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(WIND GUSTING)

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NARRATOR: They loved wandering free here, on this Yorkshire moor.

It was their horizon, a place to dream,

a place to write.

There were three of them.

The Bronte Sisters.

There was Charlotte, the ambitious eldest, author of Jane Eyre.

There was Anne, the discreet one, who wrote Agnes Grey.

And there was the enigmatic Emily...

..the creator of the strangest of love stories...

..Wuthering Heights.

(WIND WHISTLES)

(UNSETTLING FLUTE MUSIC)

A tale of love and death, on this windswept moor.

The story of Cathy and Heathcliff...

..doomed passion, merciless revenge.

Wuthering Heights is an extraordinary book.

I'm in awe of it. It is one of the most unique books

in the English language.

It's totally unique in the context of the Victorian novel,

sort of, out of sync with its own time;

I mean, out of sync, possibly, with any time.

It's also a very sophisticated book and a very disconcerting book.

And it's such a strange story.

It's dark and odd,

and it definitely has a peculiarness to it

that I don't think any of the other Bronte's novels have.

And it's a shame that we don't have another novel by Emily

because it would be amazing to know

if all of her work was going to be like that,

or if this was just an anomaly that poured out of her,

but I suppose that's something that we'll never know.

(GENTLE PIANO MUSIC)

Emily Bronte was born in 1818,

and she only lived to the age of 30.

(BIRDS TWITTERING)

A short life, spent here in Haworth,

a little industrial village in Yorkshire.

Beyond the black roofs, the moor.

At the centre of the village,

the church where their father, Patrick Bronte, was the priest.

(CHURCH BELL RINGS)

And just behind that, the cemetery.

Emily was only three when her mother was laid to rest

in the family vault in 1821,

soon followed by the two eldest daughters in the family.

The windows of the parsonage still look out onto the graves.

This is where Emily grew up

and lived with her two sisters, Charlotte and Anne,

and their brother, Branwell.

The Brontes' literature is so original and passionate.

And I think when you combine that with the story of their lives,

three geniuses living and growing up together in this house,

and you've got the landscape of Haworth,

the bleak, you know, the moorland.

And I think it's a really potent mix

which continues to bring people here.

(GENTLE PIANO MUSIC)

Within these austere walls,

so removed from the effervescence of London,

an unusual literary adventure unfolded.

It started in secret.

Because at first the Bronte Sisters chose to hide...

..behind ambiguous pseudonyms...

..only keeping their initials.

Charlotte was Currer Bell.

Anne, Acton Bell.

And Emily, Ellis Bell.

"We did not like to declare ourselves women",

Charlotte wrote later,

"because we had a vague impression that authoresses

"are liable to be looked on with prejudice."

(PENCIL SCRIBBLING ON PAPER)

(CLOCK CHIMES)

The trick worked.

In October 1847,

Charlotte, alias Currer Bell, published Jane Eyre.

The account of an orphan girl,

a governess in love with her master, Mr Rochester.

"A powerful romance," said the critics.

It was a runaway success.

In December, still under her pseudonym,

Anne published Agnes Grey,

and Emily, Wuthering Heights.

Agnes Grey, a biting critique of the bourgeoisie, was well-received.

Critics were astonished by Wuthering Heights.

I was rereading the other day, the very, very first reviews

that were ever published when Wuthering Heights came out in 1847.

This was at a time when nobody knew who Ellis Bell was.

They didn't know that Ellis Bell was a woman.

They knew nothing about the author.

And in a way, these very early critics responded

with a sort of honesty and engagement that later got lost.

They confess to being bewildered and baffled by this book.

They described it as strangely original, completely new.

One comment from one of these very early reviews in 1847,

it was the end of the review, and it really stuck out for me.

The critic just said,

"It's as if the author was saying,

"'Here, take that and see what you can do with it.'"

(WIND BLOWS)

What lies within Wuthering Heights that made it so incendiary?

The story begins one night in 1771

at Wuthering Heights, an isolated farm on the Yorkshire moors.

The master, Mr Earnshaw, brought a lost child there.

He named him Heathcliff,

a name of heather and rock,

and brought him up in his family.

(DOOR CLOSES)

(FIRE CRACKLES)

His eldest son Hindley hated Heathcliff.

He turned him into a humiliated, brutalised servant.

