Karen Powell, whose previous novel is “The River Within,” is the author most recently of “Fifteen Wild Decembers.”
Q. Please tell readers about your novel, “Fifteen Wild Decembers.”
Like many readers, I first discovered Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights” as a teenager. I was mesmerized by the wild moorland landscape she described and the equally wild characters that inhabited it.
When I finished reading, I turned to the introduction and was surprised to learn that the author of this passionate, violent novel had led a seemingly uneventful life. The daughter of an Anglican clergyman, Emily lived almost all of her life in Haworth, a remote village in the southern Pennines, hundreds of miles from literary London. She had no friends outside the family and was deeply reserved, silent to the point of rudeness when forced into company. Emily never married and there is no evidence of any romantic connections before her death at the tragically young age of 30.
SEE ALSO: Like books? Get our free Book Pages newsletter about bestsellers, authors and more
I was intrigued right away by the disconnect. I wondered how someone of Emily’s background could write a novel which scandalized Victorian readers – a contemporaneous reviewer suggested the author should have committed suicide rather than continue! – and still has the power to shock to this day.
I started writing in my early thirties, around the same time that I moved to Yorkshire. Now within driving distance of Haworth, I was able to explore the wild landscape that Emily had described for myself. And, of course, to visit the Brontë Parsonage Museum, which was once home to family. The museum is so wonderfully curated that you almost expect to find Emily and her sisters working on their novels at the original dining table, in a room which overlooks the graveyard and the church where their father, the Reverend Patrick Brontë, preached.
I began to understand that Emily’s life here was far more tumultuous than I’d first thought. She and her sisters lived under the constant threat of both penury and homelessness – when their elderly, half-blind father died the parsonage would revert to the church governors, while their attempts to earn a living through teaching or governess work had ended miserably. Added to this, their brother Branwell, the only son and once the great hope of the family, had become addicted to both alcohol and laudanum after a disastrous love affair with a married woman. Visitors to the parsonage are often struck by how tiny it is. There would have been nowhere to hide from Branwell’s despair and the ensuing chaos of addiction. Emily’s home in Haworth was hardly an idyllic writing retreat and yet…
I don’t recall the precise moment I decided I must write her story, but the idea must have lurked somewhere in my teenage brain and then started to evolve during those visits to Haworth.
Q. The Brontës grew up in Yorkshire and you live in North Yorkshire. Was knowing the landscape of the area essential to understanding the family?
It would be a tall order to write about Emily Brontë without having some familiarity with the moorland that surrounds her home in Haworth. Emily was so viscerally attached to this landscape that she suffered breakdowns almost every time she was forced to leave.
After Emily’s death, Charlotte wrote: “My sister loved the moors. Flowers brighter than the rose bloomed in the blackest of the heath for her; out of a sullen hollow in a livid hillside her mind could make an Eden. She found in the bleak solitude many and dear delights; and not the least and best loved was—liberty. Liberty was the breath of Emily’s nostrils; without it, she perished.”
In order to imagine my way into Emily’s mind, it was essential to walk in her footsteps, to learn this landscape – so different to the softer, more ordered countryside of the south-east of England where I grew up – for myself. I’ve spent many hours now on the moorland that rears up directly behind Emily’s parsonage home. It’s a very particular terrain: peaty, boggy, windswept, with a bleak beauty of its own: “No life higher than the grasstops, or the hearts of sheep,” as Sylvia Plath once described it. Aside from the reservoirs down in the valley, and the signposts in both English and Japanese to Top Withens, a ruined farmhouse and the alleged inspiration for Wuthering Heights, little can have changed since Emily walked here.
Q. What’s something about your book that no one knows?
I listened to Taylor Swift almost exclusively while editing “Fifteen Wild Decembers,” to the extent that major scenes in the book are now inextricably linked in my mind with certain songs, with entire albums.
I could write about this at great length if anyone was ever interested, have a habit of telling people even if they aren’t. And don’t get me started on The Eras Tour.
Q. You’re writing historical fiction, not history. Can you talk about the difference?
You won’t find me deep in the archives trying to unearth new primary sources. To my mind, that’s a job best left to the historians. As a novelist, my work is to absorb and assess the information available – in the case of a family as famous as the Brontës, a great deal of research has already been carried out by people with far more expertise than me – and then to let my imagination work its way into any intriguing gaps in the narrative.
For example, in the prologue of “Fifteen Wild Decembers,” we meet 24-year-old Emily on a boat to Brussels. This trip was instigated by Charlotte, ostensibly so that the two sisters could improve their teaching qualifications at a Belgian school. Charlotte’s fictionalized account of Brussels in her novel “Villette” and her extant letters give us a good idea of what this adventure meant to her. As far as I’m aware though, there is no record of Emily’s state of mind on that boat trip. Given that she loathed to be away from her Yorkshire home, and was possibly already suspicious of Charlotte’s motivations, I hazarded a guess that her mood was less than sunny.
Similarly, we know exactly what the young Charlotte Brontë thought about Cowan Bridge School for Daughters of the Clergy because she reproduced it to devastating effect in “Jane Eyre,” and spoke bitterly about it for the rest of her life, but there is scant record of Emily’s presence at the school, let alone her feelings. Blanks in the historical record such as these are irresistible to a novelist!
Q. Is there a book or books you always recommend to other readers?
In my early teens, my mother bought me a copy of “The Greengage Summer” by Rumer Godden. I lost it somewhere along the way, but made sure to buy another copy for my own daughter and now always recommend it to other readers.
