologise to many younger listeners, if we have any, in advance.

I promise you many of the references in this show will seem quite arcane. Rising Damper, popular sitcom of the 1970s starring Leonard Rossiter. Okay, so did you go on to write an article for a learned journal or take a break, either of those, called Bronte Novels. Dot, dot, dot, ranked, double exclamation mark. No, they were all hashtag Brontathan on Twitter Villette goes top but it was a close run

with Wuthering Heights actually and in my heart I know that Wuthering Heights is the best Bronte novel Speaking of Arcane things I'm like Una I'm fairly sure

my first experience of Wuthering Heights or the first impactful one would have been the number one single by Kate Bush which she wrote when she was about 15 or 16

she recorded when she was 17 and it was number one show and when she was 18 all of which is kind of mind-boggling really isn't it but she wasn't much younger in fact than emily bronte when she wrote the book in the first place we'll come on and talk about the kate bush song in the second half of this show but i think my first exposure to the bronte myth was um a program core tvs. program in 1979 called the Brontes of Haworth, which was a Blue Peter special assignment. And here, thanks to a man in New Zealand, and a very hissy old VCR recording, is an excerpt from that program. All the Brontes could paint and draw.

This is Charlotte's drawing of Flossie, Anne's Little Spaniel. And this is Emily's of her dog keeper. Branwell also painted this portrait of Emily She loved Howarth and the Moors even more passionately than the others And the few times she went away She became really physically ill As she grew older she cut herself off more and more from other people And roamed the Moors with her great dog keeper

Who cared for no one in the world but her She was still faithful to her lifelong dreams of the land of Gondle And poured out her soul in verse Which she put into the mouths of the characters in that unending chronicle. A messenger of hope comes every night to me and offers for short life, eternal liberty. He comes with western winds, with evenings wandering airs, with that clear dusk of heaven that brings the thickest stars. Winds take a pensive tone, and stars are tender fire, and visions rise and change which kill me with desire.

one day in the autumn of eighteen forty five i accidentally lighted on a manuscript volume of verse in my sister emily's handwriting i looked it over and something more than surprise seized me a deep conviction that these were not common effusions to my ear they had a peculiar music wild melancholy and elevating my sister emily was not a person of demonstrative character it took hours to reconcile her to the discovery i had not yet made and days to persuade her that such poems merited publication. Well, there you have it. That was an excerpt from the Bronties of Haworth, produced for BBC TV in 1979 by Blue Peter. That little clip does sum up all sorts of things that we think about, the Bronte myth, about these wild natural girls and their miraculous appearance on the literary scene. And that is a topic we will come back to.

But I think, first of all, I would like to turn to Andrew and say, reading this with your pumpkin head on, what elements of the weird, the supernatural and the horrific, did you identify in Wuthering Heights? Well, I think if you'd let that clip run on a little bit longer, you'd have heard Peter Purvis say that, and I agree with him, that Wuthering Heights, I think is one of the urtacks of folk horror, body horror and torture porn.

Yes, I remember that. Yeah. You know, I've met Peter Purvis, and he just bangs on about this kind of thing all the time. I think, I mean, one of the things I thought was interesting about it, reading it is you can see, you can hear Milton's devil in Heathcliff and also Shakespeare's Iago as well, these characters who only exist to destroy.

The Satan in Milton says only in destroying do I find ease. And I think kind of you can see those as the kind of roots of certainly of Heathcliff. But I think it was really striking, noticing all the ways in which kind of you could spot the books that it went on to influence. I think the most obvious one is Dracula. Um, because obviously, you know, you've got Dracula's arrival in a, in a port town, you've got Bram Stoker's use of disassociated narrators. You've also, you know, Dracula is this mysterious, destructive, dark-skinned foreigner who speaks in a, in a curious gibberish. Also, how does Dracula gain entry to the bedrooms of his victims? Let me in at your window. You know, tap, tap, tap. And this theme that's repeatedly runs through Wuthering Heights, about eternal love after death is obviously the thing that runs through Dracula. So I think that's an obvious one.

