Inhabiting Wuthering Heights : Jane Urquhart's Rewriting of Emily Brontë

Abstract

Jane Urquhart's Changing Heaven (1990) is a contemporary novel that interacts significantly with a Victorian novel, Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights. It has recently been fashionable for novelists to make metafictional use of their predecessor's work, and Victorian novels have been particularly popular sources. One thinks of John Fowles's bestseller The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969), which may well have begun the fashion, along with novels like David Lodge's Nice Work (1988), A.S. Byatt's Possession (1990), Valerie Martin's Mary Reilly (1990), and further back Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). I hope that my discussion of Urquhart's novel will suggest reasons for this general trend, and also for the enormous current popularity of Victorian fiction, both in its original form and in television and film adaptations, but my main concern in this essay is with the particular way in which Urquhart responds to and adapts Emily Bronte's novel. I will look at Changing Heaven in the context of the published criticism of Wuthering Heights, for Urquhart's novel shares many of the preoccupations of the critics, and it can valuably be