Heathcliff is half of one of the
most famous couples in nineteenth-century literature, yet he’s absent for a
significant portion of Emily Bronte’s 1847 Wuthering
Heights, a novel that’s inspired a myriad adaptations and retellings. What
happened to Heathcliff to transform him from a brutish orphan into a
calculating villain? Where did he come by the wealth that catapults him to a
higher social position from which he could wreak his revenge?
Michael Stewart takes on these
questions and more in his 2018 novel Ill
Will, subtitled ‘The Untold Story of Heathcliff’. The result is a novel
that’s, crucially, true to the spirit of Wuthering
Heights, as it fills in the gaps in the original narrative. The coarseness
of Emily Bronte’s characters, the violence of their actions and the immediacy
of her language set her apart from her peers. Michael Stewart’s novel would
have been unwritable in the 1840s and still shocks today, with graphic depictions
of assault and murder and curse words that may put some readers off, especially
in the mouth of the key supporting character—a prepubescent girl.
Stewart’s Heathcliff sets off on foot
from Wuthering Heights to Manchester and then Liverpool, in search of his
origins (and enough food, money and shelter to survive). But the journey is
fraught with dangers—highwaymen, unrest among the labouring classes, the dark
anger towards Cathy, Hindley and Linton that he feels inside.
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| Michael Stewart |
Michael Stewart literally walked
the walk in doing his research (recreating Heathcliff and Mr Earnshaw’s
pilgrimage) and it shows. He renders the Northern English landscapes, urban and
pastoral, in bleak and exquisite detail, sometimes losing himself a little too
much in his catalogue of British birds and horticulture (there’s only so many
times you can read the word ‘peewit’ in succession!).
The plot will also delight
students and scholars of the Victorian period. Years of debate—about
Heathcliff’s race, for instance, and the quasi-incestuous nature of his
relationship with Cathy—are explored. In fact John Sutherland’s wonderful
essay, ‘Is Heathcliff a murderer?’, was the catalyst for the novel’s creation.
Less successful, perhaps, are the
passages where the genre borders on mystery, with Heathcliff and his youthful
companion, aptly named Emily, interviewing a series of unsavoury characters to
work out our anti-hero’s lineage. While sly nods to the Bronte siblings’ real
lives in the names of places and people are a clever touch, the conceit feels a
little too early twentieth-century detective fiction. The novel recovers once
we’re back to bloody fights and living in the wild.
Ill Will is a Gothic
tale conceived in the twenty-first century, set in the eighteenth and based on
a nineteenth-century masterpiece. If you’re looking for the Heathcliff of
costume dramas, or like your historical fiction to be decorous and well
mannered, you may be disappointed. But something tells me Emily Bronte herself
would have approved.
Which novel would you like to see
the Secret Victorianist read next as part of the Neo-Victorian Voices series?
Let me know—here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.
