Kate Mosse - I Am Heathcliff - Stories Inspired by Wuthering Heights

The Borough Press

an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers 2018

In the compilation and introductory material © Kate Mosse 2018

Terminus © Louise Doughty; Anima © Grace McCleen; A Bird, Half-Eaten © Nikesh Shukla; Thicker Than Blood © Erin Kelly; One Letter Different © Joanna Cannon; The Howling Girl © Laurie Penny; Five Sites, Five Stages © Lisa McInerney; Kit © Juno Dawson; My Eye Is a Button on Your Dress © Hanan al-Shaykh; The Cord © Alison Case; Heathcliffs I Have Known © Louisa Young; Amulet and Feathers © Leila Aboulela; How Things Disappear © Anna James; The Wildflowers © Dorothy Koomson; Heathcliff Is Not My Name © Michael Stewart; Only Joseph © Sophie Hannah

The moral rights of the authors have been asserted

Jacket design by Holly Macdonald © HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2018

Jacket photographs © Sally Mundy/Trevillion Images, © Shutterstock.competals

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

These stories are entirely works of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in them, while at times based on historical events and figures, are the works of the authors’ imaginations.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008257439

Ebook Edition © July 2018 ISBN: 9780008257453

Version: 2018-06-25

For EB, in whose

footsteps we walk

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Foreword by Kate Mosse

Terminus – Louise Doughty

Anima – Grace McCleen

A Bird, Half-Eaten – Nikesh Shukla

Thicker Than Blood – Erin Kelly

One Letter Different – Joanna Cannon

The Howling Girl – Laurie Penny

Five Sites, Five Stages – Lisa McInerney

Kit – Juno Dawson

My Eye Is a Button on Your Dress – Hanan al-Shaykh

The Cord – Alison Case

Heathcliffs I Have Known – Louisa Young

Amulet and Feathers – Leila Aboulela

How Things Disappear – Anna James

The Wildflowers – Dorothy Koomson

Heathcliff Is Not My Name – Michael Stewart

Only Joseph – Sophie Hannah

Footnotes

Notes on the Contributors

A Note on Emily Brontë

About the Publisher

‘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! He’s always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being.’

THERE IS A HANDFUL of books that exist beyond their time and space, beyond the circumstances of their invention: novels that are significant, novels that are beloved. Familiar friends. Their characters step off the pages of the novel and into the real world, into a public conscience to be used ever after as shorthand for a certain sort of person. Archetypes, I suppose. Stories that seem bigger than the books that contain them. Wuthering Heights is such a book. Cathy and Heathcliff are such characters.

Published in 1847, Wuthering Heights is a novel that changes its character and colour with every reading, yet remains uniquely and absolutely itself. It is variously a Gothic novel of obsession and revenge; a story of ghosts and bad dreams; a novel of opposites – light and shade, wild Nature versus taming civilisation, storm versus calm, violence versus tenderness, revenge versus forgiveness, the North versus the South; a novel of race and class, of the powerlessness of women’s and children’s lives; a novel about poverty, property, and wealth; a novel about how the sins of the fathers (and dead or powerless mothers) are visited on the next generation; a story of two houses – Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange – on the Yorkshire Moors; a story of the shifting of time and how the land goes about its business indifferent to human emotions; a novel of order and disorder; of violence and the consequences of violence, of hate and the consequences of hate. Most of all, of course, it is held up as the most epic of love stories. But is it? It is a novel of obsession and all-devouring emotion, certainly, and about the nature and endurance of love, but romance it is not.