 |
| The following information is available about this book: |
| BOOK JACKET |
| REVIEWS & EDITION INFORMATION |
| SAMPLE CHAPTERS |
| BACKGROUND NOTES |
| PHOTOS OF TABBY'S WORLD |
| BRONTË MYTHS |
| Return
to the Home Page |
Background material for The House
of Dead Maids For those who wish to learn more about the background of The House of Dead Maids, I have written a number of web pages dealing with my research into the Brontë family and Wuthering Heights. You may reach all of those pages by clicking on this link. Some Criticisms of My Prequel Anticipating criticisms of my Wuthering Heights prequel may seem like stacking the deck against myself—after all, I’m admitting that my story has flaws, right? Yes, but something that seems to be an error may actually have quite a bit of thought behind it, and those scholars who have given their time and attention to Wuthering Heights may be gratified to know that the thought is there. Here are some complaints concerning The House of Dead Maids, along with my responses:
There wasn’t enough story—the book left me wanting more. But that’s great! That’s exactly how I want you to feel. When you finish this book, I want you to be filled with curiosity. I want you to say, “I have to find out what happens next,” and then I want you to head to your nearest library or bookstore to pick up a copy of Wuthering Heights. Many books that play off classic texts use them just as a jumping-off point, but this book has a different goal. My plan is to persuade as many young readers as possible to try Wuthering Heights. Because of that, the book should feel like a real prequel: “Volume One” to Emily Brontë’s “Volume Two.” I’ve constructed my book so that it fits into the text of Wuthering Heights like a puzzle piece, tying the two books together in a number of subtle ways. Even those of you who know Wuthering Heights well may find some new things to wonder about if you read it again after reading my prequel. The language in your book is too old fashioned/not old fashioned enough. No, the language is just right. It matches the language in Wuthering Heights. In order to write this book, I read Wuthering Heights enough times to memorize key passages. I also read works by the other Brontë sisters. And I studied the language of Wuthering Heights extensively, reading some of the best research and literary criticism available today. As I wrote my book, I would stop every two or three sentences (or, often, two or three times a sentence) in order to consult Wuthering Heights, which I had in keyword-searchable form. I also searched Jane Eyre and the examples in the Oxford English Dictionary. I was looking not just for words themselves but for idioms and sentence structures in order to capture the sound of Emily Brontë’s English. Some readers object that my text is too old fashioned and that modern teens won’t be able to handle it. I doubt that. My experience has been that teens can handle quite a bit more than their elders give them credit for. But I wrote my book for one audience only: those readers who already enjoy Wuthering Heights or who would enjoy it if they got to know it. If readers can’t handle my book, then they can’t handle Wuthering Heights. And if they can’t handle Wuthering Heights, then my book is not for them. Some readers object that my text is not old fashioned enough—that it’s modern, with a few old-sounding words in it. This isn’t true, but it is an understandable objection from those who read Victorian or Regency literature but who don’t know Wuthering Heights well. Emily Brontë’s classic work sounds surprisingly modern to readers who are used to Austen or Dickens. Why is that? The difference lies in Emily Brontë’s “voice”: the author’s own choice of words. Emily Brontë did not write in the literary style of her day. A poet first and foremost, she rejected complex, flowery phrasing in favor of spare, direct sentences. Her prose is natural and plain, and her characters are uneducated. Since she stuck more closely to spoken English than to literary English, her prose has not become dated, and it is not nearly as much of a struggle to read as the prose of, say, Dickens. Contrast these two paragraphs, chosen entirely at random, from Jane Austen and from Emily Bronte: An hour passed away before the general came in, spent, on the part of his young guest, in no very favourable consideration of his character. “This lengthened absence, these solitary rambles, did not speak a mind at ease, or a conscience void of reproach.” At length he appeared; and, whatever might have been the gloom of his meditations, he could still smile with them. Miss Tilney, understanding in part her friend’s curiosity to see the house, soon revived the subject; and her father being, contrary to Catherine’s expectations, unprovided with any pretence for further delay, beyond that of stopping five minutes to order refreshments to be in the room by their return, was at last ready to escort them. This is the beginning paragraph of Chapter 23 of Austen’s Northanger Abbey. I chose it “blind” by clicking on a link from a table of contents page; I did not sift through multiple paragraphs, hunting for “difficult” Asten prose. We see here fairly difficult prose nonetheless. It is literary English—very fine literary English. A modern reader may have to read the paragraph twice in order to figure out what is going on. And here is the matching paragraph from Wuthering Heights, the opening paragraph of Chapter 23 (which is Book II, Chapter 9, in my Penguin Classics Deluxe edition)—again, this was chosen “blind” because I did not know what the matching paragraph in Wuthering Heights would look like ahead of time: The rainy night had ushered in a misty morning -- half frost, half drizzle -- and temporary brooks crossed our path, gurgling from the uplands. My feet were thoroughly wetted; I was cross and low, exactly the humour suited for making the most of these disagreeable things. This prose has a few “old-fashioned” words in it, but the vigorous style here is