Fifteen Wild Decembers by Karen Powell - Review

I kept hearing about this book - which is a telling of the life of Emily Bronte - last year and the year before, and bought it when I had a voucher some time last year. Then I kept it for December, feeling it would be an atmospheric read in the colder months. And I was right, it was. It also made me really want to go to Haworth again. It's where the Brontes lived and worked, and where Emily died and is buried. Charlotte and Branwell are buried there too, but Anne is in Scarborough. I saw her grave there about ten years ago. I have been to Haworth, of course, and gone round the parsonage where the family lived, but not for ages. So Lee and I decided to go to Haworth for new year, and we had a lovely time. I was really glad to have read this so close to our trip. We also drove up Penistone Hill to look at the moors where Emily loved to walk and which she used in Wuthering Heights. As I'm disabled it would be difficult for me to walk all the way to Top Withens - which Emily used as the base for where Heathcliff lived - but I did enjoy standing on the moors on New Year's Eve letting the cobwebs blow away. 

I already know quite a lot about Emily's life, having read a biography about her fairly recently and really, having grown up in Yorkshire and having visited the parsonage before, but I really did like this retelling. I liked the focus on her very early life and her first experiences of school. Her elder sisters Maria and Elizabeth were ill and so they and Emily and Charlotte were pulled out and taken home, where the elder girls died. I liked the imagining of Emily at this time, and later, as a young woman, when she was in Brussels with Charlotte. These were parts of her life which may actually be lacking in real detail, but which the author here has imagined beautifully. 

There isn't a lot of detail about Emily's writing, especially until later in the book, but I didn't mind this. I also thought that the lack of detail about Branwell was a good thing. He was a bit of a wrong un and ended up addicted to laudunum or something and was often drunk in the town's pubs and had to be brought home. He died just before Emily did. Dramatisations of the Brontes' lives often focus on Branwell and what his sisters had to sacrifice for him, but this didn't, which I was glad for. Emily is dutiful and cares for her brother and their father, especially when her sisters are away, but there's not much sympathy for Branwell. There is a lot of Charlotte's ranting about how he gets everything handed to him because he's a man and how she and her sisters have to fight so hard, which I did appreciate.

I also think there are hints of Emily being depressed. At times she can't write at all and that distresses her. She finds solace in her dog and in walking across the moors. When she writes, she is all consumed with it. I really liked this version of Emily (who is the best Bronte, for real). 

Obviously I know that Emily died aged just 30, and I wondered how the book would deal with that. I absolutely loved the end and thought it was perfect. I am giving this four out of five.