What Everyone Gets Wrong About Catherine Earnshaw

A few years ago a sparrowhawk seized a small bird in my parent’s back garden.

“Let nature take its course,” we agreed with each other, wisely. “We’re not RSPCA sentimentalists. We’re country dwellers and we know about things like ecology.”

Then we sat frozen around the dining room table avoiding each other’s eyes as the tiny song bird’s agonised squeaks went on for a long time.

An unbearably long time. I can still hear them now. Not nice.

It might seem unrelated, but I thought about this distressing incident as social media blew up in response to Emerald Fennell’s film adaptation of Emily Bronte’s novel Wuthering Heights. Many commentators have scrutinised the original text for clues about Heathcliffe’s likely ethnicity — whether he’s been ‘white-washed’ (which, of course, he has). But no-one much is opinining about Margot Robbie’s blonde and blue-eyed heroine — except to say, quite reasonably, that she’s too old to be the impetuous teenager Bronte wrote.

I’ve always puzzled about why, amidst a sea of stout Yorkshire lasses like Heathcliffe’s housemaid Zillah, the text makes it clear that Catherine Earnshaw is dark-haired and dark-eyed. Heathcliffe’s vaguely delineated ‘gipsy’ aspect indicates that he is a foreigner and a heathen. Yet no-one questions Cathy’s family origin or suggests that she might in any way be alien to the South Pennines landscape. And understanding why this might be so adds yet another layer of interest to an already complex, and deeply layered, novel.

I’ll start with a topographical description of Yorkshire. The region is on the eastern side of the country with a long coastline facing Europe. A network of powerful rivers flowing eastward into the Humber Estuary gives easy access to the interior. And much of the county, contrary to myths which the Bronte sisters themselves were instrumental in fashioning, is flat and fertile Grade A agricultural land.

As a result, the English region of Yorkshire has been conquered many times. First by the Romans, and then successively by the Anglo-Saxons, the Vikings and the Normans. This contrasts with the nations of Scotland, Wales and Ireland (both the bits) along with the regional anomolies of Cornwall (south west England), Brittany (France) and Galicia (Spain). In these places the Celtic peoples and cultures remain to varying extents.

But Haworth, where the Bronte sisters lived, is in the Pennines. This is not a vast range of mountains — the highest peak, Cross Fell to the north, reaches a modest 2,930 feet. But this still matters from an invader’s perspective. As the terrain rises, the land becomes less conquerable and less worth conquering. Most of what was to become England fell to the Anglo-Saxons in the early fifth century. But the ancient British kingdom of Elmet in West Yorkshire, speaking a language similar to Welsh, Cornish and Breton, held out against the proto-English for two more centuries.

Elmet was, during this period, a unique and mysterious stronghold of Celtic culture surrounded by Germanic tribes. The area that was to become Haworth was on the badland Western fringes of Elmet proper. The high Pennines were too wild and remote to be ruled by anybody; but the sparse population that did exist there would have been Ancient Britains in language and custom.

Haworth is an Anglo-Saxon place name. When the neighbouring Kingdom of Northumbria got its act together in the 660s the region was settled by people from Germanic Deira in what is now the East Riding. Over centuries they made their mark culturally to the extent that only a handful of obviously Celtic place names survive. The best known of these is the mountain of Pen-y-Ghent but there are also multiple versions and variations on the word Eccles (‘church’), a lingering reminder that the Ancient Britains were Christian.

And that’s a key point. Julius Caesar left us lurid tales of pagans and druids. But by the time the Romans left in the fifth century the Celts had Christianised. The first Christian Emperor, Constantine, was was proclaimed by his army in York, which must have made a big impression on the locals.

Still, the name ‘Earnshaw’ is Anglo-Saxon in origin. It derives from the Old English words earn (“eagle”) and sceaga (small wood or copse). So the earliest Earnshaws — and it’s a real name, there are Earnshaws in the phone book — would have been people who lived in a wooded area frequented by eagles.

These ornithological details are important, as anyone who has visited the Bronte Parsonage in Haworth understands. Eagles — both the white-tailed and golden varieties — were once common across the United Kingdom. But by 1845 when Emily was writing her novel, they were on their very last legs — hunted and poisoned to extinction by gamekeepers. It is likely none were left in the Pennines by then.

But the Rev Bronte was a keen bird watcher. He owned a copy of Bewick’s seminal "‘A History of British Birds’ a field guide for non-specialists which first appeared in 1797. As a young curate in his 30s, striding across the moors, he was one of the last people in England to witness the great birds flying wild.

So if Emily understood the etymology of the name Earnshaw — and it seems likely she did, as she picked Linton (flax town) for the golden-haired occupants of Thrushcross Grange — then she would have associated it, and the Earnshaw family, with the highest, most remote and untamed lands.

Which leads me to the question — were the Earnshaw family, scratching a living on the high moors, inspired by folk memories of an ancient Welsh population clinging on in the Pennines with their separate language, religion and customs?