But I think you can see Heathcliff in Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Michael Myers in Halloween, just the idea of like just this relentless figure, this relentless figure dead set on one goal and one aim, even something like Twilight, which, you know, which asks the question, what would it mean if the person who you loved wanted to kill you and destroy you? Also there, you're evoking to me a warning to the curious, for instance, by M.R. James, the indefatigable pursuer. Yeah. And someone who you can, because the thing about Wuthering Heights, yes, you can say it's revenge, but there's something else that exists beyond that, isn't it, that is kind of infernal and uncanny?

Yeah, yeah. Laura, you wanted to come in there. There's something of Peter Pan there as well, but they're coming in through the window. and J.M. Barry's depiction of Peter Pan as this kind of wild demonic boy whose other half is in some ways Captain Hook and that's a huge influence on Demoree. And what happens when you have this figure

who comes through windows, who wants to take children away? There's something about the way that the childhood scenes between Kathy and Heathcliff are constantly repeated but also become sort of demonic and and possess other characters and constantly, constantly repeat and come back. This idea of that these grown-ups who behave like children, which, you know, is one of the things that runs through Wuthering Heights,

the sense that kind of, or a young person, i.e. Emily Bronte's idea of writing about grown-ups and playing about grow-ups. And I do not mean this is a slight at all But one of the main books that it reminded me of Was The Young Visitors by Daisy Ashford You know, the sense that you have got kind of These characters in it who are grown-ups But the way they behave does not correspond

To how grown-ups behave in the real world They are a creation of this writer You know, and they are a fantasy That does not seem to be fully drawn from, you know, the world in which they inhabit. That brings me perfectly to ask you of Wuthering Heights as an example of what we would now call genre fiction. We know, don't we, that Wuthering Heights, in a sense,

the world of Wuthering Heights is an extension of Emily Bronte's writing up until that point, which is fantasy, is unapologetic world building, specifically with her sister, Anne, of the, the realms of Gondel and so forth. Could you tell us a little bit about that? Yeah, so Gondel was a sort of game that they played together, wasn't it? They came up with these stories.

I think it wasn't Glass Town, the original one. Branwell and Charlotte had their own play world, which I think is angrier. But Gondell seems to live on for Emily, insofar as we know much about them. It seems to live on for much, much longer than these imaginative games. usually do. It's not just childhood play. It seems to be a source of deep imaginative productivity. And it's analogous to, in certain ways, to what Tolkien is doing with kind of inventing Middle Earth, that it goes beyond those sort of childhood drawing of maps or playing games with your sibling into something that becomes richer and deeper. And as I understand it,

Laura will know more about this. A lot of Emily's poetry we read as poetry but actually behind it there's a lot of gondal myths so some of the most famous poems actually are sort of attributable to characters in the gondal stories

yes the kingdoms that they came up with as children were absolutely fundamental to their artistic creation they were collaborative so as una said Emily and anne working on gondel charlotte and branwell working on Glasstown and then Angrier. And then they started to sort of almost splinter off

and have these quite competitive stories from these different kingdoms. And these stories were also, I think this is really important. They were literary. They produced little books. They wrote magazines. They reviewed each other's work often in quite sort of cheeky ways. They vied with each other in this competition. And just to plug DeMoreen again, and her biography of Bramwell Bronte that's called the infernal world of Bramwell Bronte, Charlotte called those kingdoms the infernal world. And Charlotte became afraid of them. And she feared that they had become so powerful that she was losing touch with reality. That is what DeMoree thinks is the cause of Branwell's downfall. He's unable to distinguish truth from reality, fiction, from fantasy.

anymore because he's completely engulfed by this infernal world. But for Emily, Demorese says, she says, Emily alone reveled in its glory and lived with it forever. She was able to channel it and she wasn't taken over by it. But it very much comes out of this collaboration of which Branwell is at the centre. He's given this box of toy soldiers and they each take one and they create these characters. So all of the literature comes out of this incredibly rich. but deeply, deeply dangerous imaginative world.

