Pod Insights Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society Sex & Scandal behind Wuthering Heights About this episode Wuthering Heights is a story full of passion, violence and sexual tension.
So it's no surprise that it shocked Victorian readers when it first came out. How did Emily Brontë, the daughter of a clergyman, create such a provocative world? How did the Brontê sisters write about sex and sexuality in their work? And how accurate is the new film to the original story?!
Joining Kate today is Dr Claire O'Callaghan https://claireocallaghan.com/, author and Brontë scholar, to take us back to Victorian England at the peak of the Industrial Revolution, and find out more about this scandalous story.
For tickets to the live show of Betwixt the Sheets in May, follow the link here https://www.fane.co.uk/betwixt-the-sheets
This episode was edited by Hannah Feodorov. The producer was Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Freddy Chick.
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0:00 Kate Lister? Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? Well, sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles. Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.
0:35 Kate Lister? Hello, my lovely Betwixters. I'm just jumping in here real quick to remind you that if you wanted to come and see Betwixt the Sheets live and in the flesh, you can do so in May. We have got two live events, one in Edinburgh on the 23rd of May and one in London Town on the 25th of May. There will be guests, there will be games, there will be smutty history aplenty. Tickets are available now at fane.co.uk, that's F-A-N-E.co.uk, and just search for Betwixt and we will see you there.
1:12 Kate Lister? Hello, my lovely Betwixters. It's me, Kate Lister. You are listening to Betwixt the Sheets. Hello and welcome back to the podcast that roots around in the pants of history for your entertainment. But before we can get a root in together, I have to tell you, once more and forever more, this is an adult podcast, spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things in an adulty way, covering adult subjects and youth spared adult too. And that's just to keep you safe, because we care. Right, let's crack on.
1:50 Kate Lister? I haven't actually had to travel too far for this episode, thankfully. I've just nipped over to Howarth in West Yorkshire, not too far from my own stomping ground, except that we have landed smack bang in the middle of the 19th century. Well, almost the middle of the 19th century, 1847, and that's pretty close. Look around, we've got factories and mills popping up across the landscape. TB is killing off family members and everybody's off their face on gin. It really is peak Victorian. And at the edge of this cobblestone town lurks the Yorkshire Moors, a wild and fearsome landscape that is as much a character in Wuthering Heights as anyone else.
2:32 Kate Lister? But how did this small pocket of Victorian England influence the daughters of a clergyman into writing some of our darkest and most powerful stories? You wanna know more? Well, I certainly do. Let's do it!
3:12 Kate Lister? Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister. Movie fans out there may have noticed that we are about to be blessed with another adaptation of Emily Bronte's Gothic masterpiece, Wuthering Heights. I was just thinking we needed a new one. I was, that's what I was thinking. And here it is. But before we all dash off to the cinema to see it, and before I give you my rendition of Kate Bush's song, what better time to explore the wild world of the Bronte sisters, Emily, Anne and Charlotte? What happened in their lives that meant that they could create and sustain such vivid, violent and passionate worlds? Were their own personal lives vivid, violent and passionate?
3:54 Kate Lister? How did the tragedy they faced influence them and their writing? And why do their stories still endure today? Well, joining me today to help us find out is Dr Claire O'Callaghan, lecturer and editor in chief of Bronte Studies, the official journal of the Bronte Society. So, let's face it, if anyone can clue us in, it's Claire. And without further ado, let's crack on.
4:29 Kate Lister? Hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Claire O'Callaghan. How are you doing?
4:35 Speaker 01 I'm really well. How are you doing?
4:38 Kate Lister? Well, I'm doing good, but quite how you're doing at the moment with the fact that Wuthering Heights is about to drop, because if anyone doesn't know you and your work, you're a senior lecturer in English literature, but you are very focused on the Brontes. You are the editor of Bronte Studies, the official journal of the Bronte Society. And these are your girls.
4:58 Speaker 01 I know, I know, my homegirls. It's a very exciting time. It's an exciting time for the Brontes and it's an exciting time for Wuthering Heights. A controversial time, though.
5:07 Kate Lister? How are you feeling?
5:08 Speaker 01 I'm really excited. I have to say, I did think your first question would just be cut straight into, did they have sex in the novel? But we can get to that, maybe. I'm really excited. I love Emerald Fennell's work, so I'm really excited to see how this all comes off on screen. It looks like a really interesting take, a really different take. And it's already, of course, been provocative, but I'm really excited to see what happens.
5:34 Kate Lister? Maybe it needs a different take, because it's a classic for a reason. I don't even know how many times Wuthering Heights has been retold in film.
5:43 Speaker 01 Oh, so many times, around the world as well. Not just across a film, of course, but on stage, opera, all sorts of things. So, yeah, a new take is needed, a new take for this moment in the 21st century, I think.
5:58 Kate Lister? I wonder what Emily would have thought about it. Jo, I'm getting ahead of myself. Just for anyone that's listening, who might be aware of the Brontes, but it's not their bag. Can you just give us an overview of who they are and why they're so important?
6:13 Speaker 01 Yeah, of course. So, the Brontes, when we refer to the Brontes, we're talking about the three sisters, Charlotte, Emily and Anne, who are a unique literary family. There are no other sets of three siblings who all published absolute, you know, classic canonical texts within a really short space of time. Um, that are now kind of accepted as part of the literary canon. So Charlotte, Emily and Anne, young women, young northern women, born in Thornton in Bradford between eighteen sixteen and kind of eighteen twenty. Grew up in Howarth, which was at that time,
6:50 Speaker 01 an emerging industrial space. So it's kind of full of mills and workers, you know, it's kind of weavers and that kind of thing. And they moved to Howarth with their mum and dad and some older sisters and a brother. And I'm sure we'll pick up the brother because he's known, yes. But the sisters, uh, they grow up in a very kind of secluded family because their father's the local clergyman. Uh, they're sent off to school. The older sisters are sent off to school and Charlotte and Emily go. And then sadly, they lose their older sisters when they they come home very, very sick from school. So the children, a family of six is reduced very quickly to a family of four. Their mother dies within a year of moving to Howarth.