Surprisingly, my tenuous speculation has been given added weight by modern DNA studies. The People of the British Isles (PoBI) project led by the University of Oxford has identified a distinct genetic cluster in West Yorkshire that closely corresponds to the boundaries of Elmet. This local population, genetically distinct from the rest of Yorkshire, has shown remarkable stability over time. The study found the people of West Yorkshire were more similar to people in Cumbria and North Wales than they were to their immediate neighbours to the East. And unlike in the rest of Yorkshire, Viking DNA is notably absent.

So much for Mrs Gaskell’s speculation that the rough manners of the Brontes’ neighbours were due to their Viking heritage. Not in Elmet.

The PoBI study is powerful because it screened out recent arrivals, testing only those with deep local roots. And what it shows is that this ancient genetic divide WITHIN YORKSHIRE is one of the sharpest in England. It was never absolute but in Emily Bronte’s time the visual distinction between her dark Brythonic upland neighbours and the golden-haired people of the plains was perhaps a little more evident.

The Bronte Parsonage, one of the best houses in the village, is situated at the top of the steeply sloping lane that constitutes Haworth’s main thoroughfare. What strikes visitors is its liminal position. The back of the property gives you direct access to the moors and Emily escaped there often. Civilisation, meanwhile, arrived by the front door. This duality haunts the book, the unthinking savagery of the wild world where eagles once ripped their living prey apart, making a mockery of Christian ethics.

The Brontes were writing at a time when just about everything was being called into question. Wuthering Heights, as film-maker Luis Bunuel and his Surrealist friends so acutely observed, contains much that is downright blasphemous. The book is an argument between good and evil in which neither side emerges particularly well. Like the writings of the lunatic de Sade, its skilful attack on virtue forces us to be more intelligent in our defence of it.

So is it a story of opposition between the pagan uplands (Wuthering Heights) and the Christian valleys (Thrushcross Grange)? Well, not quite. Because the surviving Ancient Britons had their own brand of very early Christianity. And the new arrivals were pagans. One little known feature of Church history is that the British Isles had to be Christianised not once but several times, as each new set of heathen invaders arrived. Ultimately there had to be a synod, the Synod of Whitby 664AD, where the two competing branches of Christianity in the region, Celtic and Roman Catholic, decided the date of Easter in the Kingdom of Northumbria.

Initially the Romano-Brits, the Christian inheritors of a literate pan-European outlook, looked down on their self-sufficient Germanic neighbours. But even in remote Welsh Wales Celtic church traditions had been absorbed into the prevailing Roman Catholicism by the 12th century. What survived in Elmet? Maybe, for a few centuries, remote farmsteads living in haughty isolation, where a handful of individuals all had suspiciously identical hair and eyes.

“I see the house at Wuthering Heights has ‘Earnshaw’ carved over the front door” [observes Lockwood]. “Are they an old family?”

“Very old, sir, and Harewood is the last of them,” [replies Mrs Dean].

Over time, by refusing to marry outside the clan, some families might have found themselves dangerously degraded and inbred. Are the Earnshaw family’s impulsive actions and hair-trigger tempers perhaps the result of cognitive impairment? Did the Rev Bronte share stories over the dinner table about his early life as an Anglican curate, setting out over the wild moorland to give sacrament to half-crazed beings of an alien, and deeply superstitious, religious fervour? Or did he merely pass on the stories of older priests? Oral tradition has a very long shelf-life.

This is literature. One is allowed to speculate. But the stubborn genetic survival of the forgotten Kingdom of Elmet offers a convincing answer to a question that has always puzzled me: Why didn’t Emily Bronte present Cathy Earnshaw as your classic, sturdy Yorkshire blonde? I see these flaxen-haired Rhine maidens around and about in the Lower Derwent Valley where I live quite often. Their ‘blonde’ is mostly chemical highlights but they’re definitely on the fair side.

I think Cathy Earnshaw, with her quicksilver personality and dark hair and eyes, is an Ancient Briton. Her ancestors arrived as the Ice Age receded, and they’re still here genetically in the living, breathing West Yorkshire population. Just as ‘Heath’ + ‘Cliff’ is the human personification of a destructive gale howling across the moors, I see her looks as Emily Bronte’s embodiment of the land itself. Her lineage is as ancient and elemental as the millstone grit.

Film adaptations come and go. Each to their own — the book remains. I don’t claim this as a definitive interpretation of such a masterful novel. I just think the ancient Brythonic Kingdom of Elmet may have left a more lasting imprint on English literature than we realise.

Liz x

Biographical note: My first creative writing tutor, the late novelist Barbara Whitehead, bought the neglected Bronte Birthplace in Thornton, Bradford, in the 1990s. She did what she could to save it for the nation, and it is now owned by a not-for-profit community society and run as a museum-guest house where it is possible to stay overnight.