Bronte Sisters in a Different Land, Under a Different Name

If, as Harold Bloom has suggested, every new poet is unwittingly engaged in revising and rewriting the work of his or her literary predecessors, what are we to make of authors who wittingly base their work on someone else’s?

In recent years, we’ve seen sequels to classics such as “Rebecca” and “Pride and Prejudice,” a slave’s-eye view of Tara in “The Wind Done Gone” and so many remakes of old movies, a modern Rip van Winkle might never even realize he’d been asleep for 20 years.

Some reworkings are little more than attempts to benefit from the popularity of the already famous. Others seem to come out of a need to reply to the earlier work: to tell another side of the story. And, for some aspiring writers, an earlier book may have such a powerful hold on their imagination, they feel compelled to plunge into the fictional world created by their favorite authors.

In the case of Mardi McConnochie’s first novel, “Coldwater,” the story that exercises this hold is not only fictional, but also biographical. It is the story of three sisters from an isolated parsonage in Yorkshire who grew up to write, among much else, “Jane Eyre,” “Wuthering Heights” and “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.” What McConnochie has done is to transfer elements of the Brontes’ story to Australia, changing the locale but still keeping close to the original time, the late 1840s, when the Brontes were writing and publishing their books.

The three sisters in McConnochie’s novel are called Charlotte, Emily and Anne Wolf, and, like the real Brontes, they even have a brother named Branwell, who died some years earlier. Unlike the Brontes, these young ladies live on a tiny, windswept island called Coldwater off the coast of Australia where their father, Capt. Wolf, has charge of a penal colony for offenders deemed too dangerous for the mainland. The widowed Capt. Wolf is an interesting character (as was the Rev. Patrick Bronte): He is, understandably, obsessed with keeping order (rebellions are a real threat), yet he also believes in giving some prisoners the chance to reform. Among those he deems worthy is Finn O’Connell, a proud, attractive, forthright Irishman who’d been driven to crime by the terrible potato famine in his native land. Capt. Wolf allows Finn to work as a servant in his house, where the good-looking fellow makes a strong impression on his daughters, especially Emily. Needless to say, this is not the kind of reform Capt. Wolf had in mind.

If the Bronte sisters felt provincial and isolated living in a Yorkshire parsonage, the Wolf sisters feel 10 times as isolated on their antipodean island. McConnochie, an Australian playwright and television writer, tells the story from four viewpoints: Charlotte’s, Emily’s, Anne’s and their father’s. Emily--no surprises here--is the most passionate: “I feel as if a Tiger has taken up residence in my breast--a rage has kindled within me which cannot be Quenched--I will not let Father crush my spirit, as he would that of a rebellious Convict--whatever torments he can devise, I am equal to them--I will endure--I will endure.” McConnochie is not alone in supposing that the author of “Wuthering Heights” would be the sister most likely to succumb to erotic passion. But this widely held image of Emily as Ur-Romantic overlooks the uncompromising realism that is a key component in her portrait of the uglier aspects of passion, balanced against its grandeur.

McConnochie’s Charlotte, fittingly, is the most analytical and introspective, the most in touch with reality. Yet, as McConnochie rightly understands, she is also intensely passionate: “I liked to think of myself an exceptional woman ... but in this one regard I was utterly conventional: Like every other woman, I longed to be known and understood and loved. I longed for love. It was the fire that burned within me, the insistent voice that screamed day after day: Look at me, see me, know me.” Anne is so gentle and self-effacing, she writes about herself in the third person. And even as he grows increasingly despotic, Capt. Wolf remains a rather poignant figure: “I tried to build something here, something magnificent. I tried to take the dross, the refuse of society, and turn them by a kind of alchemy into gold.”

McConnochie spins a good yarn, and it is curiously fascinating to watch as she weaves so many elements of Bronteana into her novel. Of course, there’s no denying the book is derivative: more of a commentary on the Brontes than a work of literature in its own right. But it does make for diverting--and absorbing--entertainment.