But Hindley's younger sister Cathy,

"a wild, hatless little savage,"

saw herself in Heathcliff.

(PANS CLATTER)

Give him to me, or I'll tell my father

how you boasted you'd turn me out of doors when he died.

That's a lie. I never said such a thing.

Of course he didn't.You never had a father, you gypsy beggar.

You can't have mine. Cathy, stop that!

"Poor Heathcliff, Hindley calls him a vagabond,

"and won't let him sit with us, nor eat with us any more;

"and, he says, he and I must not play together,

"and threatens to turn him out of the house if we break his orders.

"His conduct to Heathcliff is atrocious.

"H and I are going to rebel."

Are you hurt badly?

Talk to me.

Why don't you cry?

Heathcliff, don't look like that!

How can I pay him back?

Cathy, Heathcliff, for life, in death.

(ROMANTIC ORCHESTRAL MUSIC)

A childhood love...that cared nothing for either the taboos

or the difference in class.

An absolute love, which Cathy betrayed when she got older.

WOMAN: 'Heathcliff! Heathcliff!'

'(DOOR SLAMS)'

Cathy.

Heathcliff.

(MELANCHOLY ORCHESTRAL MUSIC)

Why did you stay so long in that house?

I didn't expect to find you here.

Why did you stay so long?

Why? Because I was having a wonderful time.

A delightful, fascinating, wonderful time.

Among human beings.

Go and wash your face and hands, Heathcliff.

And comb your hair,

so that I needn't be ashamed of you in front of the guests.

Wuthering Heights is probably guilty

of touching upon at least two or three of the things

that I think most trouble English people

when they think of English society.

Wuthering Heights is guilty

of a pretty savage investigation of the class system.

Well, the whole of the structure of the book

is set up around rank and order,

who is acceptable, who is acceptable to marry who,

erm...how you move up the class system,

how you can fall off that ladder and move down.

The shame and the guilt

and the discomfort around class and rank and order

is very much at the centre.

Of course, that's one of the things that so disturbs Heathcliff,

this idea of not belonging, not being the right kind of person.

(RAINFALL PATTERING)

Cathy married Edgar Linton, a gentleman,

the heir of the neighbouring estate.

A man of her own social class.

Defeated, Heathcliff fled.

MAN: "Why did you despise me?

"Why did you betray your own heart, Cathy?

"You loved me.

"Then, what right had you to leave me?

"What right?

"Answer me.

"Because misery and degradation and death would have parted us.

"You, of your own will, did it.

WOMAN: "I have no more business to marry Edgar Linton

"than I have to be in heaven.

"And if Hindley had not brought Heathcliff so low,

"I shouldn't have thought of it.

"It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now.

"So, he shall never know how I love him.

"And that, not because he's handsome,

"but because he's more myself than I am."

Initially love, some kind of love.

A kind of connection, a bond,

which has become poisoned.

It's become diseased.

It's become infected with something that they can't recover from,

that they can't really escape each other either.

That kind of toxicity which is beginning to undermine it

means it's no longer love,

but it's the kind of familiar bond that they can't break it.

So, that's tragic, of course.

(ROMANTIC ORCHESTRAL MUSIC)

Years later, Heathcliff returned to Wuthering Heights.

I'll wait for you.

Till you come.

Devastated, Cathy died of sorrow.

Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest, so long as I live on.

I killed you.

Haunt me, then. Haunt your murderer.

I know that ghosts have wandered on the Earth.

Be with me always.

Take any form, drive me mad.

Only do not leave me in this dark alone, where I cannot find you.

I cannot live without my light.

I cannot die without my soul.

Oh, Cathy.

Oh, my dear.

(DRAMATIC MUSIC)

The 1939 film version by William Wyler,

with Laurence Olivier as Heathcliff,

had an enormous impact in terms of turning this book

into a sort of icon of popular culture

and a sort of iconic story of romantic love.

(DRAMATIC MUSIC CRESCENDOS))

I think the film was enormously popular.

I think by 1947, within ten years of it being released,

something like 200 million people had seen it.

# KATE BUSH: Wuthering Heights

And that's how Wuthering Heights became a legend.

# Out on the wily, windy moors

# We'd roll and fall in green...

In 1978, an unknown young, 19-year-old singer

even turned it into a global hit.

# How could you leave me

# When I needed to

# Possess you?

# I hated you, I loved you, too

# Bad dreams in the night...

Kate Bush sang of Wuthering Heights...

