Merinder's House

Over 150 years ago, Emily Brontë wrote a novel, an ode to darkness, where she was more at home than in the daily world. No-one has really described it so well since. Our culture confounds dark with evil, but the two are not synonymous, and what Emily Brontë described was a privileged place where the mind wanders and where it is possible to fall either side of the tightrope.

In this place, she put into words what so many have since struggled to understand, the beauty inherent in the contradictions of the human mind when it is at peace with itself, and at odds at the same time, and when it teeters on the edge of a melancholy where human judgement holds no sway. To do so, she gave us a privileged glimpse of an imagination which did not need us, the reader. Emily Brontë told us what she saw whether we were listening or not, and did not write so that we would hear. If she had, she would never have been able to produce the poetry of Wuthering Heights.

She created a wild landscape which is at once a moor in Yorkshire and the eternal depths of a mind which was most at ease with the darker corners where no-one is looking. It is a place not to be trifled with, but neither can it be avoided if we are to encounter life at its best. So many people live their whole lives without ever noticing it, or shutting it out, and are the worse, I think. For this dark place is, for good or ill, our imagination, and it does not come free.

How clear she shines! How quietly
I lie beneath her guardian light;
While heaven and earth are whispering me,
“To-morrow, wake, but dream to-night.”

…While gazing on the stars that glow
Above me, in that stormless sea,
I long to hope that all the woe
Creation knows, is held in thee!

(Emily Brontë/Ellis Bell)

Jane Coutts, who recently wrote Merinder’s House, Scottish literature with a European flavour.