Fifteen Wild Decembers

Fifteen Wild Decembers, by Karen Powell, is the story of the Brontë family with Emily as the first-person narrator. I've read a lot of Brontë bios and fictional renderings over the years, so there wasn't anything new or startling regarding the basic outline of the story but oh, the writing. It is lyrical, incredibly moving, and such a strong voice for Emily. Absolutely loved every minute I spent reading this book. I knew the ending, but Emily narrates her own death as only Emily Brontë could do. Incredible.

My main takeaway is that the portrayal of Emily in this novel meshed perfectly with my view of Emily and all of the Brontës. She doesn't reinvent them; she honors their words, and when there are no words or facts, she finds plausible words and motivations based on what we do know about them. Definitely a 5-start novel.

The title comes from Emily's poem Remembrance, which was included in the book of poems self-published by the three sisters. Below is the third stanza of the poem, which was originally written about one of the characters in the fantasy country, Gondal, that Emily and sister Anne created and expanded on over at least fourteen years. In Fifteen Wild Decembers, Powell has Emily realizing that the poem is actually about the deaths of the oldest Brontë sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, who died while Emily was still a young child. 

Cold in the earth—and fifteen wild Decembers, 
From those brown hills, have melted into spring: 
Faithful, indeed, is the spirit that remembers 
After such years of change and suffering!

 This is truly a work of fiction, and Powell does come up with a reasonable inspiration for Heathcliff and his and Cathy's story in Wuthering Heights. In a nutshell and I hope this doesn't constitute spoilers, but Powell has Emily encounter a wildish boy on the moors, then years later, she sees him as a young man, still on the wild side, and then as the inhabitant of Top Withens, the abandoned farmhouse on the moors above the Brontë parsonage at Haworth. She is fascinated by him, and his presence repeatedly pulls her up to spy on him, to hope to see him, to want to understand him. 

Below is the painting of Top Withens that is in my office--I picked up this copy when I visited Haworth in 2009.

I'm starting to feel like I need to create a Brontë page that collects all my various posts on this remarkable family.

I'm also starting to feel like I want to rewatch To Walk Invisible, the excellent biopic from BBC in 2016. Has it really been almost ten years since I watched this?

Emily, Anne, and Charlotte in To Walk Invisible

The Taste of Sorrow (A novel of the Brontës) - a must-read!

Patrick Brontë, father of Charlotte, Emily, Anne, et al, remembered his Irish father working in fields, so poor that he had to suck on a pebble to keep his mouth from going dry..."That is the taste of sorrows: the hard necessary pebble in your mouth."

The whole of The Taste of Sorrow (aka Charlotte & Emily in the U.S.) by Jude Morgan is like that.  Poetic, layered, and somber, until the sun breaks in at the end with Charlotte's marriage to Arthur Bell Nicholls, her father's curate and fellow Irishman.  Despite Charlotte dying less than a year after she was married, I was so happy that the poor woman finally tasted something other than the sorrow that weighted her down for most of her life.

The Taste of Sorrow is not just the best book I've read this year, it's one of the best books I've ever read.  I'm a fan of both Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, as well as Elizabeth Gaskell's fabulous The Life of Charlotte Brontë, and know well the story of the talented by doomed Brontë family.  The mother from Cornwall who died an agonizing early death, leaving five young daughters and one young son.  The Old Testament father whose eccentricities both nourished and starved his children, both mentally and physically. The deaths of the two oldest girls at a school that Charlotte Brontë would immortalize and condemn for the ages as Lowood School in Jane Eyre.  The childhoods of the four remaining children who escaped into fantasy worlds that they documented in miniature books.  The drunken debauchery of the golden boy, Branwell.  The silent stoicism of the reclusive Emily.  The determination of shy Anne.  And the grit, gumption, and sheer chutzpah of Charlotte.

Morgan's book doesn't really reveal anything I hadn't already read in bios about the Brontës, but his writing makes the story new and fresh and heart-breaking all over again.  My copy has an endorsement by Hilary Mantel on the cover, which is appropriate because The Taste of Sorrow really reminded me a lot of Wolf Hall.  Mostly in present tense, often stream-of-consciousness, but not in a hard-to-understand way, and frequent use of free indirect discourse.  I loved how in a single paragraph, Morgan could convey the four points of view of Charlotte, Branwell, Emily, and Anne, enabling the reader to feel the tension and alliances and baggage between the four.

My favorite part was when Charlotte, Emily, and Anne were working on their first three novels, and would write at night in the dining room.  Pacing around the table, reading aloud, rewriting...the three weird sisters, concocting their literary magic.  I also really enjoyed hearing about Charlotte's first meeting with Elizabeth Gaskell and their friendship.