# I was going to lose the fight

# Leave behind my Wuthering, Wuthering

# Wuthering Heights, Heathclif

# It's me, I'm Cathy, I've come home now

# So cold

# Let me in your window... #

(THUNDER CRACKS)

..Cathy, Heathcliff, the moors.

Classic.

But in danger of being misunderstood.

(DRAMATIC MUSIC)

Heathcliff!

Heathcliff! (SOBS)

Heathcliff.

But I don't know what people who've seen the film would have felt

when they opened the book

because the film really transforms it

into something completely different.

The film completely overlooks

the disturbing aspects, really, of the novel.

It makes Heathcliff much more sympathetic,

and it completely omits the second half of the plot

in which Heathcliff implacably pursues his revenge.

(WIND WHISTLES)

Emily Bronte wrote of that...

..the most horrifying, the most uncompromising revenge.

Haunted by his dead love,

for 20 years Heathcliff lashed out at all those who remained:

Hindley, Cathy's brother, whom he leads into debauchery and ruin;

Edgar Linton, whose sister he seduces and persecutes.

And when they were all dead, he went after their children:

Cathy's daughter, Hindley's son,

and even his own son.

MAN: "I have no pity.

"I have no pity.

"The more the worms writhe,

"the more I yearn to crush out their entrails!

"It is a moral teething;

"and I grind with greater energy in proportion to the increase of pain."

No, no, no, it's savage.

You know, there's a great deal of cruelty and revenge,

which is in parallel with the... with the supposed passion and love.

Again, it's unchecked, it's uncontrolled. It's... It's wild.

There's a moment where I think Heathcliff takes the young Cathy,

Cathy's daughter, Cathy number two,

on his knee and slaps her so hard about the face and ears.

It's just a scene of...

You know, there are no trigger warnings in this book.

There are scenes of sadistic violence....

you know, perpetrated all over the place,

but when it's perpetrated by a man on a woman,

it's particularly difficult to swallow.

But the novel just presents it,

it doesn't really comment on it.

(UNSETTLING MUSIC)

Class violence, revenge, sadism.

Wuthering Heights isn't just a love story.

According to the script of the very first adaptation, made in 1920,

and unfortunately lost,

instead it was a "tremendous story of hate."

The moral of the story, if there is one,

it's not an optimistic view of human nature.

Heathcliff himself, I think, at one point says

something like "the tyrant grinds down the slave,

"and the slave doesn't rise up against him.

"He grinds down those beneath him."

(SPEAKS JAPANESE)

Wuthering Heights has been adapted for the cinema more than 50 times.

(SPEAKS JAPANESE)

In 1988, Japanese filmmaker Kiju Yoshida took on the challenge.

His version embraced every aspect of the work.

Heathcliff is Onimaru;

Cathy is Kinu.

(THEY SPEAK JAPANESE)

(SPEAKS JAPANESE)

For French writer, Georges Bataille, Wuthering Heights was one

of the greatest works of literature of all time.

(SPEAKS JAPANESE)

Perhaps the most beautiful,

the most profoundly tormented of love stories.

(SPEAKS FRENCH)

The thing that's so odd about the book is that it just isn't sexy.

It's not about erotic desire, really.

I mean, the bond between Cathy and Heathcliff is...

it's like a bond of identification rather than desire.

So, as Cathy says, "I am Heathcliff."

It's a bond that's forged in childhood,

and there's almost overtones of sibling incest

because they've, of course, been brought up as brother and sister.

There are so many aspects about this novel

that break boundaries and feel transgressive.

(WIND WHISTLES)

MAN: "I'll tell you what I did yesterday.

"I got the sexton who was digging Linton's grave

"to remove the earth off her coffin lid, and I opened it."

(SPEAKS JAPANESE)

"Before closing the coffin, I struck one side of it loose,

"and I bribed the sexton to pull it away when I'm laid there."

(THUNDER CRACKS)

"And then by the time Linton gets to us,

"he'll not know which is which."

(COFFIN LID CREAKS)

(SPEAKS JAPANESE)

(HIGH-PITCHED WHISTLING)

Emily Bronte wrote about all the shades of Evil.

And that's what has fascinated,

obsessed, and astounded people from day one.

