The Woman of Substance. Piers Dudgeon

the emotional light and shade of the landscape of her birth. When she came to write the novels, she had no hesitation in anchoring them there, even though she was, by then, cast miles away in her Manhattan eyrie.

      The county is blessed with large tracts of wide-open spaces – breathtaking views of varied character – so that even if you are brought up in one of the great industrial cities of the county, as Barbara was, you are but a walk away from natural beauty. There is a longing in her for the Yorkshire Dales which living in Manhattan keeps constantly on the boil. Like Mallory Keswick in Everything to Gain, ‘I had grown to love this beautiful, sprawling county, the largest in England, with its bucolic green dales, vast empty moors, soaring fells, ancient cathedrals and dramatic ruins of mediaeval abbeys . . . Wensleydale and the Valley of the Ure was the area I knew best.’

      The author’s sense that landscape is more than topography may first have been awakened when Freda introduced Barbara to the wild workshop out of which Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff was hewn. ‘My mother took me to the Brontë parsonage at Haworth, and over the moors to Top Withens, the old ruined farm that was supposed to be the setting for Wuthering Heights. I loved the fact that this great work of literature was set right there. I loved the landscape: those endless, empty, windswept moors where the trees all bend one way. I loved Heathcliff.’

      There are many allusions to Wuthering Heights in Barbara’s novels. For example, Voice of the Heart tells of the making of a film of it. Shot in the late 1950s, the film stars heart-throb Terence Ogden as Heathcliff and dark-haired, volatile, manipulative Katharine Tempest as Catherine Earnshaw. The Triumph of Katie Byrne is about an actress whose first big break is to play Emily Brontë in a play-within-the-novel about life in Haworth parsonage. In A Woman of Substance the principal love story between Emma and Edwin Fairley, though Edwin is no Heathcliff, draws on Brontë’s idea of Cathy’s sublimation of her self in Heathcliff and in the spirit of the moor: ‘My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath . . .’ Brontë wrote. ‘Nelly, I AM Heathcliff.’ When Emma makes love with Edwin literally within ‘the eternal rocks beneath’ the moor – in a cave at Ramsden Ghyll – ‘Emma thought she was slowly dissolving under Edwin, becoming part of him. Becoming him. They were one person now. She was Edwin.’

      There is scarcely any landscape description as such in Wuthering Heights, but Emily Brontë (1818–48) was the greatest of all geniuses when it comes to evocation of place. Charlotte, her sister, worried what primitive forces Emily had released from the bleak moorland around Haworth, ‘Whether it be right or advisable to create things like Heathcliff, I do not know,’ she wrote, ‘I scarcely think it is.’ She compared her sister’s genius to a genius for statuary, Heathcliff hewn out of ‘a granite block on a solitary moor’, his head, ‘savage, swart, sinister’, elicited from the crag, ‘a form moulded with at least one element of grandeur . . . power’. The mark of genius was the writer working an involuntary act – ‘The writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master – something that at times strangely wills and works for itself . . . With time and labour, the crag took human shape; and there it stands colossal, dark, and frowning . . . terrible and goblin-like . . .’

      Readers of A Woman of Substance will know just how central this ‘element of grandeur . . . power’ is to the character of the woman of substance. Are we to understand that it is hewn from the same granite crag whence Wuthering Heights came? The natural assumption is that Barbara takes from the imagery of that ‘nursling of the moors’ and transports it to the boardrooms and salons of Manhattan, London and Paris. Certainly, wherever the settings of Barbara’s novels take us, her values are Yorkshire based, but hers is a moral focus on the history of place, and the spirit of Yorkshire speaks to her through its history as much as through Nature’s demeanour.

      She owes to her mother Freda’s expeditions the sense of drama she shares with mediaeval historian Paul Murray Kendall from ‘this region of wild spaces and fierce loyalties and baronial “menies” of fighting men, with craggy castles and great abbeys scattered over the lonely moors . . . a breeding ground of violence and civil strife’. Freda saw to that; she took her to castles – Middleham and Ripley – and to ruined abbeys – Kirkstall Abbey in Leeds and Fountains Abbey on the Studley Royal Estate in Ripon.