Laura is wearing a team Branwell badge that she brought at the Howarth Parsonage gift shop. I have one here myself. This is at the point which this show gets really weird, where we turn it into an episode about Bramwell's Lost Novel. That would be a backlisted triumph, but we're not going to do that. So Andrew, look, going back to this idea of Wuthering Heights as a suitable Halloween read, We'll talk about the ghosts just in a second. In what authors do you think the natural slash unnatural world,

the way Emily Bronte writes about that in Wuthering Heights? What genre authors does that remind you of? I had a touch of Arthur Macon in terms of what can emerge from the hills and the valleys and whatever and the bog. The bog is a really interesting thing in the graveyard that is next to Howarth Parsonage. As John Sutherland points out, if you bury someone in the loam of the soil round there, it has a quality of preserving the corpse rather than eating it away. So, for instance, in the novel, when Heathcliff wishes to disinter after how many years it is, Kathy's corpse,

the chances are she is actually fully recognisable and rather well preserved, which is in itself a horrific, horrific prosperable. You mentioned M.R. James and also Arthur Mackin, but I'd also like to mention one of, I think, our first Halloween author from 10 years ago, Robert Aikman. Robert Aitman's first story, The Trains, and his last story,

The Stains, the rhyme is intentional, are both versions of Wuthering Heights. And the trains is set within a house that two female hitchhikers come upon that has a relationship within it that is very similar to the relationship that is encountered in Wuthering Heights. And his last story,

the Staines, is about a lonely middle-class civil servants who becomes infatuated with this mysterious, wild nymph-like woman who lives on the moors and he mistakes her world for one of liberation which is going back to what we're saying about the myth of the brontes but what she actually does is she turns his world into one of mold and entropy and rot so it's that idea of the moors and nature and landscape that infest so his kind of his house becomes infested with mold and he they

they grow sort of they start to grow mold on their skins and they're basically become literally consumed by the nature that he tried to be romantically tried to be along with you can see that Aikman is reading Wuthering Heights and seeing the horror within it. Right, yes, that's that's really, really interesting. Well, you were saying, Andy, actually, about the, you know, digging in and finding the corpse, the sort of preserved. It's like a twisted version of sleeping beauty, isn't it? I think is behind that. But the other thing that I started thinking about, when I was re-reading was how a book like

The Secret Garden is almost preparatory reading in a way. I think you've got, obviously you've got the Yorkshire setting. You've got Mary's deeply unpleasant nature. You've got the sickly child. There's nothing wrong with your back, Colin. Yeah. Oh, just get up and move around. Yeah, and then you've got Dickon,

who is kind of a sort of, you know, an eight-year-old friendly version of Heathcliff, I guess. the creature who's close to nature and at home on the moors, this kind of thing. It's like you'd read that and then you'd find your way into Wuthering Heights. Okay, so that's interesting about, in a sense, Wuthering Heights's influence on genre. But Laura, one of the tenets of the Bronte myth is that, as propagated by her sister Charlotte, is that Emily emerged almost like a golem herself out of the clay around Haworth and was channeling nature in various ways.

And in fact, that's not really true, is it? I mean, they weren't wonderfully educated, but they read and read and read. So what would Emily have been reading that feeds into how she then builds the world of Wuthering Heights? Yeah, she's really well read. She's reading Byron. She's reading Wordsworth.

She's reading Sir Walter Scott. She's reading James. Hogg, reading the classics. Their father, when educating Branwell, also brought the girls into this discussion. They had free reign of the library. They were reading Blackwood's magazine. You know, they were very, the gondola angrier stories are very, very political. All of this is feeding into the sophistication of the structure of the novel. I just wanted to quote a couple of things that Charlotte says in the 1850 preface to Wuthering Heights that she

partly writes, so the novels published in 1847, it has some really quite in some ways vitriolic reviews, talking about its savage qualities, it's violent, it's all about brutal, unchecked passions. And Charlotte writes these

prefaces when it's republished. She describes Wuthering Heights as moorish and wild and naughty as the root of heath, nor was it natural that it should be otherwise, the author being herself, a native and nursling of the Moors. She goes on to say that Emily

has scarcely more practical knowledge of the peasantry amongst whom she lived than a nun has of the country people who pass by her convent gates. But sort of worse than this kind of thing, she talks about her extremes of vigour and simplicity.

She says, an interpreter ought always to have stood between her and the world. But the bit that I find just just, oh, makes me so mad, She says of the characters in Wuthering Heights, having formed these beings, she did not know what she had done. Oh, that is a low blow, right?

That's a classic how to suppress women's writing. It really is. She wrote it, but she didn't know what she was doing. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Well. Exactly.

