no coward souls
Fifteen Wild Decembers by Karen Powell and interpretations of the Brontë sisters
Fifteen Wild Decembers begins with its narrator Emily Brontë — the enigmatic middle sister and future author of Wuthering Heights (1847) — not in the wind-blown cradle of the moors around Haworth parsonage, as might be expected, but on a ship bound for Belgium. Karen Powell’s prologue immediately casts Emily as bold, unconventional and active, unaffected by the seasickness that afflicts her sister Charlotte and other passengers. They are on their way to study French at the Pensionnat Héger, a scheme of Charlotte’s to polish their language skills for a new school. Frustrated by this removal from home, Emily considers ‘how thrilling it must be to steer one’s own vessel’ and remains on deck for the journey, ‘having no wish for land’. The scene establishes the novel’s Romantic and feminist tone, alluding to the famous comment from one of Emily’s tutors that she might have made ‘a great navigator.’
From here, the narrative goes back in time to the wrecking of the Brontë family by the deaths of Emily’s two older sisters Maria and Elizabeth from tuberculosis at Cowan Bridge school. Having already lost their mother, Powell perceptively foregrounds this trauma as the turning point in Emily’s life, causing her social withdrawal from anyone beyond immediate family, unable to cope with being away from Haworth. It also gives another reason for tension between Charlotte and Emily — whose relationship is the central focus of the novel — other than their divergent personalities (Charlotte restless and ambitious, Emily reserved and stoical). Charlotte returns to a different school setting and even begins to thrive there, as if able to put this grief behind her.
After this, the novel progresses through the well-known chapters of the Brontës’ lives: the creation of the imaginary worlds of Angria and Gondal by the remaining children; attempts at teaching and governess-ing as they grow up (most successfully by the youngest, Anne); the Belgium adventure when Charlotte falls in love with her married professor; mercurial brother Branwell’s job-hopping and spiral into alcoholism following an affair with his employer’s wife; the discovery of Emily’s poems and the three sisters’ efforts to get published; the invention of gender ambiguous pseudonyms Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell for Charlotte, Emily and Anne; Charlotte’s Jane Eyre becoming a bestseller; Branwell and Emily’s deaths in quick succession.
Among these events, Powell locates Emily’s inspiration for aspects of Wuthering Heights — her folkloric novel of obsessive love, inheritance and cycles of abuse — in intermittent encounters with a boy on the moors, who leads her as a child through the Fairy Cave at Penistone Crags (a site mentioned in the novel). These scenes are ambiguous: half-real, half-fantasy.
Emily Brontë’s character has been much debated, often within the wearisome framing that women’s art must be directly autobiographical; readers and scholars speculate about the source of Wuthering Heights’ violence and erotic intensity when Emily herself was so reclusive and had no documented romances.
In prefaces to new editions of her deceased sisters’ work, with a good dose of an older sibling’s condescension and an eye to the dictates of respectable femininity, Charlotte sought to defend Emily’s character by depicting her as a Romantic genius from a wild, lonely place. She was ‘a native and nursling of the moors’, whose art was channeled through her by greater forces rather than conscious skill.
Elizabeth Gaskell’s influential biography of her friend Charlotte makes Emily (who she never met) fiercer, caring more for animals than people, reserved rather than shy, ‘as shyness would please, if it knew how; whereas, reserve is indifferent whether it pleases or not.’ Bitten by a rabid dog, Emily cauterises the wound herself with an iron. One notorious passage describes Emily beating her dog Keeper after he is found sleeping on a bed before tending to the injuries she inflicted. This episode sounds suspiciously like something a character from Wuthering Heights would do: a Heathcliffian display of violence and sudden tenderness almost as chilling, another desire to link the life with the novel.
Nowadays, Emily’s goth girl tendencies (though not the possible animal cruelty) are seen in a more positive light, although this displeased one critic who bemoaned the ‘cult’ of Emily and the ‘devotion of female fans’ who have made her the ‘patron saint of difficult women.’ Fifteen Wild Decembers presents Emily as self-possessed without being cruel. Unlike last year’s film Emily (which I wrote about here), Powell does not omit Emily’s beloved pets, her role as housekeeper for the Parsonage, or her particularly close relationship with Anne. She has a strong temper at times but doesn’t pummel her dog.
Instead, Powell’s Emily is a kind of proto-feminist, instinctively scornful of the poet laureate Robert Southey’s infamous discouragement to Charlotte about attempting to publish (‘Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life’), feeling ‘a sense of liberty and recklessness, ambition even, that defied everything the great man had counselled.’
