‘You did the right thing. Telling the police is the only thing to do. So what’s the unthinkable?’
I swallow hard and, with a shudder, force myself to utter the word: ‘Home-schooling.’ Rich recoils.
It’s horrible, but it’s the only path I’m willing to consider now. I can’t send Kitty to a school. I don’t trust schools. I’m school-phobic, school-averse. I’m a school-denier. Schools ruin lives and they kill. What was the name of the school where the oldest two Brontë sisters died of cholera or scurvy or whatever it was?
We can join a home-schooling collective so that Kitty meets other kids her age. I’ll stage productions of Showboat and Oklahoma! in my lounge if I have to. I’m never setting foot in one of those toxic, evil places ever again, and neither is Kitty.
Footnotes
Anima – Grace McCleen
1 Cathy’s words: ‘… if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger’.
My Eye Is a Button on Your Dress – Hanan al-Shaykh
1 A reference to the poem by Tunisian poet Abu’l Qasim al-Shabbi (1909–1934): ‘If the people one day demand life, then destiny will surely respond’. This poem was used and repeated in various forms in the Arab uprisings beginning in 2010.
NOTES ON THE CONTRIBUTORS
Louise Doughty is the author of eight novels, one work of non-fiction, and five plays for radio. Her latest book, Black Water, is out now from Faber & Faber UK and Farrar Straus & Giroux in the US, where it was nominated as one of the New York Times Book Review Notable Books of 2016. Her seventh novel was the number-one bestseller Apple Tree Yard. Shortlisted for the CWA Steel Dagger Award and the National Book Award Thriller of the Year, it has sold half a million copies in the UK alone to date and been translated into thirty languages worldwide. A four-part TV adaptation with Emily Watson in the lead role was broadcast on Sunday nights on BBC1. Doughty’s sixth novel, Whatever You Love, was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award and longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. She has also won awards for radio drama and short stories, along with publishing one work of non-fiction, A Novel in a Year, based on her popular newspaper column. She is a critic and cultural commentator for UK and international newspapers, and broadcasts regularly for the BBC, and has been the judge for many prizes and awards including the Man Booker Prize and the Costa Novel Award. She lives in London.
Nikesh Shukla is a columnist for the Observer and the author of three novels, Coconut Unlimited (shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award 2010), Meatspace, and The One Who Wrote Destiny. Nikesh has written for the Guardian, Esquire, BuzzFeed, VICE, Noisey, Channel 4, BBC2, Lit Hub, Guernica, and BBC Radio 4. Nikesh is the editor of the bestselling essay collection, The Good Immigrant, which won the readers’ choice at the Books Are My Bag Awards. Nikesh was one of Foreign Policy magazine’s 100 Global Thinkers, and the Bookseller’s 100 most influential people in publishing in 2016 and 2017.
Hanan al-Shaykh is one of the most acclaimed writers in the contemporary Arab world. She is the author of seven novels, including The Story of Zahra, Women of Sand & Myrrh, Beirut Blues, Only in London, as well as a collection of stories, I Sweep the Sun off Rooftops, and her much praised memoir of her mother’s life: The Locust and the Bird. She has written two plays, Dark Afternoon Tea and Paper Husband, and published One Thousand and One Nights, an adaptation of some of the stories from the legendary Alf Layla Wa Layla – the Arabian Nights. Her new novel, The Occasional Virgin, will be published by Bloomsbury in June 2018. Her work has been translated into twenty-eight languages. She lives in London.
Louisa Young was born in London, and read history at Trinity College, Cambridge. She lives in London with her daughter, with whom she co-wrote the bestselling Lionboy trilogy. Her work is published in 36 languages and she is the author of fourteen previous books, including her first novel, Babylove (longlisted for the Orange Prize) and the bestselling My Dear I Wanted to Tell You (shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award and a Richard and Judy Book Club choice). Her latest work, a memoir, You Left Early: A True Story of Love and Alcohol, is out now. Her first novel, Baby Love was longlisted for the Orange Prize. Her work is published in 36 languages.
Leila Aboulela was the first winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing. She is the author of four novels, The Kindness of Enemies, The Translator, a New York Times 100 Notable Books of the Year, Minaret, and Lyrics Alley, Fiction Winner of the Scottish Book Awards. Her work has been translated into fifteen languages, and she was long-listed three times for the Orange Prize. A collection of her short stories, Elsewhere, Home, is forthcoming in summer 2018. Leila grew up in Sudan and moved, in her mid-twenties, to Scotland. www.leila-aboulela.com
Anna James is a freelance journalist and writer who lives in north London. Her debut children’s book, Pages & Co. will be published by HarperCollins Children’s in October 2018.