Exactly. Charlotte is terrified by the power of control. an attempt to control Wuthering Heights, isn't it? You know, it's kind of that she's so terrified by it. Absolutely. She kind of attempts to kind of rework it and, and transform it into something else. Okay, look, this seems like a good moment to bring in, we're talking about the Bronte myth. We're talking about Charlotte.

This seems like a good moment to ask each of you, which member of the Brontes of the Bronte family, their circle, which is your favorite? You may only choose one. You may only choose one. start with Laura. I'm hoping she's going to be true to her code. Who is your favourite Bronte? Team Branwell. Team Branwell all the way. Team Bramwell. It's the dissolute brother, the tragic individual whose own failures can be said to have caused the conditions under which the sisters lived and produced fiction. Absolutely. You can see him within Heathcliff. You can see him within Rochester with so many

within so many of the characters. But also as the key member of those early literary collaborations. Right, okay. So it's one vote for Bramel, that's excellent. Andrew, who is your favourite Bronte? Emily, she's the OG. I think also her poetry, I think, is what, you know,

her adult poetry is what awakens the darker adult side of the sisters, you know, Charlotte finding emily's poetry is kind of takes them to another level in their writing so i think um i think it's emily for me una so my favorite bronte is patrick uh i i have a soft spot for patrick that's their father their father yeah who sort of uh is from a uh we have this myth of the you know the brontes as being you know living in this rough windspurped environment but genuinely he was from a back of poverty, pulls himself up, goes into the church, gets to Cambridge, father marries, father's six children, and then one by one he watches his wife and his

six children die. And I just find that an extremely moving and poignant story. And whatever we know about him, from the kind of millier that he creates or by neglect allows to happen, all this incredible work emerges. So I have this soft spot for Patrick. Our former guest, I know our former guest and dear friend Samantha Ellis would at this point. If she's listening to this, he's probably shouting out loud. Anne, where's Anne? So I'm sorry about that, Sam. But my favourite Bronte, I'm afraid, is Charlotte. And there's a very straightforward reason for that. You know, I have been, I have been deeply affected by the negative publicity, that Paul McCartney has received over the years.

And I see Charlotte as very much the Paul McCartney of the group here. She just wants everyone to get along. They've got some hits coming. Keep the hits coming. Don't mess with the formula. You know, take care of the PR. Ambitious. She's ambitious like Paul McCartney, right?

Is that fair? Is Charlotte the Paul McCartney of the band? I think you're absolutely right. So, I mean, that means Emily is John, the sort of, you know. I'm looking at my, do we agree? Hands up as we agree. Emily is John. Which makes Anne George.

The quiet one. Yeah. And I think Bramwell is a cross between Pete Best and Stuart Socliffe. So you've got that kind of the rebel element. But you've also got this person who isn't handsome enough and isn't trustworthy enough to get them a record deal. So they ditch him and then sort of go and go to see, you know, and bring it in someone else.

I put it to you that the, most working class member of the Bronte band who grew up in poverty but provides a steady beat is Howarth itself I was going to say Patrick is Ringo as you know

There's two broads, sorry Ringo I think there's no Ringo in the Brontes and that's why the Beatles are better than the Brontes okay well look When we come back from the break, we're going to have a conversation about ghosts in Wuthering Heights and their significance. And to what extent they are the leading emblem of Wuthering Heights as a weird novel.

But when we come back from this break, you will hear a few minutes of one of the most significant adaptations of Wuthering Heights from a TV series made for the BBC in the 1960s. Let me go. Let me go. Who are you? I'm Cathy Vinton. Oh, no. I've come home. I lost my way only most.

Let me indulge them. All the devil's going on. All the devil's going on! I've seen nothing, so. You lost your tongue, sir. What ails you? She was there. Who? She held my wrist like a demon.

Well, when I tried to close that casement, her wrist was caught. It was blouse to confound you, sir. I've been awakened for a nightmare. Oh no, it was real. She cried to be let in. Oh God. I'd rather face this no strips than spin an hour in this house, Mr Heathcliff. She was there. She, she said her name with Catherine Linton. Lies.

Oh, my honor, sir! She said her name was... Littance! Catherine! Oh, God! She'd come. She'd go. We'd know I'd be a dead man.

Mr. Heath live, I'll not stay in this house. No, no, you may take my room. No, go here, Christ and speak to the devil for me. You say you can and will not stay here. Go. Go. Kathy. Hear me this time.