It’s the story of 13-year-old Cecil who travels with her widowed mother and family to Hotel Les Oeillets, an idyllic yet faded hotel in the Champagne region of France. Her mother has taken her children there to show them the World War I battlefields, in the hope of curing them of selfishness, but when she falls ill they are thrust into the care of Eliot, a charming Englishman, and the confusing, contradictory, adult world of Les Oeillets.
The book was published in 1958 but stands the test of time. To my mind, it’s the perfect coming of age novel, gorgeously written and capturing perfectly that strange, disorienting experience of being on the brink of adulthood.
Q. What are you reading now?
I find fiction too distracting when I’m deep in edits, so I’m reading a history of Elizabethan England for a possible future project. I’m also still thinking about Graham Watson’s seminal biography “The Invention of Charlotte Brontë,” due to be published in the US this August.
Earlier in the year, I loved “Glorious Exploits” by Ferdia Lennon, a hugely entertaining story of a group of Athenian prisoners in Ancient Sicily who might just save themselves by agreeing to perform a Euripides’ play. And I’ve recently finished RAW CONTENT by Naomi Booth, a beautifully nuanced novel about a young woman overwhelmed by the responsibility of keeping her newborn daughter safe. An added bonus is that the novel is set in York where I live!
Q. How do you decide what to read next?
Social media, press reviews, book bloggers, whatever grabs my eye in the book shop. Recommendations from writing friends are really important too, especially since they’re likely to get their hands of proofs. I find the writing community incredibly generous and supportive, particularly of those who are just starting out and might need a boost from more established authors. I can still remember getting a direct message and an endorsement from Elizabeth McNeal (“The Doll Factory,” Circus of Wonders,” “The Burial Plot”) after she’d finished my previous novel “The River Within.” It meant everything.
Q. Do you have a favorite character or quote from a book?
Nostalgia comes into play here, so when it comes to choosing a favourite character I veer naturally towards the books I loved as a child or came to in my early teenager years. There might be a bit of a scrap involving Elizabeth Bennet, Nancy Blackett (“Swallows and Amazons”) and Laura Ingalls Wilder (I know, not a character as such) but Anne Shirley would probably win the day.
My novel-in-progress is inspired by a quotation, the first line of Dante’s “The Divine Comedy”:
‘In the middle of the journey of our life I came upon myself in a dark wood where the straight way was lost.’
Q. Is there a person who made an impact on your reading life – a teacher, a parent, a librarian or someone else?
Not so much my reading life, but a tiny yet fearsome English teacher planted the idea in my mind that I could write.
She won’t remember me. I was a bright but unenthusiastic teenager, with no interest in making anyone’s teaching day more enjoyable. I imagined myself to be coolly cynical, too worldly for the classroom. Almost certainly I came across as a massive misery guts. And though I was considered good at English – I read extensively and therefore had a vocabulary and reasonable grasp of grammar – I didn’t much like writing stories. That meant coming up with a plot, which is something I struggle with to this day.
When instructed to write a story about first love, I chose to ignore the hopeless creatures who’d shambled in and out of my teenage world and wrote about Greece instead, a landscape and culture that have enthralled me ever since I first visited at the age of 13.
This plotless ‘story’ was returned to my desk with just one word: ‘beautiful.’ We never spoke of it again and I remained as charmless and unteachable as ever. The idea that I could write something beautiful and worthy of praise must have lodged though, and my love of the Mediterranean landscape remains to this day. My novel-in-progress is set at a beach resort between Naples and Rome.
Q. What do you find the most appealing in a book: the plot, the language, the cover, a recommendation? Do you have any examples?
I’ll happily whizz through any number of books which are plot-driven as long as the rest of the writing isn’t embarrassing. I don’t have a great capacity for retention though, so it takes emotional resonance and a facility for language to engage my mind after I’ve turned the last page.
Q. Do you have a favorite bookstore or bookstore experience?
Independent bookshops are a gift to authors. Should any of your readers ever find their way to my part of England, I can recommend The Grove Bookshop in Ilkley, Criminally Good Books in York, and Collected Books in Durham which I discovered via my American writing pal, Patricia Grace King. And if you’re ever lucky enough to go to Haworth, don’t miss the trove of Brontë-related literature, including “Fifteen Wild Decembers,” in the Brontë Parsonage Museum gift shop.
While we’re in Brontë territory, I urge you to walk down the vertiginously steep Main Street – perhaps making a detour to the Old Post Office restaurant which still retains the original counter from where the Brontë sisters posted out their manuscripts – until you find your way to a small but very special bookshop.
Wave of Nostalgia started out as a vintage clothing store but branched out into books during lockdown. These days Diane Park and her team do an incredible job of hand selling books and promoting authors through an extensive events programme. My first-ever “Fifteen Wild Decembers” event was held here and I was lucky enough to return recently for a Brontë themed event in the magical setting of St Michael and All Angels church, where the Reverend Patrick Brontë preached and where all of the family with the exception of Anne, are now buried.
I’m so grateful to Diane and to all the other independent booksellers for consistently supporting my work.
Related Articles
How ‘Is a River Alive?’ author Robert Macfarlane found himself an elder How Western outlaw Belle Starr became the ‘Queen of All Mayhem’ How Robert Macfarlane’s book ‘Is a River Alive?’ delivers a call to action How the pages of a lost Charles Portis novel were discovered ‘Open Up’ author Thomas Morris on a book that brought him peace in hard times Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( Why Emily Brontë and Taylor Swift are linked in author Karen Powell’s mind )
Also on site :