P.S. Inside Emily Brontë's Writing Desk

"Wuthering Heights was hewn in a wild workshop, with simple tools, out of homely materials."

I saw Emerald Fennell’s new adaptation of Wuthering Heights with ambivalence. The first (shocking) scene establishes that we aren’t really watching Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. This helped me enjoy the film for what it is: fan fiction—it’s what many might wish the story had been.

The biggest difference, to my mind, lies in how the film tamed Heathcliff’s character. Jacob Elordi’s performance elicits little of Heathcliff’s unhinged cruelty, opting instead for a more soulful romanticism.

For example: Elordi’s Heathcliff doesn’t dig up Cathy’s grave—one of the book’s more astonishing scenes. Nor does he punish and torment the next generation of Earnshaws, Lintons, and Heathcliffs (all of whom are cut from the film).

In the original, Heathcliff was so evil that Charlotte Brontë (Emily’s sister) wondered: Is it right to create a character as morally repellent as Heathcliff?¹

While Charlotte doesn’t offer a definitive answer, she suggests that a creative person doesn’t always exercise full control over her gifts. So it was with her sister, Emily Brontë.

Charlotte writes,

Wuthering Heights was hewn in a wild workshop, with simple tools, out of homely materials.²

The novel Wuthering Heights’s power comes from its roughness. The “homely materials” Charlotte references are the novel’s simple language and elemental passions.

This led me to wonder about the other materials Emily used to write her novel, especially because so much about her process is lost to time—not least being her drafts of Wuthering Heights.

What we do have, instead, is her writing desk, and the scrappy remnants of her authorial life stored within it.

Writing was a fragmentary process for Emily and her siblings. They often composed their works on slips of paper, filled to the roughly torn edges. And this writing often happened on top of their writing boxes—small, portable desks that also stored papers.

A writing box at the Brontë parsonage

So let’s explore the contents of Emily’s writing box and the scraps of paper stored within it—her diary, contemporary reviews of Wuthering Heights, and poetry drafts.

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