Where are you? Matthew? So there you go. That was a clip from the final episode of the 1967 BBC TV adaptation of Wuthering Heights. You heard a young and swarthy Ian McShane as he. Heathcliff there. That seems to me to be a really excellent rendering of the darkness and the ghosts of Wuthering Heights. Laura, the ghosts in Wuthering Heights, do you think they are real ghosts? They are figments of somebody's imagination. But more importantly, what does it do to the novel if they are real ghosts? And on the other hand, what does it do to the novel if they

aren't. Such a good question. I think for me, I think they have to be real ghosts. I think they really do. I think if they're not, there's something almost irredeemable about the novel. If all of this power has had no impact on the, on the surroundings, on the place, if these characters have not been able to somehow embed themselves into the landscape and the houses such that they can come back, then it terrifies me to think about what this has all been for somehow, which seems like a weird way round to say it. Because there's also an argument to say, well, oh, they're all figments of Lockwood's imagination. He has those three dreams before the, the two other dreams before the Cathy dream. There's the dream where all of her names multiply before him. And

Clearly Heathcliff talks later about being haunted by her image. He sees her image everywhere. So they could be figments of people's imaginations. We're clearly in a novel in which it's the ultimate unreliable narrator or kind of nested boxes of unreliable narrators. But somehow I need them to be real. I need that somehow. Yeah, yeah.

For me, the power sort of lies in the ambiguity. and who believes in, who proceeds through the world as if it were true within the confines of the book. But what I found really interesting on this reread was the way that the characters in the books talked about the reality of ghosts and goblins. And they talked about them in equivalent terms as belief in God or the devil.

And I just think that's incredibly interesting, particularly from the daughter of a pastor that we, oh yeah yeah there's god there's the devil there's the ghosts there's the all the other stuff you know and and the belief in that is as valid and as meaningful a belief as it as in a kind of christian pantheon and i think that's really that's strong from a pastor's daughter that is the philosophy of her poems that this is all equivalent and that god can reside within the self and that nature is as powerful as church and belief in rigid, religious ideas is sometimes the practice of fools. Big shout out to Patricia Routledge, who helped me with the book, with her, the audio book,

because hearing this book read aloud, you realize that Emily Bronte is a poet, and you hear the rhythm of the language and the rhythm of the dialogue. and if we look at it in one way as a work of poetry and you look at kind of what symbols are in poetry, they're allowed to exist both as the thing and as the symbol. So I think the ghosts both are and aren't. They exist in both states, like the novel itself. The novel itself does not reside in a fixed state.

And I think that the ghosts are the same. Can I also add that a ghost story is traditionally told by a roaring fire by somebody speaking it to you. And in fact, this book has two narrators, doesn't it? Yeah. But in both cases, it's kind of like a first-hand account of, I can't prove it, I can't tell you, I got, but it's like get ready to be chilled because this is a long-winded way of saying,

yes, absolutely, they, of course they're real and of course they aren't. And to be possessed in turn, this story is now our responsibility. You know, ghost stories are in the telling, but also in we have to take it forward and repeat it. And Wuthering Heights is an act of possession. Absolutely. You know, it kind of, it possesses you. Completely.

And that's why I say it is in itself a haunted text. And I think that's one reason why adaptations of it are in many ways so particular to the adaptee that you can go from the melodrama of the Olivier to something like the Andrea Arnold adaptation, which is, you know, it's grim up north. But then has a, that a marvellous moment of haunting just at the end, really, you know, real tingling moment. moments of the haunting at the end? Adaptations, people are very exercised and we don't have to dig into why, but people are very exercised about the forthcoming film called Wuthering Heights, which may or may not be an adaptation, but certainly is drawing inspiration from Emily Bronte's novel

by the film director Emerald Fennell. Andrew, why are people antsy already? This film isn't out for ages. Una pretty much defined it that because the novel is so vast, because it's not fixed, Emily does not provide any human individuality or psychology.