I didn't intend to finish the novel and post about it on Charlotte's birthday, so imagine my delight when I realized that Charlotte Brontë was born 198 years ago today, April 21!

Final note - here is a great blog post entitled The Secret Life of Jude Morgan.  Like the blogger who wrote this piece, I struggle with understanding Morgan's lack of notoriety.  His historical fiction is some of the very best around.  Here's my review of Passion, his novel about the Romantic poets and their women.

The Taste of Sorrow is one of my books on my 2014 Historical Fiction Challenge and the 2014 TBR Pile Challenge.

Brontë Humor, Gaskell Bio, and Plath's poem

I read the chapter on The Life of Charlotte Brontë in the Uglow bio after I read Gaskell's bio of Charlotte, and I'm glad I did because it enabled me to experience the bio on my own, without commentary from Uglow. However, Uglow shed some light on interesting aspects of the bio that I think worth sharing.

I was struck my Gaskell's use of her older daughters, Meta and Marianne, to copy out the parts of Charlotte's letters that she wanted to use in the bio. Editing letters for inclusion in a bio enables the biographer to use the subject's words to her own purposes. In this case, Uglow notes that this "editing, of course, also edited Charlotte's character--we miss some of her humour, and much of her tartness." I suppose I'll have to go and read the letters in a less edited form as I couldn't find any humor in the letters in Gaskell's bio of Charlotte.

I really loved the chapter where Gaskell and her daughters visit Italy. When I recently rewatched Wives and Daughters, the DVD had a bio on Gaskell that strongly suggested that Gaskell fell in love with and even had an affair with Charles Norton, which isn't true unless Uglow is suppressing this in the same way Gaskell suppressed Charlotte's love for M. Heger. Of course, an affair might have come later...that's the danger about blogging on a book that I haven't yet finished reading.

In The Brontë Influence, I found Sylvia Plath's Wuthering Heights, and a poem by the same name by Ted Hughes. On first reading both, I liked Plath's so much more than Hughes's. And then I read the essay in the book by Luke Spencer which made me admire Plath's all the more and almost despise Hughes version. Now, after reading them both again, I still like Plath's version but Hughes's is growing on me. It is impossible to read either poem out of the context of their lives, deaths, and the life/death/works of Emily Brontë.

Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë: In the Hill-Country Silence

Gaskell quotes often from Charlotte’s letters. Here is one of my very favorite passages:

For my part, I am free to walk on the moors; but when I go out there alone, everything reminds me of the times when others were with me, and then the moors seem a wilderness, featureless, solitary, saddening. My sister Emily had a particular love for them, and there is not a knoll of heather, not a branch of fern, not a young bilberry-leaf, not a fluttering lark or linnet, but reminds me of her. The distant prospects were Anne’s delight, and when I look round, she is in the blue tints, the pale mists, the waves and shadows of the horizon. In the hill-county silence, their poetry comes by lines and stanzas into my mind…

I have always had mixed feelings about Charlotte Brontë. Jane Eyre was one of the first non-kid books that I read, and I’ve reread it often over the years and so can’t help but like the author of a favorite book. And yet, she seems such a mixture of piety and superstition; intellectual curiosity obliterated by self-effacement. She is furious when critics do not treat her as an author but as a woman writer and yet she waxes on about not wanting to write that which isn’t ladylike. She explains her writing and that of her sisters when critics deem it ‘coarse’ as springing from their isolation, and yet she writes at length about how she wanted to write the truth as she saw it. She buried herself at Haworth after her sisters died, clinging to her duty to her father but resenting horribly the quiet, closeness of the life there. Two books were born out of her passion for her married teacher, M. Heger, and yet she seemed willing to settle for Arthur Bell Nicholls, who probably would have prevented her writing another novel.

In this bio and in JE, Charlotte seems devoid of a sense of humor. In fact, I only noticed one instance in the many letters quoted in which she says that she laughed, even when she was young. I think this lack of a sense of humor is at the root of why she never ‘got’ Austen. If you can’t see the humor and irony in Austen—-and I would say that if you can’t see the humor you won’t get the irony—-then she can do nothing more than fall flat. It's hard to like someone without a sense of humor, but then she wrote the passage about the hill-country silence and her sisters...I can't argue with someone who writes that beautifully.

I confess that Emily is the sister that most interests me, and Shirley is the Bronte book I will probably read next so that I can see how Charlotte saw her sister, whom she admitted was her model for Shirley Keeldar.