The Man in the Stone Cottage
Many fictional imaginings and retellings of the Brontë siblings’ lives have been published, attesting to readers’ endless fascination with them. The Man in the Stone Cottage is a standout. We join the Brontës in the summer of 1831. Emily is twelve years old, and in her wanderings on the moor, she has come across an old, abandoned stone cottage. This cottage becomes her hideaway, but with time it becomes a forgotten part of her childhood. We move forward to 1843 and the main part of the narrative, with the four siblings – Charlotte, Emily, Anne, and Branwell: Emily is in her mid-twenties, taking care of house and home while walking the moors with her dog, Keeper. The narrative continues following the family’s daily lives and struggles – the father’s declining health and fears for their future without him, Branwell’s inability to follow through with any career and his substance abuse, the girls carrying the financial burdens, and their struggles with publishing their works. The novel ends just before Charlotte’s death.
Emily has two sides: the mystic with a special connection to nature who roams the moors, and the domestic who is grounded in home and caring for her father. On one of her walks, she meets a shepherd who takes her to that stone cottage of her youth for tea. He has restored the cottage and made it his home. As Cowell explores the boundaries between reality and imagination, we wonder if this secret man is real or a figment of Emily’s imagination.
The author’s prose is beautiful and profound. Of Wuthering Heights she writes, “[Emily] took the dull brown of the moor in winter and the endless loneliness of the exiled and dead and blended them in ink and paper.” Her storytelling flows effortlessly as her rich nature writing and her rendering of the day-to-day existence of the Brontës draw the reader into their lives.
