Greetings from Haworth

Every summer I try and trick my brain into thinking it's on a holiday somewhere cold and lovely by making it read something pretty epic, preferably with snow in it. Two years ago I began meandering through Proust's In Search of Lost Time and failed after two and a half of the seven volumes. I spent the last summer with the Sherlock Holmes stories and novels which made things much more enjoyable, especially since I've retrospectively cast Robert Downey Jr as the title hero in my mind after seeing what a wonderful job he's doing currently in the film. The location for this summer's brain holiday had been near top of my favourite travel destinations for years and since meeting Isa it had become one of our most talked of landscapes. In October of 2009 I saw the comic below, made by one of my favourite artists Kate Beaton (who is fantastic and everyone should read her stuff all the time!), I was irrevocably sold on spending this summer with the Brontes.




I'm pretty sure there's a some fundamental divide between devotees of Jane Eyre and those of Wuthering Heights, not unlike the deep rifts between the Teams of Edward and Jacob in the Twilightverse, but certainly more civil. I fell in love with Jane and Rochester while a teenager but never warmed to Cathy and Heathcliff in the same way, probably because I found Emily Bronte's writing so emotionally charged and therefore a bit alienating for someone discovering Wuthering Heights, on the far side of a love affair with Austen. Also because I thought Cathy and Heathcliff were such arseholes and with their albeit unwitting association with Kate Bush really just made things worse between me and Emily's book. I really hope Isa will fight me on this.

So I knew and loved these two Bronte books before this summer, and had heard tons of different versions of the Bronte myths, seen BBC adaptations, Cliff Richard's musical version of Heights (amazing!) but had never done any investigating for myself beyond that. So I now have a large pile of books by my bed all by and about different Brontes and several more being flown in from the internet. So far I've read Anne Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and Elizabeth Gaskell's biography of Charlotte. Anne is definitely maligned as a writer - there's nothing shabby about The Tenant. It shows too that Anne doesn't lack the romantic passion of her elder sisters, it's just that she has an overriding drive to expose the problems with passion as well. Mrs Gaskell's book will get it's own blog post soon, it's extraordinary in it's own right.

So I just wanted to warn you guys about what you'll be hearing from me for some months to come and where my reading has taken me to. All Brontes all the time! Let's all meet up in Yorkshire!