When I was a 14 year old back in 1975 my life was dull and quiet; I didn’t even own many books. But then I won Wuthering Heights and fell in love with it. I realise now that Emily Bronte’s book seeped into my blood, my bones, into my upbringing. It is the basis on which I build my world – and it’s the inspiration for Half Bad
When I was a 14-year-old back in 1975 my life was dull and quiet. The routine of my girls’ grammar school was enlivened only by the weekly cricket club disco. Summer holidays were in a caravan in the Lake District or North Wales. I’d been abroad once to Majorca. Clothes were expensive and thus few, but mainly bell-bottomed. We had a tv (I think we might have just gone to colour then) and the three day week was only just over. I remember being blown away by the radical first episode of Starsky and Hutch! We had a phone of course but hardly ever used it. There was a constant but vague Soviet nuclear threat and a more real IRA bomb threat. The very idea of a woman prime minister seemed laughably impossible.
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heaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy.
he’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same; and Linton’s is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire.
My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff’s miseries
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!
Because misery and degradation, and death, and nothing that God or Satan could inflict would have parted us, you, of your own will, did it. I have not broken your heart—you have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine.
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