Exploring Literary Voices in The Lost Child

Abstract

In The Lost Child (2015) Phillips weaves an intricate web of multiple stories that move in time from post-war Britain to the nineteenth-century Yorkshire setting of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, which is here imaginatively reworked. In this novel, it is also possible to trace the influence of the Caribbean writer Jean Rhys and references to aspects of Phillips’s autobiography. This article discusses intertextuality in the novel and argues that literary refractions and the ensuing polyphony contribute to Phillips’s ongoing project of critically engaging with the English cultural and literary heritage.