So there's so much space for the reader to place themselves in it and take stuff away. And so each of us will have come away with a different version of Wuthering Heights. And I think therefore that becomes you can become very possessive of that. So I would combine that with what you were saying

about the myth of Wuthering Heights and the myth of the Brontes and how the adaptation seems to hold hard to a romantic notion and a romantic ideal. So we have these very strict ideas of what Wuthering Heights should be, even though Wuthering Heights itself resists that when you read it. So much like Elizabeth Taylor,

as we said the last time you were with us, there is a real sense, people feel proprietorial. You said the Wuthering Heights possesses people. Well, I think this is further evidence of it. You know, people, don't mess with what I think Wuthering Heights ought to be. Hey, Laura, what do you think Wuthering Heights ought to be and has Emerald Fennell delivered?

I am a massive fan of adaptation. You know, I'm writing an adaptation of Beowulf myself. I'm all for it. The more rogue the better. go wild and yet the Emerald Fennell trailer I think it's an abomination

I am Well I don't If you're listening Emerald I tried to hold them back But they wouldn't do it Go on It's an abomination Go on

Even the most fan fiction friendly among us draws a line You know I'll tell you for why And I would be really interested To hear what you What you all think about this But you know

It's being billed as this erotic psychological drama. I don't think Wuthering Heights is sexy. I don't think it's about sexual passion. If you, you know, the moment where Cathy says that Heathcliff is more myself than I am, whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.

And as I was kind of having this thought, I reread Daphne de Maurer's essay, Romantic Love, where she says of Wuthering Heights There is more savagery, more brutality in the pages of Wuthering Heights than any novel of the 19th century, more beauty, more poetry too, and what is more unusual, a complete lack of sexual emotion? I don't think Wuthering Heights is a sexy book. I was listening to The In Our Time on Wuthering Heights,

and one of the funniest things about it, and obviously in our time is always very funny. But one of the funniest things about it is Melvin's preoccupation, with whether their relationship was consummated. He asks it about three times and goes back to it. He goes, do you think that the relationship was consummated on the most? And it's kind of just constant. And you're absolutely right.

It's like kind of that it seems to exist outside of that. It's a violent novel. It's an obsessive novel. It's kind of, it's, you know, flesh, yes, you know, flesh. blood, but not sex. Okay, so we're talking about adaptations. The adaptation clip, if you have a chance to see that, what's interesting about it, the one we played from 1967 after the break,

is Wuthering Heights is fascinating for all sorts of reasons, the Cape Booker record. One reason is, as has been noted, it's the one of the only adaptations that takes Kathy's perspective. And that proves to be a recurring theme in Kate Bush's songs. When she adapt something, she will often, like on cloudbusting or on the red shoes, she will take the perspective of the female narrator and tell you a story you think you know, but from the woman's perspective. But also, it's worth noting that when she wrote the song Wuthering Heights, she hadn't read the book. What she'd seen as a nine-year-old child on the BBC. was that bit we just played you earlier.

And if you watch it on YouTube, you will see that the actress who plays Kathy lit from beneath, looking at the camera, direct into the camera, is reproduced by the 18-year-old Kate Bush in the video for Wuthering Heights. She'd remembered it with so clearly, and it had made such an impression on her

that nearly 10 years later, she actually channels it into the video. It's a possession. A possession, exactly, but a video that no one could see it. It's only when this thing came out of the archive about 10 years ago, that people were able to make that connection. I'd be really interested in the amount of people who love Wuthering Heights and their main knowledge of Wuthering Heights is, as you say,

Cape Bush's adaptation and no other. Yeah, Laura, could we talk a little bit about the structure of Wuthering Heights? when the novel was first published I think I'm right in saying that it was scandalous wasn't it and people were outraged by it to the extent that they couldn't see the craft within it

and it wasn't until the 1920s that someone published a paper pointing out that you could actually it's scrupulously well structured and dated absolutely it's that sort of of nested box structure where you've got Lockwood and you've got Nellie Dean and moments where Lockwood, he sort of becomes Nellie Dean. And she is such a, such an interesting figure,

as we've already said. But, you know, Charlotte in the 1850 preface holds up Nellie Dean as something completely different. She says, for a specimen of true benevolence and homely fidelity, look at the character of Nellie Dean. You think, what has she even? Has she, has she She read this book. Did we read the same Wuthering Heights? She's got the lost manuscript that she's been reading because that's not the version that I've got. It's an incredibly sophisticated structure that I think then,

and also in terms of the way that it plays with time, the way that the ghost of Kathy is the childhood Kathy, the moments later when Kathy is ill and she feels haunted almost by her, her former self and her future self. She's doing incredibly complicated things looking backwards and forwards in time across the structure of this novel.