7:35 Speaker 01 But it has this effect in terms of creating this family structure where you've got these children then that bond together. That are effectively kept at home and home schooled. And who then spend most of their time creating from their youngest ages, creating these sprawling worlds that lead to their, they're kind of like little apprenticeships, these worlds of a glass town and anger and gondola. But I always describe a little bit as kind of, um, imagine Game of Thrones, but without the set. With lots of passion, but without the explicit sex. It's those kinds of worlds. And they are acting out these little dramas and they forge these really tight friendships and it leads to them writing.
8:15 Speaker 01 And from there, um, as the sisters grow up, they kind of very quickly sack off, uh, teaching because none of them really like it. Um, none of them really want to be governesses. Charlotte absolutely hates being a governess. She's really, speaks terribly about the children she needs to look after. Anne and Jaws been in governess for a few years, but then leaves after Bramwell's scandal. And Emily just really hates teaching. Um, she very famously told the children that she taught very, very briefly at school. She preferred the house dog to them.
8:46 Kate Lister? Well done, Emily.
8:47 Speaker 01 Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, that's kind of constructive feedback, isn't it? And they basically forged careers as writers. They first published as poets. They put together a collection in eighteen forty six when they first published under pseudonyms. So they published under the names Cora Ellis and Acton Bell. It's a bit of a commercial flop because they only sell a couple of copies and it is reissued later, but it's it's a commercial flop. But because they've spent their lives creating elaborate worlds, working together. These three sisters who are unmarried, who don't really want careers as teachers. Under kind of Charlotte's, I guess, guidance, decide we're going to have a go at being novelists.
9:30 Speaker 01 And then you get the publication within a really short space of time, within within weeks, really, of Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and Ambronte's Agnes Gray. And that's why they're unique. That's why there's no other story like them in literary history. Yeah.
9:45 Kate Lister? It is mental. Do you know what's even more mental? And this is the thing, like, that all Bronte scholars are kind of desperate to sort of explain. It's like, how on earth did three very young sisters in Howarth? You've been to Howarth, lovely. It's a lovely place, great charity shops. But it is the arse end of nowhere. Like, it's in the middle of the Yorkshire Moors, which we'll get to. It's very isolated. These three young girls who've grown up in quite an isolated household. How the hell did they write these books? Like, Wuthering Heights is like fierce passions and abuse and the sexual undertone is deniable. So is Jane Eyre. It's like they're these raunchy novels, like nothing explicit happens in it, but it's all tension. And you're just going, how in the hell did you know about this?
10:30 Speaker 01 I know. I think that's what upset the Victorians a lot, which is probably understatement of the year. All of the kind of implied sexual content, the knowledge that three young women, who really shouldn't have had that kind of sexual knowledge, had that knowledge. Are writing it, you know, they're writing about bigamy and debauchery and adultery. You know, in Wuthering Heights, you've got this quasi incestuous thing going on. With these protagonists, they are all unconventional texts for their time. And really, I think we probably forget just how raunchy that all would have been for the Victorians.
11:05 Kate Lister? Yeah, good point.
11:06 Speaker 01 Yeah, and one of the reasons that they came to write that text is that context I described, that biographical context means that their father, when he keeps them at home, he gives them a lot of licence in terms of reading. So they are exposed to, and I know he's one of your favourites because you've talked about it so often.
11:26 Kate Lister? Oh, no.
11:27 Speaker 01 It's Lord Byron.
11:30 Speaker 01 Yeah, exactly, you know, I mean.
11:32 Kate Lister? The bastard.
11:33 Speaker 01 Yeah, he finds his way everywhere. They're not only reading Byron, so they're lapping up, you know, the Corsair and Don Juan and all of the rest of it, consuming it, they adore Byron. And you can see his influence throughout, throughout his work.
11:47 Kate Lister? He can actually.
11:48 Speaker 01 Through those, through those kind of characters, you know, what we call the Byronic kind of moody, mad, bad, dangerous to know characters. But they love him so much.
11:56 Kate Lister? Heathcliff, very Byronic.
11:57 Speaker 01 Absolutely, they absolutely, they love him so much. They're also reading a biography of Byron that comes out. So they have in their house a copy of Thomas More's eighteen thirty-three biography of Byron, in which More is talking about, you know, all of Byron's, you know, racy romances, his deep passions, his sexual travels and knowledge across Europe. And lo and behold, we get characters like Rochester, who is also off in the middle of Europe, having loads of sexual relationships. So, yeah, so they're reading the Thomas More biography and they're absolutely lapping up not just Byron's creative works and all of his poetry, but this, the debauchery of his life.
12:39 Speaker 01 And because they love him so much and they're exposed to that, you can see how they are absorbing that. And that kind of reading, which was also been published, or at least his poetry was certainly been published in the various periodicals that the family had subscriptions to, like Blackwoods and Fraser's magazine. You can see how they're absorbing that and then constructing these characters off the back. And it's for that reason that the Brontes as, as young women are. Aren't, you know, fair maidens and they're not really constructing fair maidens. They're constructing byronic texts.
13:12 Kate Lister? Now it makes sense. Mr Rochester, that's a byronic hero, isn't he?
13:16 Speaker 01 Absolutely.
13:17 Kate Lister? Moody, sulky, quite, is he handsome? No, he's not particularly handsome, but he's quite magnetic, isn't he?
13:23 Speaker 01 Yeah, absolutely. And also somebody who is throughout that text, kind of dangling sexual knowledge over Jane, that Jane doesn't understand. And at a point she says, you know, I'm not sure I understand you. When he's talking about, you know, these conquests and all his loves that he's had across the world.
