This post was originally published at Novelicious.com and is now at WritingTipsOasis.com. WritingTipsOasis.com acquired Novelicious.com in June 2022.
Tara Moore is the author of glamarous bonkbuster RSVP. Her second novel, Blue Eyed Girl, is described as 'a powerful, compelling family drama telling the story of a family torn apart by secrets', and is out on the 28 of March. The book that changed Tara's life was Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. She tells Novelicious why she believes it is the greatest love story ever told.
All books affect us in some way, I believe, if only in a cursory way; the eliciting of a smile, a frown, a tear or a laugh. Then, they are all but forgotten. Occasionally, though, comes a book which penetrates on a deeper level, a primeval level, almost, that calls out to our very souls and, for me, that book is Wuthering Heights.
I first read it when I was only eleven years old and sick in bed with the measles. It was my mother's book, a heavy, burgundy, cloth-bound tome, embossed with gold lettering. The pages were tissue-paper flimsy, the font dark and difficult to read, even for those with perfect eyesight. But, oh, the joys that awaited me between those covers, the passions that swept me from my sick bed out onto the wind-blasted Yorkshire moors, to walk in the guise of Cathy, alongside the tortured soul that was Heathcliff.
I was Cathy, wild, tempestuous, beautiful, all flowing hair and laughing, wicked eyes. I skipped and ran, nimble as a sprite over the lichen-covered rocks, Heathcliff in pursuit. High on life and love, I laughed into the wind, free as any bird, except for my soul. That was fettered. Forever, in Heathcliff's keeping. I, it was, who cried 'let me in,' at his window, clawing at the jagged windowpane with dead, bleeding hands, keeping him from his rest. I, it was, who drove him to feverish insanity, who chained his heart, locked it against all others, as surely as he had imprisoned mine.
Wuthering Heights, to my mind, is the greatest love story ever told. Emily Bronte's writing is unforgettably lyrical, passionate and so accomplished, authors, like me, can only sigh with envy and admiration, and content ourselves with a mere fraction of her talent.
I have been to the Haworth to pay homage to this quiet Parson's daughter. I have tramped across the bleak Yorkshire moors, eyes stinging in gale-force winds, conjuring up my own particular visions of Cathy and Heathcliff. I have lingered in the parsonage churchyard, in the curious yellow light reflecting off the gravestones, listening to the incessant, weary cawing of the rooks in the winter-bare trees. A lesser person might have gone mad in such surroundings, watching, day after day, the procession of coffins passing by her window, many of the dead victims of the TB that was rife in the 1800s. Instead, Emily Bronte, that unassuming parson's daughter, created a work of pure genius which enchanted, and which continues to enchant, millions of people all around the world.
Standing in the room where, in 1848, she took her last breath, more than a hundred years before I was born, my eyes filled with tears both of sorrow and of gratitude; sorrow that she too, aged only thirty, had succumbed to tuberculosis; gratitude for the masterpiece she left behind.
No film can ever do justice to Emily Bronte's words. Read the book!