      Centuries before Emily trod the Brontë ‘heath, with its blooming bells and balmy fragrance’, and created Heathcliff out of its darker aspects, a real-life personification of power came forth in Wensleydale, the most pastoral, gentle and green of all the Yorkshire Dales, and appealed to Barbara’s imaginative sense that the spirit of place is the spirit of the past. For her, Yorkshire is a living ideological and architectural archive of the past, a palimpsest or manuscript on which each successive culture has written its own indelible, enduring text.

      Wensleydale lies less than a half-hour’s drive from Ripon, the tiny city north of Leeds where Freda was brought up. The dale has two centres of power, Middleham and Bolton castles, and it is the former that commanded her attentions. Middleham was the fifteenth-century stronghold of the Earl of Warwick, one of the most dynamic figures in English history. ‘The castle at Middleham is all blown-out walls and windows that no longer exist,’ Barbara told me, ‘but Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, who was raised there and lived there, was devastating as a young man, devastating in the sense that he was very driven and ambitious . . . and a great warrior.’ Within ‘the roofless halls and ghostly chambers’ of Middleham Castle, Freda introduced her daughter to the story of the Earl of Warwick, the ‘reach’ of his ambitions and many of the traits that would define her woman of substance. ‘She told me all about Richard Neville, the Kingmaker . . . He put Edward IV on the throne of England, and he was one of the last great magnates. He held a fascination for my mother.’

      Warwick’s tireless constitution was rooted in the hard-bitten culture of the North. When Richard was a boy he lined up next to his father to repel attempts to wrest their lands away from them. At eighteen he won his spurs and was hardened further by action in skirmishes to avenge rustling and looting of villages within family territories. He was instinctively the Yorkshire man, but he was also someone who, like the woman of substance herself, was not bound to his home culture. The vitality of his character awakened him to recognise and seize his moment in the wider world when it occurred.

      It was in the Wars of the Roses (1455–85), the struggle between the houses of York and Lancaster for the throne of England, that he really came to the fore. His role in changing the English monarchy in the fifteenth century affected England for two centuries afterwards, but his relevance is for all times, as his biographer Paul Murray Kendall records: ‘The pilgrimage of mankind is, at bottom, a story of human energy, how it has been used and the ends it has sought to encompass . . . Warwick’s prime meaning is the reach of human nature he exemplifies and – type of all human struggle – the combat he waged with the shape of things in his time.’

      For Barbara the spirit is all, and in Warwick, as in Middleham Castle itself, it is powerfully northern. Born on 28th November 1428 to Richard, Earl of Salisbury, and his wife Alice, ‘on his father’s side he was sprung from a hardy northern tribe who had been rooted in their land for centuries . . . The North was in Richard’s blood, and it nourished his first experiences with the turbulent society of his day,’ Kendall writes in Warwick the Kingmaker. And yet Richard would hold sway over lands so far distant – more than fifty estates from South Wales across some twenty counties of England – that he, like Barbara, could never be said to have been anchored down by the northern culture in which he was raised.

      Neither Kendall nor Barbara go along with the Warwick that Shakespeare gives us in the three parts of Henry VI – a ‘bellicose baron of a turbulent time’. Kendall’s Warwick is ‘an amalgam of legend and deeds’, a figure whose character and actions attracted heroic levels of adulation and gave him mythic status throughout the land, as he rode in triumph through his vast estates; a figure who, like Barbara herself and her charismatic heroines, seems to have been marked with a strong sense of destiny from the start. Warwick, writes Kendall, never doubted for one moment that he could achieve what he set out to do: ‘He refused to admit there were disadvantages he could not overcome and defeats from which he could not recover, and he had the courage, and vanity,