13:40 Kate Lister? His grand passions.
13:41 Speaker 01 His grand passions. And of course, you know, before we even mention, you know, his wife that he's got hidden and he's off doing his bigamous adulterous things. He of course accuses his wife, doesn't he, of her giant propensities as he speaks of, which again is about her sexual desire. So we don't only just have really highly sexed men, we have apparently highly sexed women in these texts as well.
14:12 Kate Lister? I'll be back with Claire and the Brontes after the show break.
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15:22 Kate Lister? All right, so Byron's got in there.
15:24 Speaker 01 I know.
15:25 Kate Lister? Suddenly this makes a lot more sense.
15:26 Speaker 01 Right, okay.
15:27 Kate Lister? That man and his influence, honest to God.
15:29 Speaker 01 I know, he's everywhere.
15:30 Kate Lister? He really is. But it's still extraordinary that these young girls wrote these texts. Because even if you're reading Byron and you're kind of aware that, you know, people behave like this, is that still to like, like, did they have any experience? They were all unmarried, were they unmarried? Did they have boyfriends, girlfriends?
15:50 Speaker 01 Charlotte married at the very end of her life. Emily, we can pretty much say there's simply no evidence for Emily being connected to anybody. There are myths sort of sprung up after, after the fact that apparently there was a relationship, a friendship between her and a guy called Robert Heaton, who lived at Ponden Hall, which is often a building that's associated with weather in heights. And apparently he as well as kind of, I guess, the footsie under the table, he planted a pear tree for her. I'm not sure there's any evidence for any of that. And, and a pear tree isn't the best gift to be giving somebody anyway, to seduce them.
16:22 Kate Lister? Let's hope they were using protection.
16:25 Speaker 01 Charlotte is really, really interesting because Charlotte, she turned down loads of offers of marriage. She had quite a few people.
16:32 Kate Lister? Oh, did she?
16:33 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah, she had several. Even the guy she ultimately married, she turned him down initially. So Charlotte didn't want to marry at all. And when you get to her second novel, Shirley, which obviously comes out of the back of, of Jane Eyre. At the beginning of that, she kind of tells her readers to calm their expectations that it isn't a romance. And in that book, what you then get are two fiery protagonists. One who's a bit mopey that kind of is thinking about how she's going to marry and what she's going to do in life. But the other Shirley, the titular Shirley, is much more of a kind of Ann Lister-esque figure. Not in terms of sexuality, but in terms of, I don't want to marry. I'm a businesswoman. I don't need men in my life. Which is really, really, yeah, and I think Charlotte's right in a lot of that.
17:18 Speaker 01 Kind of from her ambition, of course, been a Victorian novel. It has to end differently and you have the happy ever after weddings. So Charlotte turns down marriage options. She does get married after her sisters die. So Anne and Emily die in 1848 and 1849. Within six months of of one another, so that close family bond is. Yeah, it leaves Charlotte in an enormous kind of depression and turmoil, as you'd expect.
17:46 Speaker 01 And her father's curate, Arthur Bell Nichols, who'd known the family. And who'd been quite obsessing with her for some time. He pops the question, she initially turns him down and ultimately does marry him. So she does end up having a typical married life and there are rumours that maybe one of the the reasons that she died is because she was pregnant, although that's disputed. So Anne, who's often the forgotten sister, but who's absolutely brilliant. Anne's the youngest, she's the baby of the family. Anne is said to have had feelings for her father's curate, an earlier curate, a guy called William Waitman. And Charlotte's also said to have had feelings for him as well.
18:28 Speaker 01 And he's really interesting because he's apparently said to be a very, very sexy, very handsome curate who decides to write the sisters and their friends their first ever Valentine's and he walks 10 miles, goes to extreme lengths to make sure that these girls receive a Valentine's card.
18:49 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's all a bit strange and then he dies. So it didn't work out brilliantly.
18:53 Kate Lister? Oh my God, like there's, I know that like mortality is is really high, but like it it seems unusually high around this particular father, because they all die young, don't they?
19:04 Speaker 01 They do die young. They die young, the two younger ones, Emily and Anne, die kind of when they're, you know, at the end of their twenties, basically, but that's, you know, been reaching 29, 30, 28, 27, 29. That's living longer than the kind of mortality, you know, life expectancy in Haworth, which is basically 25. But if you got to 25, you were lucky. Most people weren't expected to get past six, so.
19:30 Kate Lister? Yeah, it's child mortality, isn't it, that kind of pulls the stuff? Like, you'd think that if you got to your twenties, you would, you stood a reasonable chance of. Seeing older age at least.
19:41 Speaker 01 Yeah, and their father does. Their father lives to a really ripe old age. He doesn't die until eighteen sixty one. So he does really, really well. But Haworth is is a really sickly place. You know, we talked a little bit earlier about, you know, where they live is is an industrial place. It's full of mills and and and workers. And that leads to a lot of overcrowding, you know, terrible living conditions for people that are kind of rammed into these properties. Uh, there's a really terrible water supply. There's really bad sanitation. There's all kinds of bodily fluids rolling down what is now picturesque Main Street. Um, and because of that, there's lots of disease. So they actually do really well to get to their twenties.
20:24 Kate Lister? Wow, okay.
20:25 Speaker 01 But it's tuberculosis in the end that gets Emily and Anne.
20:30 Kate Lister? So it's they all three sisters die within relatively close time to one another. They had two older sisters who died as children. Their mother died, this curate that they quite fancied, he dies as well. Uh, Branwell, who we'll talk about, he doesn't do it. It's just.
20:46 Speaker 01 He dies.
20:46 Kate Lister? A bonanza, isn't it, mate? He dies.
