The Kate Bush song Wuthering Heights is a testament to the singer’s feeling for Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel – and its passionate lyrics have already stood the test of time.
But now the much-loved musician has written fresh lines in a poetic tribute to Brontë that will have to endure the wind and rain that lash down on the very section of the Yorkshire moors that the great Victorian author once wandered.
A new poem by Bush has been carved into one of four stones placed across the West Riding, spaced out between the sisters’ birthplace in Thornton and the parsonage in Haworth, where the three writers lived and worked with their brother Branwell and their father, the Rev Patrick Brontë.
Once again, Bush’s words play with the lonely memory of the novel’s lost soul, the wilful Cathy Earnshaw, and with the image of a single window. But this time the tone is more measured and it is the ghostly spirit of Emily Brontë who is also roaming lost on the moor.
Her famous book in hand, the young author is pictured standing, at the poem’s opening:
“Her name is Cathy”, she says
“I have carried her so far, so far
Along the unmarked road
from our graves...
Bush, 58, was commissioned alongside the poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy, the Scottish national poet or makar, Jackie Kay, and the novelist Jeanette Winterson as part of the Bradford literature festival, which closes this weekend.
Duffy has written lines in praise of Charlotte, the eldest surviving Brontë daughter and author of Jane Eyre. Kay has written about Anne, the youngest daughter, who wrote the less well-known novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and Bush was given the chance to write again about her literary heroine Emily, who was born 200 years ago this month. Winterson’s poem marks the Brontë legacy as a whole.
This weekend, Bush said she was delighted to be involved: “To be asked to write a piece for Emily’s stone is an honour and, in a way, a chance to say thank you to her,” she said. “Each sister being remembered by a stone in the enigmatic landscape where they lived and worked is a striking idea. Emily only wrote the one novel – an extraordinary work of art that has truly left its mark.”
The permanent installation of the stone bearing Bush’s new text also marks the 40th anniversary year of the release of her No 1 single, Wuthering Heights, when Bush was only 19. With the famous haunting refrain “It’s me, Cathy, come home”, her lyrics then were an early indicator of Bush’s distinctive use of narrative language in a pop song.
Bush’s stone and its new poem are available to see, set into the landscape from Sunday. Duffy and Winterson’s stones have now also been set into position, but the unveiling of the fourth stone – the one representing Anne – has been postponed until later in the year because of what is described as “the complexity of the installation at the Brontë Parsonage Museum”.
It will eventually stand in the grounds of the parsonage where the writer spent almost all of her life. “The Brontës are part of the literary landscape of this country,” Kay said. “The stones are exciting in that they will make the past new again, opening up along the way new paths for different readers to follow. I particularly loved writing about Anne – she’s the most underrated writer in the family, the pioneer about whom people know the least.”
Visitors who set out in search of the Brontë stones can use hand-drawn maps, created by Yorkshire cartographer Christopher Goddard. The man behind the project is Michael Stewart, who first had the idea for the stones five years ago. “I live in Thornton and have long wanted my village to receive recognition for its place in the Brontë story,” he said this weekend.
“All three sisters and their wayward brother were born here. They were a happy family, but very shortly after their move to Haworth in 1820 tragedy struck. First the death of their mother, then the two oldest siblings. I was aware that Anne Brontë was buried in Scarborough many miles from the rest of her family and I wanted a stone to mark her return.”
The sisters originally wrote under the men’s names of Curra, Ellis and Acton Bell, but their true identities were fairly soon uncovered in literary circles. Winterson, who grew up in Lancashire during the 1970s, said she also walked her surrounding hills “feeling both passionate and misunderstood”. Reading the sisters’ books had shown her that “hearts beat like mine, that the struggle to know who you are happens across time and generations, and gender, and that writing needs the power of the personal behind it – but that somehow the story one person tells has to become a story many people can claim as their own. And the Brontës are women. As a woman I needed those ancestors, those guides. I still do.”
Syima Aslam, director of the Bradford festival, said the Brontës are an integral part of the literary landscape of Bradford: “It’s a matter of great pride for us that the stones will stand in some of the most beautiful places in the county, bearing these moving, mysterious and playful literary works that the public can enjoy for years to come.”
The festival and the stones project have been supported by Provident Financial Group PLC, alongside Bradford Council and the Arts Council of England
The Brontë stones poems
Emily, by Kate Bush
She stands outside
A book in her hands
“Her name is Cathy”, she says
“I have carried her so far, so far
Along the unmarked road from our graves
I cannot reach this window
Open it, I pray.”
But his window is a door to a lonely world
That longs to play.
Ah Emily. Come in, come in and stay.
Anne, by Jackie Kay
These plain dark sober clothes
Are my disguise. No, I was not preparing
For an early death, yours or mine.
You got me all wrong, all the time.
But sisters, I will have the last word,
Write the last line. I am still at sea.
But if I can do some good in this world
I will right the wrong. I am still young.
And the moor’s winds lift my light-dark hair.
I am still here when the sun goes up,
Still here when the moon drops down.
I do not now stand alone.
Charlotte, by Carol Ann Duffy
Walking the parlour, round round round the table,
miles; dead sisters stragglers till ghosts; retired wretch,
runty, pale, plain C.Brontë; mouth skewed, tooth-rot.
You see you have prayed to stone; unheard, thwarted.
But would yank your heart through your frock,
fling it as a hawk over the moors, flaysome.
So the tiny handwriting of your mind as you pace.
So not female not male like the wind’s voice.
The vice of this place clamps you; daughter; father
who will not see thee wed, traipsing your cold circles
between needlework, bed, sleep’s double-lock.
Mother and siblings, vile knot under the flagstones, biding.
But the prose seethes, will not let you be, be thus;
bog-burst of pain, fame, love, unluck. True; enough.
So your still doll-steps in the dollshouse parsonage.
So your writer’s hand the hand of a god rending the roof.
The Brontës, by Jeanette Winterson
Brontesaurus
Fossil record of a miracle
Bone by Bone
Word for Word
Three Women writing the Past into the Future
Line by Line
Listen to the Wildfell of your heart
Do not betray what you love
The earth opens like a book
You are come back to me then?
Brontissimo