I Am Heathcliff: Stories Inspired by Wuthering Heights. Kate Mosse

      

      

       Copyright

      The Borough Press

      an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

      1 London Bridge Street

      London SE1 9GF

       www.harpercollins.co.uk

      First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018

      In the compilation and introductory material © Kate Mosse 2018

      Terminus © Louise Doughty; Anima © Grace McCleen; A Bird, Half-Eaten © Nikesh Shukla; Thicker Than Blood © Erin Kelly; One Letter Different © Joanna Cannon; The Howling Girl © Laurie Penny; Five Sites, Five Stages © Lisa McInerney; Kit © Juno Dawson; My Eye Is a Button on Your Dress © Hanan al-Shaykh; The Cord © Alison Case; Heathcliffs I Have Known © Louisa Young; Amulet and Feathers © Leila Aboulela; How Things Disappear © Anna James; The Wildflowers © Dorothy Koomson; Heathcliff Is Not My Name © Michael Stewart; Only Joseph © Sophie Hannah

      The moral rights of the authors have been asserted

      Jacket design by Holly Macdonald © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018

      Jacket photographs © Sally Mundy/Trevillion Images, © Shutterstock.com petals

      A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

      These stories are entirely works of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in them, while at times based on historical events and figures, are the works of the authors’ imaginations.

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

      Source ISBN: 9780008257439

      Ebook Edition © July 2018 ISBN: 9780008257453

      Version: 2018-06-25

       Dedication

      For EB, in whose

      footsteps we walk

      Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

      Copyright

      Dedication

       Foreword by Kate Mosse

      Terminus – Louise Doughty

      Anima – Grace McCleen

A Bird, Half-Eaten – Nikesh Shukla

Thicker Than Blood – Erin Kelly

       One Letter Different – Joanna Cannon

       The Howling Girl – Laurie Penny

       Five Sites, Five Stages – Lisa McInerney

       Kit – Juno Dawson

       My Eye Is a Button on Your Dress – Hanan al-Shaykh

       The Cord – Alison Case

       Heathcliffs I Have Known – Louisa Young

       Amulet and Feathers – Leila Aboulela

       How Things Disappear – Anna James

       The Wildflowers – Dorothy Koomson

       Heathcliff Is Not My Name – Michael Stewart

       Only Joseph – Sophie Hannah

       Footnotes

       Notes on the Contributors

       A Note on Emily Brontë

       About the Publisher

       FOREWORD BY KATE MOSSE

      ‘My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I’m well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff! He’s always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being.’

      THERE IS A HANDFUL of books that exist beyond their time and space, beyond the circumstances of their invention: novels that are significant, novels that are beloved. Familiar friends. Their characters step off the pages of the novel and into the real world, into a public conscience to be used ever after as shorthand for a certain sort of person. Archetypes, I suppose. Stories that seem bigger than the books that contain them. Wuthering Heights is such a book. Cathy and Heathcliff are such characters.

      Published in 1847, Wuthering Heights is a novel that changes its character and colour with every reading, yet remains uniquely and absolutely itself. It is variously a Gothic novel of obsession and revenge; a story of ghosts and bad dreams; a novel of opposites – light and shade, wild Nature versus taming civilisation, storm versus calm, violence versus tenderness, revenge versus forgiveness, the North versus the South; a novel of race and class, of the powerlessness of women’s and children’s lives; a novel about poverty, property, and wealth; a novel about how the sins of the fathers (and dead or powerless mothers) are visited on the next generation; a story of two houses – Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange – on the Yorkshire Moors; a story of the shifting of time and how the land goes about its business indifferent to human emotions; a novel of order and disorder; of violence and the consequences of violence, of hate and the consequences of hate. Most of all, of course, it is held up as the most epic of love stories. But is it? It is a novel of obsession and all-devouring emotion, certainly, and about the nature and endurance of love, but romance it is not.

      The telling of the story is complicated, and, though any reader picking up this collection will know the bare bones of it, it’s worth spending a moment thinking about the architecture of the novel. Wuthering Heights starts at the end – in 1801 – when a southern gentleman, Lockwood, calls upon his landlord and ‘solitary neighbour’, Heathcliff. The old farmhouse, Wuthering Heights, sits isolated and exposed to all elements of wind and weather, in sharp contrast to the comfortable, well-appointed Thrushcross Grange where Lockwood has come to recover from an unsuccessful love affair. Confused by the household he finds at Wuthering Heights on his first visit, he is drawn back. Trapped by a snowstorm, and obliged to stay the night, he finds a sequence of names – Catherine Earnshaw, Catherine Heathcliff, Catherine Linton – scratched into the paint of the windowsill. When he falls into uneasy sleep, his dreams are haunted by the ghost of Cathy trying to get in at