20:48 Speaker 01 He dies before the sisters, yeah.
20:51 Kate Lister? Oh, my God. Do you think there's any way that this didn't shape their work? Because it's dark, their work as well. I mean, you know, you can read about Byron and his wandering loins as much as you want, but the work is dark.
21:03 Speaker 01 Yeah, it is. One of the things people have often commented on with the Brontë's writing is there's a lot of kind of um, motherless children uh in their text. You get a lot of kind of orphaned characters. And you can trace that, of course, back to this idea that, you know, they lost their mum, you know, a year after moving to Haworth. And Anne, the youngest, would have been a baby at that time. Charlotte would have been a bit older, um, as would Emily. But that's a formative experience, even in a place where, um, you know, mortality rates are really, really high. And Patrick Brontë knows that. I mean, he desperately goes about trying to find a kind of a place that mother tries to find a wife.
21:43 Speaker 01 Um, he even writes kind of back to one of his earlier girlfriends and is like, I did turn you down, but essentially. Would you come, how do you feel about it now?
21:51 Kate Lister? Imagine getting that letter.
21:53 Speaker 01 Yeah, absolutely. So he goes to great lengths to to get them a kind of another mother figure. The person that does kind of step in who stays with them and who is there before their mum dies is their aunt. So their mother's sister and she's there for a very, very long time. But of course, that doesn't replace that that bond that they would have had with their mum and that relationship. So that kind of loss in terms of mothers definitely pervades the children's writing. But we also see a lot of sickly kids. I mean, in Jane, at the beginning, Jane goes to the Lowood School, which is that horrible boarding school, this institution where she's humiliated.
22:32 Speaker 01 And the guy that runs it is completely hypocritical. You know, he's he's serving good food and keeping his family warm. You know, to the people he cares about, but the children, he wants to live in kind of dire, hard, horrible circumstances. And in that school, we get the construction, or there's a character called Helen Burns. And she's said to be based on Maria Bronte, who was the oldest sibling of all of them, but who died when she was young. So you could again see that they're writing their sisters into their fiction as well. So mothers and sisters pervade those texts.
23:08 Kate Lister? They do, don't they? And of course, especially if we're thinking about Wuthering Heights, the Moors, the Yorkshire Moors, because it's interesting that you're saying about how it's been, it's very pretty today. Lovely tea shops, charity shops, little bric-a-bracs, beautiful, not beautiful when they were writing. Pretty industrial, pretty grim sanitation, not brilliant. But it's also slap bang in the middle of the Moors. Like, and it's, if anyone hasn't been wandering around the Moors, I'd strongly encourage you to do it. Put on a long skirt and pretend you're in a Bronte novel. But what do you think the impact of that is on their writings, the kind of the environment that they're living in?
23:46 Speaker 01 It's really hard to divorce the Moors, I think, from their writing. These these books all have the Moors and landscape in them in really critical ways, especially something like Wuthering Heights. Although, one of the things about Wuthering Actually, it's very much turned inwards. Emily holds the camera inwards in properties in that book, but she gives you the illusion that you're out on the moors and we have the image of Cathy and Heath jumping up on the moors. But the landscape for the Brontes is critical. It's where, as I've said, you know, in their, in their childhood, they were having lessons at home, reading all this wonderful stuff and then running out onto the moors and play acting and exploring. I mean, they were fierce walkers from a young
24:27 Speaker 01 age. We've got stories of, you know, by the time Anne Brontes, just a few years old, she's walking about three and four miles a day, which is remarkable, given how much, how little we all walk today. You know, it's fascinating.
24:41 Kate Lister? So they really were wandering around about on the moors. That was a big thing for them.
24:46 Speaker 01 Absolutely, yeah. They're out on those moors, they're exploring it, they know those landscapes and they're doing that through adulthood because it's their leisure space. And if you do come to Haworth and you'll see that the parsonage is right at the top of the kind of hill. So out of the front of their house, they had the graveyard and the church and then how of this industrial space. But turn around and walk backwards and you're out in this expansive moors. And that's where their imagination was. That's where they felt free. We've got stories of them being out there, exploring, walking, laughing, taking guests out there. And then it's finding expression in their books throughout their poetry, as well as the novels as well. So you can't, you can't disconnect the Brontes
25:31 Speaker 01 from the moors. And that's why so many people come to Haworth and they do things like Walk to Topwithins, which is said to be the inspiration for Weather in Heights, because they want to walk in the Brontes' footsteps. They want to know what and how those landscapes inspire these texts and feel something of that relationship between those things.
25:48 Kate Lister? Shall we talk about Branwell? Branwell Bronte. What a scallywag. I mean, I don't know, maybe he wasn't. You've got these literary sisters and then this basket case of a brother.
25:59 Speaker 01 Yeah, he's the black sheep in the family.
26:02 Kate Lister? Maybe I'm being really harsh.
26:03 Speaker 01 Yeah, I mean, poor Branwell.
26:04 Kate Lister? Poor old Branwell.
26:06 Speaker 01 Yeah, he is, I mean, in context, and to be fair to him, he was under an enormous amount of pressure as the only boy in a family of six girls and then being responsible for four. You know, if their father had died, everything would have fallen on Branwell's shoulders to look after his unmarried sisters. But the thing about Bramwell is, he tries his hand at lots of things in life. You know, he wants to be a writer, he wants to be a painter, he works on the railways for a bit, he turns his hand to being a tutor. He's actually part of a temperance society for quite a lot of his life, so he's
26:41 Kate Lister? Is he?
26:41 Speaker 01 Yeah.
26:42 Kate Lister? Didn't know that.
26:43 Speaker 01 The irony of that, because we associate him with alcohol and opium abuse, because that's how the last few years of his life were.
26:51 Kate Lister? He was, he was an addict, wasn't he? He had, he had substance abuse problems, we would say now.