It's deeply, deeply sophisticated. And I think if anyone hasn't done this, and I know I did this when I was a teenager, just sit down and do a little family tree and see how elegant. All the names that shift and move around, which is part of its structure and its concept and its framework,

But just sit and do a family tree and see how careful that is and how that is like the skeleton of the book, I think. Andrew, the repetition of names is something you commented on. What's going on with that? Well, the thing is that on the one hand, it's beautifully done, but also it's surely done purposely to confuse. So as you get this sense of loops and repetition and the way in which these things are related to...

to you know trauma and trauma being revisited upon a family so and re-emerging in different different versions of the same name so on the one hand because i know earlier on laura you casted me for saying that the novel is is chaotic it is emotionally chaotic at the same time as being beautifully structured and that's like that's the marvel it's like kind of it's like listening to some sort of you know piece of jazz where the rhythm section is totally together, but what's going on over the top is just this kind of blasting noise. It's Ornett Coleman, isn't it? His most plastic saxed. Could I ask you then, Laura, one interpretation, and the great thing about Wuthering Heights, it is of course

ungovernable, endlessly interpretable, but one interpretation there for Wuthering Heights And the ending of Wuthering Heights, yes, we're about to talk about the ending specifically. So if you don't want to know what happens, look away now. You could almost interpret that as Heathcliff finally the penny drops, that the only way to break a cycle of abuse that he has suffered from and perpetuated is to take himself out of it, is to will himself to death. Or he's just exhausted. Yeah, but also he's got Kathy saying, come on, come across, come across, come across.

Which is just what Kathy herself has done. There's this wonderful moment where Nellie Dean describes her as full of ambition, which led her to adopt a double character without necessarily wanting to deceive anyone. Kathy's been split in two between Wuthering Heights and Thrush Cross Grange, and neither of those are places where a woman can thrive or have any kind of real identity. and that fracture happens. And then she has to will herself out into some kind of other afterlife because there's no real place for her to go.

The only person who gets out is Isabella after she marries Heathcliff. She leaves, and I think she's a really interesting character. We haven't really talked about Nelly Dean, who is not only an unreliable narrator, but talk about your unlikable characters. I mean, she's, she's not a nice, not a nice person. Yeah, I'm rereading it this time. There's a moment where Heathcliff seems to break.

And it was one of the moments I found most spintingling actually where he walks into the house and young Catherine is teaching Horton to read. And they've got their heads together kind of fair and dark. and he comes in and they look up at him and Nelly describes it it's two pairs of eyes looking at him but they're both older Catherine's eyes so it's like a double Catherine

stares back at him and he seems to snap there he seems to go I can't beat this I can't I've tried to I've tried to break her I've tried to warp him but people are ungovernable

and that seems to tip him and it's a really chilling moment actually if you can't beat them literally join them enjoying them okay listen listen we talked a lot here about the ghost story of Wuthering Heights but I wonder if we could finish

with just talking a little bit about the ghost story of the Bronties what is it about the Brontee myth that even though we know on one level that they were well educated and that Haworth was not an obscure little village. It was an industrial town of some 5,000 souls and they weren't particularly claustrated and so on and so forth. What is it about the story of the Brontes?

What is it about that story that we need? What does it give us in the culture that we always tell it and tell it again? Because it's about art coming out of landscape, which seems to be a sort of a British ideal. You know, the idea that our landscape, England itself, Britain itself will be, you know, a creator, we'll give forth art. There's something miraculous about it that I think people hold on to.

