Word: bronts
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...Auchincloss resorts to literary reference: Fred Stiles, a colleague of Jamey's, "thought of himself as the hero of a Balzac novel"; Amy complains to her husband, "You're treating me like Nora in A Doll's House"; in a more charitable mood, she broods, "The Brontë governess had found her Rochester...
...Return to Wuthering Heights, Anna L'Estrange (pen name of Author Rosemary Ellerbeck) sticks closely to the original Brontë formula. Lockwood's son Tom inherits his father's manuscript and becomes intrigued by the story of Heathcliff and Catherine. He returns to the vicinity of Wuthering Heights to learn what happened to the survivors after Heathcliff's death 38 years earlier. He meets Nelly Dean's great-niece Agnes, who has served virtually all the Earnshaw and Heathcliff descendants since. She has plenty to tell...
Rather than picking up after Brontë's novel, Heathcliff begins and ends during it. Novelist Jeffrey Caine attempts to show where Heathcliff was during the roughly three years he was absent from Wuthering Heights. L'Estrange suggests in passing that he was in Liverpool, working on the docks. Caine insists that he went to London and made a fortune in the underworld...
That sounds a lot like the Heathcliff that generations of readers have loved. Even those unfamiliar with Wuthering Heights can enjoy Heathcliff's crackling prose and rapid pacing. Inevitably, though, the information that Caine contrives detracts something from the legend that Brontë invented. Heathcliff was not meant to dally, however rudely, with Lon don ladies. Heathcliff also suggests that its hero is more pussycat than tiger. For all his violent talk ("I kicked him in the mouth, rattling his teeth nicely, like dice in a cup"), Heathcliff kills no one. His one violent act, cutting off the hand...
...that both writers hint of further tributes to come. Pinnacle does more than hint; it promises "additional volumes chronicling the lives and loves of the descendants of Heathcliff and Catherine." The prospect of some nine generations of Heathcliffs yet to come is horrifying, and not in a way Emily Brontë would admire. A Heathcliff in the factory, another in the trenches, yet another on the dole and, finally, a Heathcliff as the lead singer in a group of punk rockers: it will be too much. Heathcliff should remain in the state Bronte left him, buried under the moor while...