26:56 Speaker 01 Yeah. And again, in context in the day, it would have been cheaper for him to have got hold of something like opium than it was to get hold of alcohol. But we do have letters that survive of him begging people to bring him gin and, you know, kind of saying, "If you bring some and leave it outside the door, I'll slip you the money." So he is
27:16 Kate Lister? Well, that's not good.
27:17 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's not good. But he, I think one of the things about Bramwell is, it said that he was the life and soul of social spaces. So he sounds like somebody who found real validation from kind of drinking, being merry and being the life and soul of the party and kind of getting attention and validation about himself that way, particularly if everything else in his life is kind of seemingly marked by failure.
27:39 Kate Lister? I wonder if he ended up in the books of his sisters at all, if there's any influence of that kind of, you know, the magnetic personalities, loads of fun, but there's a real dark streak to him.
27:51 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think, well, actually, I mean, people have talked about that. They've talked about how you can find echoes of Bramwell in those books. The text where that's probably the clearest is Anne Bronte's second novel, The Tenant of Walthall Hall, which came out in 1848, because that's about a woman in a troubled marriage who basically runs away. She's a woman in, who leaves and seeks refuge from her, her debauched husband. But he, and his name's Arthur, he is not only having tons of extramarital affairs and treating her terribly, but he is completely addicted to alcohol. And so you see that maybe Anne was writing out of that kind of observation of what she was seeing. But he also, as I've
28:32 Speaker 01 said, you know, he kind of echoes the fact that, yeah, Bramwell also liked to have extra, not extramarital affairs, sorry, Bramwell liked the women, I should say, rather. You know, he's associated with having a scandalous relationship with the woman of the house, where he was a tutor, who was called Lydia Robinson. You know, she's the original Mrs. Robinson.
28:53 Kate Lister? Oh, look at that. What a scallywag.
28:55 Speaker 01 I know.
29:05 Kate Lister? I'll be back with Claire and the Brontes after this short break.
29:16 Kate Lister? Hello, Betwixters. I am jumping in here because I have some very exciting news. Betwixt the Sheets has set up camp on YouTube. That's right, it took us a while, but we are there now. So if you are the kind of person who likes to see your podcasts as well as hear your podcasts, you can now go and find us right there, and the link is in the show notes. And please remember to like and subscribe because the people in charge of the money really do like that. Right, let's get on with it.
29:57 Kate Lister? Let's talk about Emily because there's a whole body of work, like not just on the writings, but on her character. And I'm going to tread carefully with this one because obviously she's not around to defend herself. We don't know. But it does seem like she was what, how do we put this? An odd duck, a strange little potato. Like, I've read lots of takes on her, the people posthumously diagnosing her with things like autism, that she might have fitted that criteria. Again, we need to be very careful that we don't, it's a long time gone, you've got to be careful of stuff. But also eating disorders, breakdowns, like she seems like quite a complex character.
30:36 Speaker 01 She is a complex character, but we have to have a caveat with all of those things. Because one of the things about Emily is that we don't really have much at all by Emily about Emily. So most of what we know about Emily is from other people, and it's mainly from her sister Charlotte. So Emily doesn't leave us volumes of diaries or letters telling us, you know, her thoughts on things or what she felt about, you know, her life and... Her marital prospects or not, or her career, or any of those things. We have everything through Charlotte. And in that void, though, people have been desperate to know, well, what did Emily think about all these things?
31:14 Speaker 01 So there's been a lot of kind of projection and kind of reading her, particularly trying to understand her through Weather in Heights, which is a really complex book, you know, the, one of the things, you know, you mentioned eating disorders there. And Emily was said to be thin, but she was out walking for miles and miles a day. So in context, you know, you could see why someone would be lean and lithe in that way. But people often take Cathy and kind of say, well, Cathy kind of, you know, doesn't want to eat. And Heath didn't want to eat at times of trouble. Therefore, that's what Emily was doing. She was writing this kind of eating disorder into, into the characters. And that's just a massive kind of overreach, really. But she is known, she was always kind of, I guess, known as the strange one in, in many ways.
31:59 Speaker 01 Um, they all suffered from chronic shyness. They weren't particularly social beings. They were a very tight knit group. So for Emily, you've got these two things of this void of, we don't know much about her. And then you've got the fact that, yeah, she didn't really like socializing with people. So within that, it gives rise to, who was she? And I mean, Ted Hughes called her the weirdest of the weird sisters.
32:22 Kate Lister? Oh, well, he can fuck off, quite frankly.
32:25 Speaker 01 Well said, exactly, yeah.
32:29 Kate Lister? Sorry, that came from quite, that provoked something in me, that did. Oh, right, okay.
32:33 Speaker 01 Triggered.
32:34 Kate Lister? He said that. Yeah, I was triggered with that one of just like, keep that to yourself. Thanks, mate. I don't think you should be passing judgment on anyone. But she, from what I've read about her, she really, like you said, she's not sociable to the point of like, it's quite, like her shyness is, is quite limiting on her life even. Like when she said that she told those kids she'd rather have spent time with the dog. It's like, that's kind of who she is. She does not like people very much.
32:57 Speaker 01 Yeah, she's someone that I don't think suffered fools gladly. And I think she was very assertive and confident in herself. You know, she was happy to be on her own. She didn't feel that she needed a massive circle of friends. Um, I mean, but she Goes to Brussels with her sister Charlotte in the early 1840s, which is where Charlotte kind of falls a bit in love with her tutor and has this yearning desire for him. And we get these letters after she returned, but that's another story. But Emily, while she's there, is a little bit teased. She's teased by the locals because she's really unfashionable. She's not wearing the fashions of the day. And she just kind of shuts all of that down.