(THUNDER CRACKS)

(THUNDER RUMBLES)

Who could have written this?

It was a mystery.

Because Emily Bronte wouldn't let anyone get close to her...

(FLOORBOARDS CREAK)

..hidden behind the walls of the parsonage in Haworth...

and her pseudonym, Ellis Bell.

(TINKLING PIANO MUSIC)

Her true identity was only revealed after her death

by her sister, Charlotte Bronte.

After this, actually, critics, you know

they turn against Wuthering Heights completely.

By this point, they know it's by a woman,

and this also really changes their viewpoint. I mean...

you know, when it was being read as being by a man,

it was an interesting experimental work of art.

Once it's known to be by a woman, it's unacceptable.

(CLOCK TICKING)

In response to Victorian England,

which condemned Wuthering Heights and its creator,

Charlotte Bronte rewrote the myth of Emily...

(LEAVES RUSTLING)

..painting her as a simple girl from the moors,

a solitary, reclusive and innocent virgin,

supposedly inspired by an inexplicable intuition.

Charlotte pleaded for her to be forgiven,

claiming she didn't realise what she was writing.

Charlotte once said an interpreter

should have stood between Emily and the world.

And, actually, an interpreter usually does

because we have to rely on the testimonies

of Charlotte or of other people

who didn't have an intimate relationship with her.

(TINKLING PIANO MUSIC)

We know very little about Emily Bronte,

and she's quite mysterious.

There is so little material relating to Emily Bronte.

We don't know for sure whether she destroyed many of her stories

and her early manuscripts before she died,

or whether Anne destroyed them after Emily's death.

I think because Emily didn't form friendships

outside the family circle,

we don't have that kind of wealth of correspondence,

which we do in the case of Charlotte.

All we've got to go on are a collection,

a small collection of diary papers,

which she produced every four years with her sister, Anne.

The first diary entry is dated November 24th, 1834.

Emily was 16 years old.

"Anne and I have been peeling apples for Charlotte

"to make an apple pudding.

"Tabby said just now, 'Come, Anne, pilloputate.'

"It's past noon, and Anne and I are yet to wash,

"make our beds, or do our chores,

"and we want to go and play outside."

Emily is just describing what is happening.

It's just symbolic of how we generally feel

about how we wish we knew more about Emily,

but there's something in the lack of sources

and also in her own personality that just won't let us in.

(RAIN PATTERING)

Emily evades us, and the mystery remains.

Unless we could go back in time.

(WIND WHISTLES)

(CLOCK TICKING

(CLOCK CHIMES)

At the parsonage in Haworth, Emily, her sisters Charlotte and Anne,

and their brother Branwell grew up motherless, isolated,

but free...

..under the watchful eye of an unusual father, Patrick Bronte.

(CLOCK CHIMES)

A priest and a poet, he revered literature.

He was an Irish immigrant and former blacksmith

who had raised himself all the way up to Cambridge University.

(SOMBRE PIANO MUSIC)

For Branwell, his only son,

he had ambitions for the greatest of literary

and artistic successes...

..the best studies, the Royal Academy of Art.

And for his three daughters, a solid grounding in the classics,

and independent lives as governesses or teachers.

I think another gift that Patrick gave to all his children

was that he encouraged them to read widely,

and he didn't censor their reading.

They were avid readers of newspapers,

and they read anything that they could lay hands on.

One of their firm favourites was Blackwood's Magazine,

which contained all kinds of political accounts.

It had reviews, new books and art and literature.

And they would devour this.

They had a passionate interest

in what was going on in the wider world,

which in turn, had a huge impact on the imaginary world

and the events that were taking place there.

One day in 1826,

Patrick Bronte gave nine-year-old Branwell a box of 12 toy soldiers.

(FIRE CRACKLING)

Along with his sisters, Branwell dreamed up names for them,

adventures, conquests, and passions.

And soon, as they played and wrote,

a whole imaginary world took shape.

The adventure had begun.

Four writers were born.

WOMAN: "Awful Branny, gloomy giant,

"shaking o'er Earth his blazing air.

"Dread Tally next, like a dire eagle flies.

"Emmy and Annie last with boding cry.

"All these, and more than these, before my eyes appear."

Imagining the fire going and the darkness and the curtains drawn

and the candles and the four of them sitting around this table

with their papers spread out

is a really arresting image.

And it's impossible to sit in this room and not imagine that.

