While her previous book unfolded through multiple perspectives, Fifteen Wild Decembers is told solely from Emily’s point of view, with Powell drawing us into the warmth and intensity of the siblings’ bonds, the squabbles and rivalries as well as their Mutual Devotion and heartbreak.

The worlds shared with her sisters and brother are beautifully drawn as they progress from enacting invented dramas as children in the parsonage hallway to penning their adult creations around the dining-room table. So too are the practical pressures on unmarried women of the Brontës’ class and meagre means, for whom posts as governesses or teachers were the only means of earning a living — work to which Emily in particular was wholly unsuited.

To build a vivid sense of the siblings’ distinctive characters and relationships, Powell draws on extracts from many real letters that Emily wrote and received. Charlotte is depicted as a bossy, interfering older sister and a frequent source of exasperation, but also the driving force behind her rare experiences of the world beyond Haworth.

As Powell’s Emily recognises, it is chiefly thanks to Charlotte that all three sisters were published in their lifetimes, albeit after numerous rejections. In Emily’s case, the pleasure of publication is a prelude to harsh reviews. One critic is “shocked, disgusted, almost sickened” by Wuthering Heights; another finds the characters “revolting” but recognises the book’s “immense power”, admitting that “we are spellbound, we cannot choose but read”. Her response here is defiant: “I can’t stop. I won’t.”

Powell is faithful to the known facts about the Brontë family without letting this material oppress the fictional narrative. She pushes back on the Victorian biographer Elizabeth Gaskell’s portrait of Emily as a frail, uneducated recluse — giving us instead an independent, well-read and fiercely intelligent young woman, as strong physically as she is emotionally, walking the moors in all weathers and shouldering the hard labour of running the household after her aunt’s death.

If anything, it is Charlotte who emerges here as the more tragic figure: her curiosity and sociability, her plans and literary ambitions — all are repeatedly frustrated by events beyond her control. Branwell, too, emerges in a new light in this telling, with Emily bearing the brunt of his volatile personality and slide into alcoholism and drug addiction. It is Emily who heaves his “drink-sodden, protesting body up the stairs and into his bed”, who tends to him during his opium-fuelled deliriums, and who tenderly nurses him as he succumbs to tuberculosis. Within a few weeks of Branwell’s death, she is felled by the same disease, the tell-tale splatter of blood “red as holly berries” on the “blank canvas of [her] handkerchief”.

The description of the final weeks of Emily’s life is almost unbearably moving: “All my life I’d withstood any damage inflicted on me, even by my own hand, felt sure that I would always recover,” she reflects, knowing that death is close, and also that she has written a novel of real literary significance but will write nothing more.

For all this, the book’s lasting impression is not of melancholy, but unquenchable vitality. From the “heather and harebells” to “the sunlit green of the mosses, their spongy filaments softening the stone, frescoed lichen”, the beauty of the countryside sustains and nourishes Emily’s soul and imagination.

The title comes from one of her extraordinary poems. A distillation of the novel’s essence, it is a poem about grief and nature and the transfiguring power of time and art. With Fifteen Wild Decembers, Powell has served her heroine loyally. (Rebecca Abrams)

At the centre of it all is our heroine, Judith, who thinks of Gavin in turn as “a composite of all her favourite romantic heroes”. He’s “the perfect amalgamation of the secretive Mr Rochester, the passionate Heathcliff and the intimidating Max de Winter”, which would make him the ideal murderer, lover and gentleman – and thus too good not to be true. It’s one of this novel’s immediate pleasures that everything is everything you expect, and more. (Cal Revely-Calder)

Quick lightning round! Tell us the first book you ever remember reading, the one that made you want to become an author, and one that you can’t stop thinking about!

[...]

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë – When I was about eight or nine, I was playing school with a friend and picked up a copy of Jane Eyre. I devoured the entire book in one day, staying up late to finish it. Never before had I read anything that came to life through ink on a page in such a real and vivid way. I couldn’t wait to try it for myself. (Elise Dumpleton)

One of my favorite books, as early as middle school, was Jane Eyre, and there’s something irresistible about the idea of a journey to a new and rather mysterious place. (Melissa)

-J. A.: Y luego bebe mucho del cine, pero también bebe de la novela. Desde los relatos de las hermanas Brontë, desde una 'Jane Eyre', de seguir a un personaje a lo largo del tiempo, desde que es pequeñita hasta que se consigue vengar o unas 'Cumbres borrascosas' o 'La casa de los espíritus', como esas cosas familiares que pasan mucho tiempo, muchas experiencias vitales a lo largo del tiempo. A mí me gusta que sea seriada porque lo que más bebo yo es de la novela, que es lo que más creo que me ha impactado a la hora de escribir. (Iker Cortés) (Translation)