33:37 Speaker 01 You know, she kind of responded, her retort is, you know, I want to be as God made me, which is a pretty interesting response, but she just, that one line closes it down. I don't think she could easily be bullied. I don't think she was giving them maybe the response she wanted. And she was kind of a little bit like, I'm going to wear these mutton sleeve dresses. I don't care that they're not in fashion anymore.
33:58 Kate Lister? I was going to say there that her reaction should have just been like, I'm Emily Bronte. Do you want to just, just do one? Thank you. But maybe in her own day, she wasn't super famous. Like if she'd turned around and said, yeah, but I'm, I'm Emily Bronte, they might have just gone, who? Like, how was her work received? How did the Victorians react to Wuthering Heights?
34:17 Speaker 01 Yeah, well, obviously, I mean, they were published under pseudonyms, so Emily was desperate not to be known. In fact, she made Charlotte promise, it was one of the conditions of, of them publishing together. Absolutely no fame. She did not want to be known as, you know, her name out there. Charlotte did leak all of that, but that's another story as well. Emily's work was received in a, in a really kind of complicated way. And we know that Emily had some reviews of Wuthering Heights. So when Wuthering Heights comes out, it's published in a double volume with Agnes Gray. And it comes out, as I said earlier, a little bit, just a couple of weeks after Jane Eyre. But the Victorians are absolutely shocked by it. Uh, one review says, read Jane Eyre but burn Wuthering Heights.
35:01 Kate Lister? Wow, oh, that's, wow, okay.
35:03 Speaker 01 Which kind of sums it up. Um, and another reviewer says that people who, uh, eat cheese late at night will have nightmares. The author of Wuthering Heights obviously ate a lot of cheese. Which again is an interesting Victorian response, but by and large, they're accusing the Brontes of being coarse, of being vulgar, of being immoral. They're suggesting that young women shouldn't be reading these texts. So it's completely shut down. Even when writers acknowledge that there is merit to her writing, that there's originality and power, and they say, you know, we weren't able to put the book down, they're still condemning it. And that's because nobody knows what to do with Wuthering Heights. They don't know if it's
35:44 Speaker 01 a kind of cautionary tale, or is it a love story? Are we meant to like Heathcliff and Cathy? You know, and for the Victorians, having a kind of a moral agenda, a book being didactic and teaching society something was what they wanted. So it's condemned. And what's really tragic is she only lives a year, basically, after that book is published. But in her writing desk after she dies, she has a beautiful portable wooden writing desk that no doubt she took out on the moors with her to write. But in the drawer of that, some of the reviews, she's obviously kept cut-ins. And they're all pretty harsh ones. She doesn't live to see a particular review that comes out in 1850 in The Palladium by a guy called
36:28 Speaker 01 Sidney de Bell, who basically says Wuthering Heights is one of the most original texts of all time. And he sees its power and its beauty. And so she, but she misses out on that. But it's his review that really changes the path for that book. Because Charlotte also writes about how awful Wuthering Heights is. She writes a very short biography of her sisters after they've died. And she basically says, you know, in that, and she edits them as well and publishes, republishes them. She said, you know, these are, these are mistakes, these books, you know, Wuthering Heights really shouldn't have been written. And it isn't right to kind of conjure characters like Heathcliff.
37:07 Kate Lister? I didn't know that.
37:08 Speaker 01 I know, it's fierce sibling politics, isn't it?
37:11 Kate Lister? It really is. But you know, like, just hearing you say that, that the Victorians didn't know what to do with Wuthering Heights. I'm not sure we know what to do with Wuthering Heights. It remains one of the most frustrating texts to read. And I don't just mean like you read it and go, what the hell's going on here? But like, some people do. Like, not only do you have this strange framing device where it's a story within a story within a story. And then it's kind of a ghost story, but it's also like, is it a ghost story? Is it not? Oh, there is a ghost. But like, what? There's just one ghost and like, and then you're kind of like Heathcliff, do we love you? Do we hate you? It's like, what on earth is go- am I supposed to like you? Do you look- are you siblings? Are you not siblings? Are you black? We don't know anymore. It's so complicated.
37:50 Speaker 01 And then everyone's got the same name, at least twice in some time, in some occasions.
37:55 Kate Lister? I know, she didn't have to do that. She didn't have to, like, just to add to the, to the, like, there's intergenerational confusing. Everyone's got the same name. Everyone's marrying each other. It's a confusing text.
38:06 Speaker 01 It really is. And it's one of the things I've seen so much on, on social media about recently. People kind of reading it for the first time, encountering the book, um, and kind of saying, what is this book? What is this book? What am I meant to do with it? This isn't the thing I thought it was. I thought it was going to be this great love story and actually it's madness. What do I do with it? I don't know.
38:27 Kate Lister? As a preeminent Brontoscolus, can I just get your take on that? Is it a love story?
38:33 Speaker 01 I don't think it's a love story. I think it's meant to be a really provocative debate about, is this love? But also a, a, a kind of book about, um, immorality and what happens when people have no boundaries, have no boundaries, have no structure and want to do whatever they want and do so with impunity. Um, because the characters at the, at the centre of this book are, they're both kind of married. Not kind of, they are married. They're both in deeply unhappy marriages. One of them, Cathy, by choice, you know, she has chosen to sack Heathcliff off because it would degrade her to marry him. And marry a guy for material wealth and, and class and, and gain in that way.
39:17 Speaker 01 But then you have this kind of passion that's destructive, that is so destructive, that it overrides everything and everyone in some way. So I don't think it's meant to be a love story. I think it's kind of in keeping with these stories of, you know, the other sisters' stories about illicit marriages and bigamy and, and kind of, you know, the things that people get up to that they're, they're not meant to. But the thing about it, the reason we're still asking the question that you asked, which is a really good question. I think it's good that people discuss it because that I think is the essence of it, is that we still don't know what to do with it because Emily doesn't tell us. She doesn't come down on any side for us and tells us very clearly, you know, it kind of, he dies
40:02 Speaker 01 at the end. Sorry, spoiler alert for anyone that hasn't read the book.
