By the beginning of the 20th century, High Sunderland Hall had been divided into tenements. Photos of the Hall shortly before its demolition in show its walls and pillars bulging outwards.
Like the Sheela-na-gig, these figures seem to be pulling open their vulvas, but their faces look more male than female. The site on which High Sunderland Hall stood is bleak, wind-blasted, almost treeless. Photo: brontecountry. In an account published in , one William Davies described a visit he made to Haworth in Sturdily built of dark stone, Ponden Hall sits on the slopes of a hill and boasts stunning views over the Worth Valley.
A sizeable — though not enormous — house, with mullioned windows, beamed ceilings and stone-flagged floors, Ponden Hall occupies an area of 5, feet and has four acres of grounds. The house overlooks Ponden Reservoir created in the early s , formerly a smaller lake called Ponden Water. Though the current boxbed is a replica, the aged original apparently lasted until the s. Another window in the same room — a mullioned one in the east end gable — also has a Wuthering Heights connection.
Photo: annebronte. Ponden Hall, however, lacks the grotesque gothic carvings of High Sunderland Hall and — as far as I know — cannot claim any ghosts. But the factor most against Ponden Hall as an inspiration for Wuthering Heights is its location. Rather than commanding an exposed moortop position, Ponden Hall sits snug and sheltered on a slope near the valley floor.
A young Emily was walking on the moors with her sister Anne, her wayward brother Branwell and two servants after days of unrelenting rain had cooped them up in Haworth Parsonage. The group were enjoying the fresh post-deluge air and the weak rays of the sun, when the sky suddenly darkened and an ominous rumble came from the earth. It grew darker still, hailstones pelted down and the ground began to shake.
Ponden Hall was in the distance and the group instinctively sprinted towards it as shouts from the Hall urged them on. Panting, hearts pounding, the group reached the Hall, taking shelter in a building called the Peat Loft. Seconds later, an enormous explosion erupted. Patrick ran from Haworth Parsonage, believing his children were victims of an earthquake.
He later preached a sermon about their deliverance, which went on to be published. The explosion was heard as far away as Leeds and you can still see the scars and craters this huge landslide — known as the Crowhill Bog Burst — left on the moors.
Ponden Hall had a grand library, said to be the finest in West Yorkshire. A catalogue of the library shows that — as well as a precious Shakespeare First Folio — it contained many gothic novels and books on necromancy and black magic. There was also the influence of the Heatons themselves, a notable local family who served as Justices of the Peace and as churchwardens at Haworth, where Patrick was perpetual curate.
Behind Ponden Hall stands a withered pear tree, supposedly a present to an unimpressed Emily from a teenage Heaton who had a crush on her. Another story states that Emily was one day taking tea at the Hall when a dog gave birth to puppies at her feet. Robert Heaton was embarrassed, but Emily merely laughed. Might Ponden Hall have been a model for Thrushcross Grange?
Like the Grange, Ponden Hall had a long tree-lined drive. Most of the drive has now been swallowed by the reservoir. Also, like Thrushcross Grange, Ponden Hall has a large upstairs room with a window at either end. The nearby — and grander — Shibden Hall might be a closer model for the Grange while the size, style and details of Ponden Hall are more similar to Wuthering Heights. Emily might have visited Shibden Hall now the museum which houses the relics from High Sunderland when teaching at Law Hill.
This abiding feeling that Wuthering Heights makes too much noise and not enough sense was woven into my first encounter with the book. Long before I was old enough to read it, I watched the Monty Python sketch in which Catherine and Heathcliff exchange passionate declarations of adulterous love across the moor tops using semaphore. Again, I turn out to be in good company.
The reviews, when they appeared following publication in December , comprised the sort of chorus of disapproval that would send most debut authors into a funk.
This was also the publication that wondered if the author, at this time still known as Ellis Bell, had simply been eating too much cheese.
Just five years later Charlotte was dead too, but her characterisation of Emily as a freak of nature would gust down the decades, gathering sound and fury as it went.
What she was trying to get at was the sense that Emily was both mythic and a shape-changer, unbound by the physical laws of the universe. At that point a new wave of revisionary scholarship suggested that, far from being a remote and primitive hovel as Gaskell suggested, Haworth was a busy cultural centre with a keen curiosity about and attachment to what was going on in the world.
There were newspapers, concerts and lectures. The bookshelves held an expansive range of literary classics. Sophie Alexandra Frazer does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
While contemporary critics often admitted its power, even unwillingly responding to the clarity of its psychological realism, the overwhelming response was one of disgust at its brutish and brooding Byronic hero, Heathcliff, and his beloved Catherine, whose rebellion against the norms of Victorian femininity neutered her of any claim to womanly attraction.
The characters speak in tongues heavily inflected with expletives, hurling words like weapons of affliction, and indulging throughout in a gleeful schadenfreude as they attempt to exact revenge on each other. It is all rather like a relentless chess game in hell. She must jump, as it were, without looking to see if there is water below. It is a Paradise Lost of a novel: its poetry Miltonic, its style hyperbolic, and its cruelty relentless.
It has left readers and scholars alike stumbling to locate its seemingly Delphic meaning, as we try to make sense of the Hobbesian world it portrays. The author remains as elusive as her enigmatic masterpiece. Emily was to die just 12 months later, in December His relationship with Cathy is sometimes disturbing—for example, he breaks the side of her coffin so that, when he dies, they can decompose together.
Clearly, this guy has issues. Wuthering Heights shocked Victorian critics with its violence, passionate characters, and amoral plot. While some reviewers admired its creativity, others downright hated it. It is a compound of vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors. Wuthering Heights came out in December A year later, in December , Emily died at age 30 from tuberculosis.
Her brother Branwell had died in September and Anne would soon follow in May , leaving only Charlotte alive.
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