Due to the emphasis on Cowan Bridge and the Brussels’ adventure, where Anne was not present, Charlotte and Emily’s relationship takes centre stage, another iteration of Lucasta Miller’s Bronte Myth that sees the two sisters reinvented for each generation. Anne is needed for the magic number three of the ‘weird sisters’ (as Ted Hughes called them) but otherwise she is sidelined in cultural memory, partly due to the legacy of Charlotte declining permission for a new edition of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) after Anne’s death. Muriel Spark likened her to an amateur watercolourist in comparison to her sisters’ pure artistry. During the In Our Time episode on Wildfell Hall, scholars noted that Anne’s critical reputation may now be on a par with Emily and Charlotte, yet there is a lag in popular culture that means she is still not as widely known.
Charlotte and Emily are often put together for including ‘Byronic heroes’ in their novels: brooding men whose callous or cruel behaviour is unduly romanticised. Anne, on the other hand, who witnessed Branwell’s adulterous affair when they were both employed by the Robinson family, wrote a novel showcasing the abuse allowed within a patriarchal marriage when a naive woman believes she can reform her husband.
Some have even suggested Wildfell Hall was a rebuke of sorts to Wuthering Heights (note the repeated W H). Yet I’ve always thought that both novels meant to show the destructive nature of domestic abuse and its particular impact on women and children, expressed through Emily and Anne’s unique styles. Although this theme is certainly present in Jane Eyre, it is not as integral to the main love story.
Furthermore, Anne was arguably just as influenced by Byronic models, albeit in a different way. She applies them to Helen Graham, the mysterious, reclusive, artistic and moody tenant who leases Wildfell Hall at the beginning of the novel, whose troubled backstory is gradually revealed through her diaries — and was perhaps partly inspired by Byron’s unfortunate wife Annabella Milbanke.
While Anne is definitely a significant presence in Fifteen Wild Decembers, the traditional hierarchy remains. There seems to be something about Charlotte’s ‘bossy older sister’ vibe that is more compelling to writers, perhaps to provide clearer narrative friction or because her charismatic voice so dominates the historical record. Powell’s Emily describes their complicated dynamic as:
Charlotte sniffing me out like a tiny mouse and me resisting, retreating, trying to heed my own voice instead, the endless push-pull of us.
At times, Fifteen Wild Decembers has a kind of remoteness to its narrative. Many events and emotions are summarised by Emily or recounted as memories; whole characters come and go without direct action or speech (hello and goodbye, flirty curate William Weightman). This means that the reader often has to accept Emily’s assessments of situations and people, constricting space for our own interpretations.
Nevertheless, Fifteen Wild Decembers shines in its depiction of Emily’s inner life, the interaction between her experiences and her poetic imagination, lit by love of her local landscape:
Once, when I was small, I’d hacked an E into the surface of the dining room table, earned a severe punishment from Aunt, who’d thought it the behaviour of a savage. Even now I could not explain why I had done it. I remembered the feeling though, because it was the same one I had when my feet carved their own pathways through the moorland heather. I am here.
My thanks to Europa Editions UK for sending me a proof of Fifteen Wild Decembers.
If you want to read more
You can order Fifteen Wild Decembers from Europa Editions UK online. The title is from one of Emily’s poems, ‘Remembrance’. This log’s title is from another of her poems, ‘No Coward Soul is Mine’.
Although I don’t particularly care for her interpretation of Emily Brontë (the line ‘who remained a girl all her life despite her body as a woman’ irks me), Anne Carson’s ‘The Glass Essay’ is a powerful piece of writing, including a complex mother-daughter relationship and failed relationship. It’s also another great example of the Brontë Myth in action, incorporating Emily & Charlotte’s words and quotations from biographers:
She lives on a moor in the north. / She lives alone. / Spring opens like a blade there. / I travel all day on trains and bring a lot of books—
some for my mother, some for me / including The Collected Works Of Emily Brontë. / This is my favourite author.
Also my main fear, which I mean to confront. / Whenever I visit my mother / I feel I am turning into Emily Brontë,
my lonely life around me like a moor, / my ungainly body stumping over the mud flats with a look of transformation / that dies when I come in the kitchen door. / What meat is it, Emily, we need?
I also recommend Anne Brontë’s preface to the second edition of Tenant of Wildfell Hall, defending herself against accusations of ‘coarseness’ in the depiction of her characters and an abusive marriage:
I wished to tell the truth, for truth always conveys its own moral to those who are able to receive it. But as the priceless treasure too frequently hides at the bottom of a well, it needs some courage to dive for it, especially as he that does so will be likely to incur more scorn and obloquy for the mud and water into which he has ventured to plunge, than thanks for the jewel he procures; as, in like manner, she who undertakes the cleansing of a careless bachelor’s apartment will be liable to more abuse for the dust she raises than commendation for the clearance she effects.
Other writing updates
I wrote about the proliferation of books on the wives of famous artists for Art Review, ‘Work of Two.’
My writing is featured in ROAM Vol. 1, along with about 40 other amazing contributors. It’s an exciting new collaborative anthology documenting how creatives are exploring the past through modern ways. If you’re interested, you can follow on Instagram or buy a copy here.