40:07 Kate Lister? But you're right, you aren't left when you finish it going, what, what happened? Like, it's just a load of mad stuff that happens. And like, you're really confronted with it because you don't have the safety of this narrative where you're like, this is the good guy, this is the bad guy, or a bad guy that actually turns out to be a good guy. You don't get any of that. You're just left with like, oh, just the ashes of this awful, I guess abusive, we would say now, dynamic. This morning, we actually got an email, and I'll read it to you. This is from Dr. Victoria Williamson, who's a research fellow and president of the UK Psychological Trauma Society. And we just picked up this morning, Dr. Williamson, so we didn't have enough time to get you on. But she says this about Wuthering Heights, I'll read it to you and see what you think. "You do not have
40:50 Kate Lister? to look closely to see that the story centres on sustained intimate partner violence and severe child abuse. Continuing to present this as romance risks reinforcing some very harmful ideas about what love looks like, especially for women and for children who grow up around violence. Given the cultural weight of this story and the likely popularity of the film, it feels like a moment to pause and to question the way it's usually told."
41:13 Speaker 01 Yeah.
41:13 Kate Lister? Well, I thought that was very interesting, Dr. Williamson. What do you think about that?
41:17 Speaker 01 I'd completely agree. I completely agree with Dr. Williamson. And I think one of the things that happens, or that has happened in the last couple hundred years since the book was Published is that adaptation and popular culture has made this into a love story. And that's why people going back to the book are kind of going, what on earth is this? This isn't the book. This isn't the story I was sold.
41:41 Speaker 01 In this book, there is so much violence and Emily does something really interesting. You know, you meet Heathcliff when he's horrible. He's a horrible guy at the door. He's not welcoming, as I've said. And he doesn't want this guy stoned in his house. But then she pulls the rug from us by taking us back to his childhood and giving us this this horrible story of him being a foundling. And he's brought back, he doesn't speak English, they don't understand him, he's abused, he's treated cruelly. And then he loses the only guardian figure he has in his life and he's only connected to Catherine. And what you see is him being abused and it is this story then of if you treat someone horribly,
42:23 Speaker 01 they're going to turn out with with problems in some way if they've not got anyone good. And Cathy abandons him. That's why he's so angry and he feels so betrayed. Because it's that kind of trauma bond that's basically broken in many ways. But it's Hollywood that has, by very often not adapting the full text, or by just kind of writing scenes that aren't there, has taken Wuthering Heights and solely made it into a love story. Most people know the line, I am Heathcliff. All have heard that or be aware of that kind of and have heard of Cathy and Heathcliff probably, even if they'd not read the book or seen an adaptation. And that's because that idea that this is, this is a big declaration of love,
43:09 Speaker 01 you know, precedes precedes those things. But that sentence is devoid of context, you know, when she says, I am Heathcliff. Just a few minutes before that, he's already run off because he's been so embarrassed, humiliated and degraded by her saying she wouldn't marry him because she'd be degraded by marrying him. She's also kind of talked quite openly about choosing somebody else, you know, and choosing them really for the context of class and material wealth and gain. So that whole line is actually based around the context of rejection, not love. But Hollywood makes it into a love declaration.
43:47 Kate Lister? I think Hollywood does it and I think it actually tapped into something that we still do culturally, which is that we conflate. Passion and jealousy with love, like if somebody is jealous, if somebody's willing to go to those kind of lengths, like stalker behaviour, like, oh, he must really love you then. We've conflated that in this book.
44:05 Speaker 01 Absolutely. I think the idea that their love, their passion, and let's be clear, there is a lot of, there's a lot of intense passion and erotic tension in the book between these characters. That it's easy to, as you say, flatten all of those other things and see the idea that you're loved even after death as the ultimate declaration of love, forgetting the fact that while she's inside been unwell and giving birth, he's standing outside the window like a stalker, you know.
44:34 Kate Lister? It's not good.
44:35 Speaker 01 No, if you, but it's a Gothic novel, it's not a realist novel, right? So, but if you flatten all of the, the complexity and the, the intensity and remove the violence or make it kind of out of some kind of love story, you reinforce all the wrong ideas that leads to kind of intimate partner violence today, or stalking today.
44:54 Kate Lister? Stalking, it is stalking, that's, it's obsession is what it is, and it's not a healthy thing. Now, you haven't seen the new film, have you? They didn't give you a sneak preview.
45:03 Speaker 01 No, no, god damn it.
45:05 Kate Lister? But I'm guessing that Emerald Fennell might, might have lent in to the sexiness of this, so.
45:12 Speaker 01 I don't know, what would make you think that, Kate, really?
45:14 Kate Lister? I don't know what would make me think that, I've just a hunch that I've got. Do, do they have sex in the novel? Where's sex in this novel?
45:22 Speaker 01 Really, really good question, probably one of the most provocative questions as well. People get really animated about this because many people think it's a completely sexless novel. And, and they'll say, this is just all about a spiritual bond and a spiritual connection. And on the one hand, that's accurate in some respects because there isn't a kind of penetrative genital sex scene that would have, because no, Victoria, that would have been pornography, you know, if that was in there. So we don't get any scenes like that. What we do get are intense erotic moments, tension, we get physicality, we get kissing, we get grasping, we have a whole bedroom scene. So the Brontes, and this is one of the reasons they upset the Brontes, both Charlotte and Emily.
