Fifteen Wild Decembers tells the story of the Brontë family through the eyes of Emily, from 1825 when she first goes away to school, to her death in 1848. From their childhood tales of the fantastical island of Gondal, to the events in their lives that shaped them and their literary outputs, Fifteen Wild December offered a glimpse into their lives.
It was an alright book; I’d love to rate it any more warmly than that, but it didn’t really inspire much in me. I read it, I don’t regret reading it, but I would never read it again. If the personalities of the Brontë family were anything like what was portrayed in this book, I truly wonder why Emily didn’t just fake her own death, and take her dog Keeper and go off to live in the Yorkshire Moors away from the rest of them. Maria and Elizabeth, the eldest siblings, died early in the book and I never really got a feel for their personalities, and her mother Maria, had died before the book began, so I will excuse them from my criticism. However the rest of them? Charlotte and Branwell were two of the most selfish, self-centered, bossy, opinionated brats ever, and their go with their own whims way of life, flitting from money-making scheme to money-making scheme, expecting the world to realize what they wanted and would change to fit their views. Any time they were on the page, I kept having an ear worm of two specific verses from “Guido’s Song” from Nine:
I want to be young
And I want to be old
I would like to be wise before my time
And yet be foolish and brash and bold
I would like the universe to get down on its knees
And say, “Guido, whatever you please, it’s okay
Even if it’s impossible, we’ll arrange it”
That’s all that I wantI am lusting for more
Should I settle for less?
I ask you, what’s a good thing for
If not for taking it to excess?
One limitation I dearly regret
There’s only one of me I’ve ever met
Meanwhile, the youngest, Anne, I spent most of the book fluctuating between thinking “get off the cross, someone needs the wood” or “no one likes martyrs, that’s why they burn them at the stake”. And their father? Maybe if he stopped thinking that just because Branwell used the chamber pot standing up he was both the most important person in the house but also the sole resident who would bring any fame or fortune he would be far less exasperating. I hope it was artistic license, but then again I wonder why Powell would intentionally (or maybe it was unintentional) make everyone other than Emily so darn annoying. I never knew that the Brontës’ mother was originally from Penzance. I knew, but it hit anew reading this book how young the children all were when they died; Charlotte lived the longest, and she didn’t make forty. Noticed that Powell leans heavier towards the “death by tuberculosis” angle than the “death from tuberculosis combined with well water contaminated by the local graveyard”. And wow, did the three sisters apparently wander around with pent-up, unexamined lust? Charlotte for her professor in Belgium, Emily for a “wild” farmer, Anne for religion (seriously, did the family not realize that there are Episcopalian nuns? Anne might have been happier in a convent). I found surprising and yet in a way happy that the writing of Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Agnes Grey, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was such a small part of the book; showed that they had more to their brief live than writing some poems, four books, and then dying young. Though how much of the books were autobiographical, especially Charlotte’s and Emily’s. Jane Eyre was heavily based (according to this book) on Charlotte’s experiences at boarding school, while Wuthering Heights was apparently influenced by witnessing the farmer Emily had a thing for and his antagonistic yet sexual relationship with a lady of means. Anne’s I think were inspired by the families she was a governess for, but mostly they seemed to come out of left field with their darkness. One thing I will ding it on, is the continual habit of dropping words; I’m starting to think either there is an editing epidemic going on, or I am far too particular. The chapter pertaining to Emily’s death still made me cry though.