The quiet voice of Emily Brontë was anything but tame
British writer Karen Powell’s darkly atmospheric second novel, “Fifteen Wild Decembers,” offers a fresh perspective on the talented Brontë family, whose childhoods on the isolated, rain-lashed West Yorkshire moors nurtured their hearts and fueled their imaginations.
The broad outlines of Powell’s narrative will be familiar to devotees of the Brontë sisters’ fiction and poetry, particularly Charlotte’s tale of an unsentimental education, “Jane Eyre,” and Emily’s groundbreaking Gothic romance, “Wuthering Heights.”
Powell’s decision to have Emily narrate “Fifteen Wild Decembers” is a shrewd move. She hands the mic (or pen!) back to the shy, nature-loving fourth of five daughters of widower and curate Patrick Brontë. Emily’s voice, which was somewhat drowned out posthumously by her surviving sister Charlotte, comes through forcefully here.
Why We Wrote This
Contemporary fiction harks back to favorite authors like the Brontë sisters, whose creativity and mutual reliance helped them overcome limited opportunities and setbacks.
The novel’s title and overarching themes are encapsulated in one of Emily’s elegiac poems, “Remembrance.” In it, she evokes a lost loved one, possibly one of her two older sisters, Maria or Elizabeth, who, along with several schoolmates, died in the tuberculosis and typhoid outbreak that tore through their harsh boarding school during the brutal winter of 1825.
Recalling that terrible time, Emily writes of the “fifteen wild Decembers” that “have [since] melted into spring” and asserts: “Faith, indeed, is the spirit that remembers / After such years of change and suffering.”
“Fifteen Wild Decembers” encompasses much hardship, but also much pleasure in the Brontës’ deep connections with each other, their writing, and the wild, windswept Yorkshire landscape. Emily’s first-person narrative spans the years 1824 through 1848, from the time when she was first sent away at age 7 to join her older sisters at the joyless Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan Bridge (later immortalized as Lowood in “Jane Eyre”) until her death at age 30 from TB, the disease that affected all her siblings save Charlotte.
During those years, the Brontës’ driving concern, propelled by the knowledge that they would be evicted from the Haworth parish house after their father’s death, is how to earn a living. The roles of teacher or governess are the only respectable options open to the young women. Their brother Branwell’s possibilities are greater, but so are his failures, and his sisters rue the sad, dissolute mess he makes of his life.
The novel chronicles Charlotte, Emily, and Anne’s forays into various schools and households. One by one, they boomerang home to Haworth after miserable, short-lived stints at grueling, thankless, poorly paid teaching positions. Charlotte comments, “Oh, we have no luck in this world, no matter what we do.”
As readers know, the three sisters eventually hit upon more suitable employment.
Writing, which they initially pursue in private with little thought of remuneration or fame, allows them to stay together in their beloved corner of West Yorkshire. Before they turn to novels, which are deemed to offer greater financial potential, the sisters cut their teeth on poetry and an involved, mind-numbingly dull (at least in this telling) epic fantasy about the myths and legends of Gondal, a fictional world that preoccupied Anne and Emily for years.
Powell, who has written of her own long, indirect journey to the publication of her first novel, “The River Within” (2020) – an evocative mid-20th-century family tragedy inspired by “Hamlet” and set in North Yorkshire (where she lives) – brings compassion to her portrayal of the Brontës’ struggles to find their voices and audience. She movingly captures their dismay at repeated rejections from publishers, but also the tight bond and occasional squabbles between them as they sit scribbling together around the parsonage’s dining table.
Charlotte is the only one to make money from her literary efforts during her lifetime: Her novel “Jane Eyre” is a huge commercial success when it is first published in 1847 under the pen name Currer Bell. Anne’s “Agnes Grey” receives little notice, and “Wuthering Heights,” published that same year under the pseudonym Ellis Bell, is lambasted for its shocking, unbridled passion and violence – yet is also deemed unputdownable.
Emily’s enthusiasm for nature in all its forms comes through in Powell’s many gorgeous descriptions of the landscape that attracted her narrator in all weather and seasons. In summer, Haworth Moor is “a purple, rolling carpet, alive with the hum of bees.” In December, it is “dun and grey and black against a sky of wintery blue.” In early spring, “The leaves of the cherry tree ignited overnight, a whoosh of pink and orange against the grey Yorkshire sky.”
“Fifteen Wild Decembers” will make you appreciate anew Emily Brontë’s free spirit and her refusal to write a tame, “well-
mannered” novel.