Obviously, there was a lot of tragedy.

They lost their mother, they lost other siblings,

but it seems that they were so creatively ambitious

and so extravagant with their imagination

that they must have been happy as well, I like to think.

So, this is one of the miniature books

produced by Charlotte Bronte

when she was about 13 years of age.

So, you've got a whole collection of poetry and prose,

all the elements you'd expect to find in a journal

like Blackwood's Magazine.

These were intended to be read by a set of toy soldiers.

They would act out little plays

and create an imaginary world around the soldiers.

I think it's all quite childish, initially,

but as the children got older,

the imaginary world and the ongoings in it

got more and more complex and sophisticated.

(CLOCK CHIMES)

There has sometimes been a feeling

that the Bronte novels just appeared from nowhere,

but the other thing about these tiny manuscripts

is they show that the Brontes served

a long apprenticeship in literature.

(UNSETTLING MUSIC)

(FLOORBOARDS CREAKING)

WOMAN: "We wove a web in childhood

"A web of sunny air.

"We dug a spring in infancy

"Of water pure and fair. #

Miniature books and hundreds of poems,

prose texts and detailed maps.

Written by the four of them over nearly ten years,

under the aegis of Branwell and Charlotte,

these exuberant youthful writings

conjured up an entire world - Glass Town.

Capital of the Kingdom of Angria,

an imaginary land on the distant shores of West Africa.

Isabel Greenberg made a graphic novel out of all this.

I think they were fascinated by the news

and the world that they lived in. They were alive

in a time of great exploration and colonialism,

and so all the things they were reading in the newspaper, of course,

were going to find their way into their imaginary world.

The way that they write it was sort of romantic and exciting to them.

They're, sort of, very... It feels quite patriotic,

and that is uncomfortable, I think, for a modern reader.

But they were children of their time

and they were writing what they knew.

(URGENT DRAMATIC MUSIC)

(PEN NIB WRITING ON PAPER)

In the twists and turns of Glass Town,

one character stands out.

His name is Quashia Quamina.

Most of the characters they use are, sort of, British,

English, European types,

but Quashia Quamina is a native prince of the Kingdom of Angria,

and he is...

his plot arc is really exciting.

He is rescued/kidnapped from his village

by the Duke of Wellington himself who's been doing the pillaging.

(HORSES' HOOVES GALLOPING)

WOMAN: "At the age of 17 he was a handsome youth, black as jet,

"and with an eye full of expression and fire,

"and at the same time deeply treacherous.

"And notwithstanding the care

"with which he had been treated by his conquerors,

"he retained against them the most deeply-rooted

"and inveterate hatred."

I don't know if that is something that was on Emily's mind

when she was writing Heathcliff.

I like the idea that they had sat around this table,

chatting about...Quashia and Heathcliff, but I'm not sure.

The idea of a, sort of, hated brother...

..being brought up, I guess, perhaps abusively,

maligned, hated, not respected,

and then having to seek revenge,

that is a parallel, I think, that you can't, sort of, escape.

(GRASS RUSTLING)

(SOMBRE PIANO MUSIC)

Heathcliff is an enigma.

He's a foreigner, but where did he come from?

What is his background?

Emily kept it a mystery.

Clues planted here and there to decipher throughout the pages.

She describes him as a "little Lascar,"

as the son of a Chinese emperor and an Indian queen.

But, above all, he's the seven-year-old child

Mr Earnshaw brings back to Wuthering Heights one night,...

a child "as dark almost as if it came from the devil."

You've got to leave some room for the imagination,

but her physical descriptions of Heathcliff, you know, as his colour,

the colour of his skin,

the descriptions of him in terms of how he kind of frightens people

in the way in which people take a double take sometimes

when the door opens, and they're not expecting

to see a darker-skinned person walk in, or a person with curly hair.

She's doing that all the time throughout, certainly in his youth.

You know, erm...

She doesn't need to do any more than that,

then you suddenly realise, you know, he doesn't look like...

he doesn't look like the other boys.

It's not just that his origins are a problem.

It's the visuals are a problem as well.

(SHIP'S HORN BLARES)

(SEAGULLS CRY)

WOMAN: "The master tried to explain the matter.

"It was a tale of his seeing it starving and houseless,

"and as good as dumb in the streets of Liverpool,

"where he'd picked it up and enquired for its owner.

