Reimagined story reaches great heights

NELLY DEAN<br><b>Alison Case</b><br><i>HarperCollins</i>
NELLY DEAN<br><b>Alison Case</b><br><i>HarperCollins</i>
I approached Nelly Dean, United States author Alison Case's reimagining of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights - one of my all-time favourite books - with trepidation.

There has been no shortage of literary, screen, stage and musical adaptations of it and other classic novels, but only a few have come close to the literary merit of the originals.

(Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea, her response to Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, is one of the notable exceptions.)

Case has succeeded where many have failed.

She has written a story that honours and enhances the original, faithfully noting the events, characters and setting of the primary source, yet is a compelling, imaginative work in its own right.

Case knows her subject well - she is an English professor with an interest in 19th-century British fiction - and her attention to detail is evident.

Everything is spot-on (characters, language, customs, superstitions and setting), and she writes in prose as powerful, persuasive and passionate as Bronte's.

As in Wuthering Heights, the pragmatic Nelly, the former's narrator, is the constant calm in the storm amid the tempestuous relationships of several generations of Earnshaws and Lintons.

Unlike the original, however, Heathcliff and Cathy are relegated to the background, and Nelly takes centre stage.

This is ''herstory'' in every sense, told this time to Heathcliff's tenant Mr Lockwood through a long letter.

Nelly comes into the Earnshaw household through her mother, nurse to the eldest child, Hindley, and is brought up alongside him, Cathy and then Heathcliff, more as a playmate than servant.

She becomes housekeeper, teacher, nurse and confidante, but Case has imagined a new story for Nelly, complete with several new characters who take their place seamlessly in the narrative.

Her background echoes some unanswered questions of the original novel; and her life, relationships and their repercussions are every bit as harrowing as it.

To give too many details about the plot would simply spoil this book for readers; suffice to say there is a fascinating mix of the familiar and the foreign which should appeal to fans and newcomers alike.

It made me immediately reread the original, and I felt both were richer for Case's contribution.

The passion, cruelty and torment are there in spades, but so too is the glimmer of light over those bleak Yorkshire moors, which echoes the ''happier'' ending of the original.

Emily Bronte would surely have approved.

• Helen Speirs is ODT books editor.

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