The Man in the Stone Cottage

The cogent latest from Cowell (The Boy in the Rain) offers a window into the lives of Charlotte, Anne, and Emily Brontë, and speculates on what might have inspired Emily to write Wuthering Heights. In 1831, when Emily is 12, her wanderings away from her Yorkshire home bring her to an abandoned stone cottage, where she spends hours making up stories. By the time she’s a young woman in 1844, she’s long forgotten about the cottage—until she feels “the moor calling to her.” Out on a walk, she finds the cottage inhabited by an attractive stranger, Jonathan MacConnell, who has a taste for poetry. Their relationship blossoms over her continued visits to the cottage in the following years, as Emily and her sisters become popular novelists under male pseudonyms. Mysteriously, though, Jonathan is absent each time she attempts to introduce her sisters to him. Still, Emily is ecstatic to hear his praise of Wuthering Heights. In lyrical prose, Cowell conveys the women’s pressing desire to achieve their artistic visions: “Our world opened and closed like a blowing window curtain and, for a moment, revealed the other worlds beyond them, too quickly closed to put your hand out and touch them.” This stands out in the crowded field of novels devoted to the Brontës. (Sept.)