Michael Stewart is a multi-award-winning writer, born and brought up in Salford, who moved to Yorkshire in 1995 and is now based in Bradford. He has written several full-length stage plays, one of which, Karry Owky, was joint winner of the King’s Cross Award for New Writing. His debut novel, King Crow, was published in January 2011. It is the winner of the Guardian’s Not-the-Booker Award, and has been selected as a recommended read for World Book Night. Michael works as a senior lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Huddersfield, where he is the publisher of Grist Books. His latest novel, Ill Will, will be published by HQ in November 2018.
Juno Dawson is the author of seven novels for young adults as well as the non-fiction titles This Book is Gay, and The Gender Games. She is also a regular contributor to Stylist, Glamour, The Pool, and Attitude Magazine.
Grace McCleen’s first novel, The Land of Decoration, was published in 2012 and was awarded the Desmond Elliott Prize for the best first novel of the year. It was also chosen for Richard & Judy’s Book Club and won her the Betty Trask Prize in 2013. Her second novel, The Professor of Poetry, was shortlisted for the Encore Award and her latest, The Offering, was published by Sceptre in 2015. She read English at the University of Oxford and has an MA from York, and currently lives in London.
Erin Kelly is the author of six novels including The Poison Tree, He Said/She Said and Broadchurch: The Novel, inspired by the mega-hit TV series. In 2013, The Poison Tree became a major ITV drama and was a Richard & Judy Summer Read in 2011. Born in London in 1976, Erin lives in north London with her husband and daughters.
Joanna Cannon graduated from Leicester Medical School and worked as a hospital doctor, before specialising in psychiatry. Her most recent novel Three Things About Elsie was published in 2018 and was a top-ten hardback bestseller and her first novel The Trouble with Goats and Sheep was a top-ten bestseller in both hardback and paperback and was a Richard and Judy pick. She lives in the Peak District with her family and her dog.
Laurie Penny is a writer and journalist. She writes for Vice, the Guardian and many other publications, and is a columnist and Contributing Editor at the New Statesman magazine. She was the youngest person to be shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for political writing on her blog ‘Penny Red’. She has reported on radical politics, protest, digital culture and feminism from around the world, working with activists from the Occupy movement and the European youth uprisings. She has 160,000 followers on Twitter and in 2012 won the British Media Awards’ ‘Twitter Public Personality of the Year’ prize. Laurie is a nerd, a nomad and an activist. She is thirty years old and lives in London.
Lisa McInerney’s work has featured in Winter Papers, Stinging Fly, Granta and on BBC Radio 4, and in the anthologies Beyond the Centre, The Long Gaze Back and Town and Country. Her debut novel, The Glorious Heresies, won the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction 2016 and the Desmond Elliott Prize. Her second novel, The Blood Miracles, was published by John Murray in April 2017.
Alison Case received her BA from Oberlin College and her PhD in English Literature from Cornell University. A Professor of English
at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, she has published two books and many articles on nineteenth-century British fiction and poetry. Her debut novel Nelly Dean was published in 2015 by The Borough Press.
Dorothy Koomson has been making up stories since she was thirteen and hasn’t stopped since. She is the award-winning author of fourteen novels including The Brighton Mermaid, The Friend, When I Was Invisible, The Chocolate Run, My Best Friend’s Girl and The Woman He Loved Before. Dorothy’s books have been translated into more than 30 languages and have regularly topped the charts across the globe. In 2013 a TV series based on Dorothy’s The Ice Cream Girls was shown on ITV1 and her Quick Read book, The Beach Wedding was one of the 2018 World Book Night giveaway titles.
Sophie Hannah is an internationally bestselling crime fiction writer. Her crime novels have been translated into 34 languages and published in 51 countries. Her psychological thriller The Carrier won the Specsavers National Book Award for Crime Thriller of the Year in 2013. In 2014 and 2016, Sophie published The Monogram Murders and Closed Casket, the first new Hercule Poirot mysteries since Agatha Christie’s death, both of which were national and international bestsellers. Sophie is an Honorary Fellow of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge.
A NOTE ON EMILY BRONTË
EMILY JANE BRONTË, AUTHOR of Wuthering Heights, was born on 30 July 1818, the fifth of six children of the reverend Patrick Brontë and his wife Maria. She was born at Thornton, near Bradford, in West Yorkshire. In 1820 Patrick Brontë was appointed perpetual curate of Haworth church, five miles away. The bleak parsonage at Haworth, and the windswept moorland surrounding it, became central to Emily’s creative life, and had a profound influence on her writing.