very close to spoken English, and most modern readers can manage it without difficulty. The short paragraph, easy for modern readers to follow, is typical of Emily Bronte’s style. Contrary to what one would expect of a Victorian author, Emily did not indulge in long descriptions. (I should note here that some editions combine Emily's short paragraphs into longer ones, but this is an edition faithful to the original text.) This brisk style, which does not hide brutal actions behind flowery words, is one of the things that made Emily Brontë controversial in her day. But it makes her the perfect Victorian author for modern readers to explore, and helping readers to learn that fact is the goal of my little novel. Your Tabby speaks very differently from the way the real Tabitha Aykdroyd spoke. It is true that my Tabitha Aykroyd is far too eloquent. We know from Emily Brontë’s diary papers that the real Tabby sounded like Wuthering Heights’ Joseph: “Ya pitter pottering there instead of pilling a potate [peeling a potato] ...” (Barker, 29-30) And Charlotte Brontë may have put a portrait of Tabby into Jane Eyre, in the person of Hannah, the housekeeper of the Rivers family. Hannah, too, speaks in simple sentences and thick dialect: “I’m fear’d you have some ill plans agate, that bring you about folk’s houses at this time o’ night.” (319) Shouldn’t my Tabby speak like that? Perhaps—but if she did, there wouldn’t be a book. Mark Twain had the brilliance to handle a dialect-speaking first-person narrator, but I do not. I don’t think my readers have the ability to navigate archaic Yorkshire speech, either. (Joseph’s canting speeches in Wuthering Heights require their own series of annotations nowadays so that modern readers can decipher them.) Besides, in adjusting my Tabby’s speech to meet the needs of her literary task, I’ve followed the very best of role models: Emily Brontë herself. For the sake of readable narrative, her Nelly Dean is very eloquent, despite having been Joseph’s counterpart in the same household. My editor asked me at one point, “Should Tabby really say ‘ascertain’? It seems like too sophisticated a word for her.” And I answered that my Tabby says ‘ascertain’ because Nelly Dean says ‘ascertain’—no fewer than seven times! You mention that Tabby tells the Brontë children ghost stories because Mr. Brontë does not know such tales. In my prequel, I do say this: “I tell them tales that their pious father cannot know, about the red-eyed Gytrash, the slavering devil dog who waits for the wicked, and about the young girl who was murdered by her lover on the moor and who roams barefoot on the bleak hills yet.” But those who know the histories of the Brontës very well know that Patrick Brontë, the son of a legendary Irish storyteller, did indeed tell his children hair-raising ghost stories. We have this information on good authority from Charlotte Brontë’s friend, Ellen Nussey, who did not at all approve of such outragious conduct. (Irish, 100-101) Unfortunately, I didn’t learn this fact until after the prequel was written. When I wrote it, I was drawing upon Mrs. Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography of Charlotte Brontë, which mentions Tabby as the source of the family’s otherworldly tales, as this excerpt from the beginning of Chapter V reveals: What is more, [Tabby] had known the “bottom,” or valley, in those primitive days when the fairies frequented the margin of the “beck” on moonlight nights, and had known folk who had seen them. But that was when there were no mills in the valleys; and when all the wool-spinning was done by hand in the farm-houses round. “It wur the factories as had driven ‘em away,” she said. No doubt she had many a tale to tell of by-gone days of the country-side; old ways of living, former inhabitants, decayed gentry, who had melted away, and whose places knew them no more; family tragedies, and dark superstitious dooms; and in telling these things, without the least consciousness that there might ever be anything requiring to be softened down, would give at full length the bare and simple details.Tabby seemed, then, an excellent narrator for the tale of the “dark superstitious doom” that engulfs the family of Wuthering Heights. The chronology of your prequel does not match the chronology of Wuthering Heights. That is quite true. Instead, the chronology of my prequel matches the chronology of the Brontës’ lives. It could not match both, so I stayed true to history. Tabitha Aykroyd’s gravestone in the Haworth churchyard gives her birth year as 1770. But Heathcliff, according to Charles Percy Sanger’s careful chronology, arrives at Wuthering Heights in 1771. (296) How can these dates be reconciled? The answer is that they can’t. My Heathcliff does not meet up with his foster father on the streets of Liverpool until 1781. Only three dates show up in the text of Wuthering Heights: Lockwood’s famous dates at the beginning of the two major sections of the book, 1801 and 1802, and Nelly Dean’s mention of 1778—but that date, as we have already noticed in my webpage concerning Wuthering Heights’ mysteries, is employed in an incorrect statement. 1801, then, the first “word” in the book, seems to have determined the entire remainder of the chronology. Edward Chitham, who has studied Emily Brontë’s primary texts minutely, opines that she may have chosen that date because she had read it many times stamped on a plaque at Ponden House. He states that it was characteristic of Emily Brontë to choose numbers or dates because of some personal connection she felt to them. (Birth, 98) And why shouldn’t Emily Brontë choose any date she liked for her novel? “Why ask to know the date—the clime?” we might say, as she herself wrote in a poem composed during the revision of Wuthering Heights. (Birth, 146) She had no requirement to conform to historical events. She could set her novel in any decade she chose. You see, my story of Tabitha Aykroyd’s extraordinary childhood is “fact”—but Emily Brontë’s sequel to it is fiction!
|