Is it also, you know, that people just want to believe that someone can just be brilliant rather than work at brilliance they're touched by some kind of muse or some inspiration strikes or a vision is given or something is channeled through them whereas as I think we've discussed

they worked and worked and worked at this unconsciously at first as children but they told stories they wrote books I'd forgotten they'd review each other they're working at this and then Charlotte later is very consciously working at this as a professional

as someone who wants to become a professional but the idea that something I guess it's like John Claire isn't it again that's landscape we want to feel that something bubbles up something is ungovernable I guess I would suggest

as well Laura that we the public love miraculous brilliance that doesn't require work and then we love to know that they'll be punished for it. That is the story of Van Gogh or the story, you know, as long as they suffered and died and died young, we can handle it. If on the other hand they have long careers, we just go, we get bored of it. Yeah, and they can be controlled. You know, on the one hand, there's this myth of the artistic family and we love that and we see that in the in the demurees too but the other side of this is

unfortunately the patriarch controlling incredibly imaginative industrious hardworking disciplined women with their dissolute brother what they what they did is just extraordinary and yes they had this touch of magic and a visionary quality about that there's something there's something of William Blake to Emily Bronte, but they... Everyone thought he was mad, too. But they worked their socks off and they read and they learned their literary craft. Again, like Dumorriere, who similarly gets dismissed. I think Daphne D'Amoye has been mentioned more in this show.

The actual show. The one we made about Daphne D'Morio. In the context of that, the failure of Brannwell, Branwell's failure is integral. the fact that he is the man amongst three sisters and the fact that he is the failure and also the fact that he is probably the one who believes in the idea of the miraculous most that this this stuff will just emerge and especially it will just emerge if you take laudanum or you get drunk you know the idea of the the male creative artists all you need to do

is go to the pub get wasted and you'll write something miraculous and it doesn't happen And that's his tragedy, but it's also integral to the myth of the Brontes. Also, the other piece of bad luck that Bramwell, and all the Brontes had, but Bramwell in particular, is he was always popping down to the Black Bull to get drink himself stupid with beer that was made from water soaked through 40,000 corpses in the graveyard because they hadn't deteriorated in the ground. they'd just leaked into the whole substrata of Haworth. And the pub made its beer from the water that was drawn that had gone through all the bodies in the graveyard. So he truly was haunted.

Yep, there you go. All those souls. And if that's not a Halloween story, I don't know what is. And that's where we must leave it. Thanks to Andrew and Una for digging in to a bitter feud that seems to have lasted for generations and to Laura for coming on and talking about Wuthering Heights. And many thanks to our producer today, Tess Davidson,

for being our own loyal Tabby Akroyd. For show notes with clips, links and suggestions for further reading for this show and the previous 250 episodes, visit our website at batlisted.fm. If you wish to buy the book discussed on this or on any of our other shows, visit our shop at bookshop.org and choose Backlisted as your Bookshop. And do subscribe to our Patreon at patreon.com forward slash backlisted. And remember if you subscribe at the lot listener level,

you'll get two extra exclusive podcasts every month, installments of Andy's new project inventory, and the chance to join a community of. dedicated listeners and readers like ourselves. But before we go, Andrew, and honestly, beacons are being lit around the coast of the UK, as I prepare to ask you this, or they could be effigies, I'm not sure. But anyway, Andrew, if Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte were a Gene Kelly film musical, which would it be?

I think it's the one in which a group of a people, opinionated people come together and rework classic ideas over and over again. And there's a central scene in which one of the characters, a man, goes mad during inclement weather. I think it has to be singing in the rain. I've waited 10 years for singing in the rain. Well done. Pull your shirt over your head and run around the room, Andrew. Well done.

Well, Lorna, is there anything you could add to that? Is there anything you'd like to say about Wuthering Heights that we didn't get to in the show? I barely know how to follow that. It's extraordinary. A little plug for the Isabella Linton in set, letter and story, because I think that's a really important bit that people should keep their eyes peeled for. And I also want to just plug an amazing graphic novel called Glass Town by Isabel Greenberg. which if you want to get into the gondol and angrier story and the importance of that to the Brontes,

obviously read Daphne de Morier's, The Infernal World of Brannwell Bronte, but also check this out, Glass Town, by Isabel Greenberg. Brilliant, okay. And I should definitely plug my Doctor Who audio where the doctor has an adventure with Emily Bronte, surely. I can't believe you ever mentioned that already. What's it called, Una?

It's called The Window on the Moor and it plays with the Glastown stories. So it's just a little... Wow. Incredible. Amazing. Thank you so much, everyone. Have a fantastic Halloween.

Have a lovely time. Thank you. Kathy Earnshaw, Heathcliff. And The Moors themselves, along with Una, Laura, Andrew and Tess for joining us for this special Halloween episode. about Wuthering Heights. Thank you, everyone.

See you next time. Don't have nightmares. Bye-bye.