"Not a soul knew to whom it belonged.

"He thought it better to take it home with him at once."

(HORSE CARRIAGES RATTLING)

I began to see him through the prism

of what Liverpool means in British society in the 19th century,

the 18th century too;

as the chief slaving port.

That is where orphans, that's where the jetsam and flotsam,

that's where the, kind of, detritus of empire washed up,

which is why Liverpool has the oldest black community,

why it has the oldest mixed-race communities,

it has the oldest Chinese community.

That's where the backwash of empire ended up,

on the streets of Liverpool,

and was slowly integrated into the society.

It's a very...

It's a melting pot, that city, but at the heart of it is slavery.

At the heart of it is the slave trade.

Heathcliff seemed to me

to be clearly part of the detritus of empire.

In his novel The Lost Child, Caryl Phillips imagined

what Heathcliff's life might have been like

before his arrival at Wuthering Heights.

He imagined him as the son of a woman from the Congo,

reduced to slavery,

deported to Jamaica,

and washed up in Liverpool.

(SHIP'S TIMBERS CREAKING)

Slavery wasn't abolished until 1833.

Emily was 15, and in the newspapers

she, her sisters, and her brother devoured,

the debate over abolition was omnipresent.

(PEOPLE APPLAUDING)

That's the central story in Britain at the time.

"We need to abolish the slave trade. It's evil.

"It is a moral stain on our society.

"How can we do this to other people?"

Emily is composing the novel

and is thinking about the novel

at precisely the moment that these debates are raging

about what does it mean to be exposed to a system

which is making phenomenal amounts of money,

which actually fuels the Industrial Revolution,

and makes Britain, you know, the great capitalist power

in the 19th century that she became?

She would have been very aware

that slavery was not just an evil

that was perpetrated upon non-white people;

slavery was an evil that was actually eating away

at the moral fibre of people that looked like her.

So, in one sense, I think you could see the novel

as a sort of warning to Victorian society,

and perhaps particularly Victorian colonial society,

that, you know, the outcast will rise against you in the end.

(HAUNTING MUSIC)

It seems that, at the heart of her novel,

Emily Bronte tucked all the things

that ate away at the society of her time -

violent class relations...

..but also colonisation, slavery...

..the oppression of the other.

However, it took until 2011, and Andrea Arnold's adaptation,

for a Black actor, James Howson, to play Heathcliff in a film.

It's not convenient to look

at a great canonical novel like Wuthering Heights

and see it through the prism of multiculturalism,

you know, because it didn't begin then,

as far as most people are concerned.

It began with people like me

arriving in England after the Second World War.

They don't want to think, "Oh, it began all those years ago?"

I think that's what Emily Bronte could see.

(SHIP'S HORN BLARES IN DISTANCE)

My parents came to England in the late '50s from Saint Kitts,

which is a small island in the Caribbean.

I did grow up ten miles away from where she grew up...

..in the '60s in Leeds,

as a Yorkshire kid, as a northerner, but as a Black northerner,

which obviously meant that at times, it was precarious.

That duality, where some days you feel you belong,

some days in subtle and unsubtle ways you don't belong.

I think I share that with her

because I'm sure on some days she belonged

because her father was... the big man in town.

It was his church, you know,

and she could sit in the front pew, and she belonged,

but, erm, I'm sure when people saw her walking by herself on the moors,

they're thinking, "Who's that freak out there? What is she doing?"

(WIND WHISTLES)

It's really important to understand

that Emily Bronte herself was marginalised.

You're not... If you have to publish under the name of a man,

as a woman, that tells you something

about the precarious nature of your relationship to that society.

So, that's the crucible, if you like, out of which she was writing.

She had intuition about the other because she's the other too.

That's why.

(CHURCH BELL RINGING)

(LEAVES RUSTLING)

(DOOR OPENS)

(FOOTSTEPS)

(CHAIR SCRAPES)

WOMAN: "Monday 26th June, 1837, a bit past four o'clock.

"Charlotte working in Aunt's room.

"Anne and I writing in the drawing room."

In her diary entries,

Emily Bronte never refers to her novel, Wuthering Heights,

Heathcliff, or Cathy.

She never provides an explanation.

Just the present moment...

WOMAN: "Aunt: Come, Emily, it's past 4 o’clock.

"Emily: Yes, Aunt.

