Emily Bronte inspired Essex answer to Wuthering Heights

Originally devised by Roy Plomley in 1942, it is still going strong and is currently hosted by Lauren Laverne.

If you haven’t ever listened to it, each week a guest is asked to choose eight recordings, a book and a luxury item that they would want with them if cast away on a desert island.

It’s great fun, full of surprises, with some famous castaways making the most unlikely choices. But then that’s what makes individuals so special and unique.

What would you take with you? My recordings would have to include Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells, a lifelong favourite since its release in 1973.

My luxury item would be a bottle of 1982 vintage, first-growth Bordeaux Chateau Latour.

However, the book (just one, apart from complimentary copies of the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare) would be more problematic.

So many spring to mind, but my shortlist would include Michael Wood’s In Search of the Dark Ages (BBC Books 1981) and, without doubt, Emily Bronte’s classic novel Wuthering Heights (Newby 1847).

I first came across this tremendously powerful story in 1981 – not in paper format, but on cassette.

I liked nothing more than walking round the historic, rural landscape of Beeleigh, listening to the audio book, read by Daniel Massey, on my Sony Walkman.

There, that dates me!

I was (and I suppose still am) obsessed by this complex tale of passion and vengeance, all set in the wild, stormy countryside of a rugged Yorkshire, which I subsequently came to know and love through my marriage to a native of “God’s own county”.

Not many people realise that Emily’s father, the Reverend Patrick Bronte, started his clerical career in Essex.

From October 1806 to January 1809, he was curate of the parish church of St Mary Magdalene, Wethersfield – a farming village with a number of links to Maldon.

George Gifford, the Puritan vicar of All Saints' from 1582 to 1584, was best friends with Richard Rogers, the similarly inclined vicar of Wethersfield.

When equally controversial Maldon man John Shipton died in 1619, his widow, Susanna, married another vicar of Wethersfield.

John Wayte, the son of a Wethersfield tanner, was apprenticed to Maldon alderman Joseph Hills, and both emigrated to America in 1638.

Stephen Nunn (Image: Stephen Nunn)

The parish church of St Mary Magdalene, Wethersfield

And the Wentworth family had branches in Maldon and were lords of the manor of Wethersfield in the 1500s. Their tombs in Wethersfield church would have been well known to Patrick.

After Wethersfield (and staying for three weeks in Colchester with his friend, John Nunn!), Patrick moved to Shropshire and then to Yorkshire, where he ultimately served as the incumbent of St Michael and All Angels’, Haworth, until his death in 1861.

Emily’s Wuthering Heights was published under the pseudonym Ellis Bell in 1847, and she died at Haworth parsonage on December 19,1848, aged just 30.

When Wuthering Heights first appeared it was billed as “shocking” and “immoral”, but after Emily’s untimely death it was revived by critics and gradually grew in popularity.

The first edition (of 1847, in three volumes, including sister Anne’s Agnes Grey) had a limited print run, but the 1850 and subsequent editions had a much wider distribution.

In Maldon, in 1848, the main bookseller was the gloriously named George Dandridge Bridge, who had his bookshop in High Street.

There were 3,967 people living here then. John Wilmhurst was the mayor and the newly opened Maldon, Witham and Braintree line had trains running from East Station to the capital every hour.

There were also mail coaches, carriers from the Swan, Rose and Crown, and White Horse, and vessels making weekly voyages from the Hythe.

Stephen Nunn (Image: Stephen Nunn)

Mehalah was inspired by Wuthering Heights

Even if Mr Bridge didn’t stock it, surely someone must have picked up a copy of Emily’s now famous novel and spoke to their friends about it in hushed terms.

It certainly had an influence on later residents. From 1871 to 1881, the rector of East Mersea was the Rev Sabine Baring-Gould.

As well as being a vicar, he was an accomplished writer and in 1880 released one of his first novels.

Just like Wuthering Heights, Mehalah: a Story of the Salt Marshes, created something of a stir.

Baring-Gould set his dark, tragic novel in the marshlands and riverscape of the Blackwater and the characters are based on his first-hand experiences of local fisherfolk.

The proud and defiant, fiery, gipsy-beauty Mehalah and the sadistic, passionate Elijah Rebow seem immediately familiar.

When it first came out the book was compared by literary critic Charles Algernon Swinburne to Wuthering Heights.

Since then it has become known as “the Wuthering Heights of the Essex salt marshes”.

I have a 1950 edition of Mehalah and a 1991 Wuthering Heights in my library. Both are well-thumbed, but what I would give for first editions.

An 1847 three-volume Wuthering Heights sold at Christie’s in 2020 for £87,500.

Little did I realise all those years ago, as I ambled by with my Walkman, that the library at Beeleigh Abbey contained a first edition of Charlotte’s The Professor and an 1848 edition of the three sisters' collected Poems.

It would appear the Haworth moors are closer to Maldon than we might have thought!