46:03 Speaker 01 Put their kind of main protagonist love figures in bedroom scenes. We have it in Jane Eyre when there's a fire, you know, Jane has to run in and save Rochester. You know, they're both in their nightgowns and there's this, he says, you know, stay here while he goes to check that everything's safe. So it was all very sanitized in that book. In whether in height, the bedroom scene happens when Catherine's unwell. And Heathcliff goes to see her when her husband's out. And Nellie knows this, that Nellie Dean, the housekeeper, that is. So he goes to see Catherine and they immediately embrace, they embrace, you know, he goes down on, on his knee, he's, he's clutching her.
46:40 Kate Lister? Thought you were gonna say something else then, I was gonna go, I missed that bit.
46:45 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah, that, that bit, that's probably in the film.
46:48 Kate Lister? Sorry, so he goes down on his knees, sorry.
46:50 Speaker 01 He goes down on his knees, yeah, but she has hold of his hair, she grasped his hair and is holding him there.
46:56 Kate Lister? Oh, yes.
46:57 Speaker 01 They're covering each other in kisses, they are grasping and clinching one another, one another. Now, so yes, there's no sex scene, but this is deeply unconventional for a Victorian book. That, of course, also though is set in the, in the, in the raunchy eighteenth century, we should say as well. So you have this intense scene where these two people who are married, and she's pregnant, by the way, we should throw into that, she's quite heavily pregnant. Are in these clinches, I mean, he holds her and Nellie observes that when he's grasping her, he leaves bruises on her arms because he's holding her so tight. So they have completely taken over any kind of boundary of proprietary behaviour.
47:40 Speaker 01 And are expressing their love, their passion, their connection in very coded sexual terms. So that's where we are in the book.
47:49 Kate Lister? And then, then there's all this rough and tumble out on the moors. Like, I know they're kids, but it's quite like, like, we're led to believe that it's very physical, what they're doing out there.
47:59 Speaker 01 Yeah, from a young age, they are kind of wanting to run off. They talk about going off for a scamper on the moors and that that was their, their, their best thing to do all day. And there's, again, it's interesting that Emily writes about physical.
48:13 Speaker 01 In a, in a very visceral sense, you know, Cathy's often kind of running around without shoes on, you know, her feet are on the ground. Again, you know, the exposure of skin is really important. So they are incredibly bound to one another. And in that bond, in that tightness is kind of what leads, I guess, to these scenes later on where they don't have proprietary and class expectations between them to keep them apart. They are just like magnets who are very comfortable with one another physically.
48:45 Kate Lister? So there's a final question then. And I'd love to get you back on actually when you've seen the film, just to say, and what did we think of that? But if you were allowed, well, the next time they remake Wuthering Heights, I'm sure they will, if they phoned you up and they went, right, we want, we want to know, how would you have made this film? If you were going to do it, how would you have this story represented on the big screen? What would you pull out of it?
49:08 Speaker 01 I think if you're going to do it, you need to do the full thing. So if you're going to show the intensity of love, you need to also show the darkness of passion and the violence. You need to get both sides of those things. And you need to have the complexity of Heathcliff, I think, in terms of, of his identity, again, to show how provocative this was, that you've got a white, middle class, or kind of more senior classed woman with somebody that's a foundling, a non, a non-English, non-white foundling. And I would put all of that complexity on screen, and I would then layer on the intensity of the erotic passion and the forbidden love, as well as all the darkness. I guess what happens
49:50 Speaker 01 with that, though, is that then you end up with a really, really bleak film. At the same time, there's not really a happy ever after. So I guess that's why people haven't adapted the full thing. So no one would make my version.
50:02 Kate Lister? But I think that's important though, isn't it? Is that it doesn't give you the happy ever after, and it is bleak, and it is, and it's uncomfortable, and it always has been.
50:10 Speaker 01 Yeah. I mean, I guess people could argue that, you know, the fact that, one of the things about that, the book is, in the second half, so by that I mean after Catherine dies, you get this book of yearning and mourning, which again is bound up with love and intensity and desire. And you get Heathcliff taking out her husband's hair, throwing that away and putting some of his own hair and tying it round, so that they're bound. You get him wanting to dig her up to look at her body. You get that sense of, he really wants to... Eradicate the veil between life and death. He just wants to be with her in that sense. But it's the extreme lengths that he'll go to. Towards the latter half of the book, wants to be, he wants to die. He wants to be with her. They want to be ghosts roaming around the moors.
50:55 Speaker 01 In a way, I guess if you see that as fulfillment, that could be a happy ever after in its own way, in an Emily Bronte way that's a bit truer to the book. But it's not a happy ever after in terms of maybe what audience expectations are at all.
51:09 Kate Lister? Claire, you have been wonderful to talk to. I'm even more excited about this film now. And if people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you?
51:17 Speaker 01 So I've kept all my social media handles really simple. It's at Dr Clara Cal on most platforms. I wrote a biography of Emily that was, it came out in 2018, but it's actually been expanded, updated and reissued this year. So that's called Emily Bronte Repay and it's coming out in June.
51:34 Kate Lister? Fabulous. Well, have fun watching the film.
51:36 Speaker 01 I'm going to have the biggest load of popcorn and try not to irritate everyone in the cinema by doing that thing of eating really, really fast while trying to keep focus and making noise.
51:46 Kate Lister? Thank you for coming to talk to us. You've been marvelous.
51:48 Speaker 01 I really enjoyed it. Thanks for having me.
51:50 Kate Lister? Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Claire for joining us. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like, review and follow along wherever it is you get your podcasts. Coming up, we have got the second episode in our little mini series of history's worst breakups, featuring none other than Lord Byron and Lady Caroline Lamb. We struggled to fit it into an hour, honestly. We've also got an episode on the truth about Frida Kahlo all coming your way. And if you wanted us to explore a subject or perhaps you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at [email protected] . This podcast was edited by Hannah Feodorov and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Freddy Chick. Join me again, betwixt the sheets, the history of sex scandal in society, a podcast by History Hit.
52:34 Kate Lister? This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.
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