Book review: Nelly Dean, Alison Case

Cover of Nelly Dean.

Told in a series of letters from Wuthering Heights housekeeper Ellen (Nelly) Dean to Mr Lockwood - the man to whom she formerly confided the story of Cathy and Heathcliff - this is essentially Nelly unlocking her cupboard and releasing the skeletons within, and what a lot of old bones there are to unearth.

Nelly, here a poor relation of Mrs Earnshaw, is brought up with the Earnshaws more as a companion than an employee, though this status changes when Mr Earnshaw brings the urchin Heathcliff home, and she is banished for a slight to the boy. With help from her mother she regains a place at Wuthering Heights, a place she considers her home, and she is employed as a servant, and told her to be content with her lot. But, despite her demotion, she remains close to the Earnshaws' son Hindley throughout their youth. This eventually blossoms into love and a promise of marriage.

Her lover, Hindley, is portrayed relatively sympathetically: his rage in reaction to a father who was always prepared to be disappointed in his son, and acted accordingly - and Hindley's jealousy of Heathcliff is exacerbated by this lack of fatherly affection. Although his behaviour on returning to Wuthering Heights, surprising poor Nelly with his young, fragile wife - and his subsequent unkindness to her, to Heathcliff, and later to his son, Hareton - is unconscionable, the half-concealed truths beginning to twine through the story and give some meaning to his madness.

Nelly's hardworking life leaves little time for rolling on the windy moors, although two episodes bring to mind the brooding supernaturality of Emily Bronte's novel; Hindley and Nelly spend a passionate night alone in the fairy cave at Penistone Crags and conceive a child; and Nelly takes herself off to an old wise woman for a spell when she is desperate to feed the motherless Hareton.

Some Wuthering Heights critics have described Nelly as an "unreliable witness" to Mr Lockwood and even here when she is telling her own story there are things she does not seem to grasp, whether through naivety or dogged disinclination to see otherwise.

The greatest secret of her life, which most readers will have grasped from the broad hints strewn throughout the pages, Nelly only eventually finds out through a posthumous letter from her mother.

The characters of Cathy and Heathcliff, Isabella and Edgar, are not fully fleshed out, perhaps fairly, as they have had their day, and this is Nelly's story, but a reader unfamiliar with the original story might find the motivation - especially for Heathcliff's absconding and Isabella's later elopement with him - hard to follow.

The death of Cathy and the return of Heathcliff to Wuthering Heights slip by in a couple of pages of this thickish book, while pages and pages are dedicated to Nelly's description of nursing a lamb.

As an attempt to do justice by Nelly this is an interesting take on Bronte's book, and this book's housekeeper is a worthy heroine. But because of those gaps in the storytelling there is not enough to fully satisfy either a Heights aficionado or someone who 'as niver opened t'book.

Nelly Dean
Alison Case
(HarperCollins $32.99)