"Ann: Well, do you intend to write in the evening?

"Emily: Well, what think you?"

..as well her imagination,

which bursts forth here and there in a line.

WOMAN: "A fine, rather coolish, thin-grey, cloudy, but sunny day.

"Papa gone out, Tabby in the kitchen.

"The Emperors and Empresses of Gondal and Gaaldine

"to prepare for the coronation."

It's really as if the imaginary world, the fantasy world,

and the real world are on a continuum for her.

For Emily, the imaginary world is as real as the real world.

she doesn't really ever want to give up retreating into this world.

I mean, I say retreating, but on the other hand,

it was also clearly a world in which she was able to exercise

her powers of imagination in a really creative way

that, you know, involved actual real work

that fed into her greatest work, Wuthering Heights.

(FIRE CRACKLING)

(CLOCK CHIMING)

As they grew up, Charlotte and Branwell drifted away

from the imaginary worlds of their childhood.

Emily stayed true to them,

building a new kingdom, Gondal, with her younger sister Anne.

The saga of Gondal exists only in Emily's poems.

Hundreds of verses written from her teens until the end of her life.

Between the lines, you glimpse the fate of a mysterious queen - AGA:

Augusta Geraldine Almeda.

Her kingdom of moors and mist,

her many lovers, dead in combat,

murdered or mad with love.

WOMAN: "Augusta, you will soon return

"Back to that land in health and bloom

"And then the heath alone will mourn

"Above my unremembered tomb

"For you'll forget the lonely grave

"And mouldering corpse by Elnor's waves."

(WIND WHISTLING)

Beautiful, in love, rebellious,

could AGA foreshadow the rebellious Cathy of Wuthering Heights?

I would even go so far as to suggest

that Wuthering Heights is taken from a Gondal story.

I think she's taken the characters

and put them into a Yorkshire setting.

I think Emily's poetry is important.

It gives you an indication of the themes that drew her,

and which are all there in Wuthering Heights.

Doomed love affairs, tragic early deaths

and, erm, also revenge, it has to be said.

Those are themes which you see in Wuthering Heights.

(FOOTSTEPS)

Emily Bronte didn't have to experience

the passions woven into her poems;

she read about them...

..in Walter Scott's adventure novels...

and in the inflammatory poems of Lord Byron, the great Romantic.

His pariah heroes, his scandalous love stories

filled her imagination from childhood on,

and never left her.

We describe Emily Bronte as being a genius.

That's where it comes into it.

I think if she'd had a real-life love affair,

Wuthering Heights would have been a completely different book.

I think it's the fact that she didn't have a real-life love affair,

and that this relationship

is based on the dramatic that she's read in Byron,

in Blackwood's Magazine.

And also, if you think about

her own brother's tragic love affair with Mrs Robinson

and the devastation that that caused in his own life,

you can kind of see where the drama

in the relationship between Cathy and Heathcliff came about.

(CROWS CAWING)

Emily saw her brother foundering,

lost because of his impossible love for a married woman, Mrs Robinson.

Branwell, the prodigy, the precocious writer,

the promising painter was a complete failure.

Incapable of publishing a poem,

he ruined himself in the taverns and artificial paradises.

(CHURCH BELL RINGS)

From this painting of the four of them, which he painted at 17,

he eventually removed his image.

He died on September 24th, 1848, at the age of 32,

defeated by his sorrowful passions and tuberculosis.

A few weeks later, Emily, too, fell ill with tuberculosis.

She refused any treatment.

She died on December 19th, 1848...

on this sofa, in the parlour in which she had grown up,

dreamed, written.

(SOLEMN PIANO MUSIC)

(WIND GUSTING)

Childhood, that's the country that writers never leave.

First love...

first passion,

first betrayal,

erm...

..you carry it for the rest of your life.

Erm...

Everything thereafter for a writer,

I think, is a sort of form of observation.

But the real bedrock of what you're going to deal with

and the real bedrock of what you're interested in,

you're going to return to and mine

and reexamine and mine it again...

..erm, is early experiences in childhood.

(LEAVES RUSTLING)

In the end, isn't that what she shares with Heathcliff?

Her wretched anti-hero, haunted by his dead love,

who never got over the lost paradise from which he had been exiled.

Wuthering Heights.

Cathy.

The moors.

Childhood.

(WIND WHISTLING)

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