Emily and her sisters were taught the essential female skills of needlework and household management by their Aunt Branwell, who made her home with the family following the death of Mrs Brontë in 1821, when Emily was just three years of age. The children studied the Bible, as well as history and geography, with their father. In 1824 Emily joined her elder sisters at the Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan Bridge, near Kirkby Lonsdale. Conditions at the school were harsh, and later provided Charlotte with a model for the infamous Lowood School in her novel Jane Eyre. This first experience of leaving home ended tragically with the deaths of the two eldest girls, Maria and Elizabeth, who died within a few weeks of each other in 1825, aged just eleven and ten years. Charlotte and Emily were withdrawn from the school and spent the next few years at home, together with their youngest sister Anne, and brother Branwell, resuming lessons with their father and aunt. Patrick Brontë instilled a love of learning in all his children, and they read anything they could lay hands on, delighting in the novels of Sir Walter Scott and the poetry of Lord Byron.
Outside lesson time the children created a rich imaginary world sparked by their father’s gift to Branwell of a set of toy soldiers. Each of the soldiers was given a name and a character by the children, and an increasingly complex sequence of stories and plays developed around them. Whilst Charlotte and Branwell joined forces to create the kingdom of Angria, Emily and Anne went on to form Gondal, an imaginary island in the North Pacific, with a cold climate and bleak moorland landscape reminiscent of Haworth. The central characters were as wild as any of the inhabitants of Wuthering Heights, and the Gondal saga continued to absorb Emily into adulthood.
In 1835 Emily was sent away for a second stint at boarding school, this time to Roe Head, near Mirfield, a much more genteel affair than Cowan Bridge, where her sister Charlotte was employed as a teacher. At seventeen, Emily was older than the other pupils; she did not make friends and failed to adapt to school life. Her health declined, and within three months Emily was back at Haworth. She had established her right to remain at home, and, with only two exceptions, never left it again.
In 1838, despite her lack of formal education, she obtained a teaching post at Miss Patchett’s school at Law Hill, near Halifax. Emily survived the uncongenial employment for just six months before heading back to Haworth. Shortly after, the sisters’ decision to set up a school of their own at the parsonage provided Charlotte with the impetus to improve her language skills by spending time studying at a school on the continent. It seems surprising that she suggested Emily should accompany her, and more surprising still that Emily agreed to go.
The sisters’ stay at the Pensionnat Heger in Brussels, funded by their Aunt Branwell, was cut short after nine months by news of their aunt’s illness and death. While Charlotte returned to Brussels for another year, Emily remained at the parsonage as housekeeper. She threw herself into the old routine of household tasks combined with writing, and wasn’t overly disappointed when the school project came to nothing.
One day in 1845 Charlotte discovered a collection of Emily’s poems and was awestruck by their quality. She hatched a plan to publish a selection of poems by all three sisters, and, although Emily was initially furious at the invasion of her privacy, she was eventually persuaded that the poems should be published. Branwell was not included in the project, despite the fact that several of his poems had already been published in local newspapers. After a series of disappointments and ill-fated career attempts, his early promise had been blighted by alcoholism. It’s unclear whether he even knew about his sisters’ publications, which all appeared under the androgynous-sounding pseudonyms, Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. The book of poems was published in 1846, but despite some favourable reviews, the small volume sold only two copies. ‘Ill success failed to crush us,’ Charlotte later wrote, adding that ‘the mere effort to succeed had given a wonderful zest to existence: it must be pursued.’ The sisters set to work again, and three prose tales by the Bells were soon winging their way to the first on a long list of publishing houses.
Emily’s Wuthering Heights was published in December 1847. Branwell died the following year, and it is said that his funeral was the last occasion on which Emily left the parsonage. She died on 19 December 1848, at the age of thirty, from tuberculosis. It soon became clear that Anne was also ill; she died from tuberculosis in the following year, aged twenty-nine years. Charlotte lived on at the parsonage with her elderly father, and published a total of three novels in her lifetime (a fourth was published posthumously). In 1854 she married her father’s curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls, but died nine months later in the early stages of pregnancy. For the remainder of the nineteenth century, Charlotte was regarded as the famous Brontë. Although the originality of Wuthering Heights was acknowledged, the novel repelled many of its early readers, and Emily Brontë never lived to see the huge impact her writing would have.
Ann Dinsdale
Principal Curator, Brontë Parsonage Museum
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