Out on the wiley, windy moors

One can't, or simply shouldn't, read the same author all the time for too long for fear, sir, that one's own writing might inhabit their manners and mannerisms over one's own and one risks being subject to an alien mode of expression which, howeversomuch one might admire it, it doesn't become one.

There is much to be enjoyed in Dr. Johnson's writing and it's not easy to depart from it but one must, for a while at least. It's not only what it says but the way in which he says it which might appear to us now extravagant to the point of being rococo but that, as well as its sophistication, is where the beauty of it is.

Nobody really writes like that any more. We are not encouraged towards such grandeur. I, for my part, when trying to comply with all known reasonable standards of respectability, try to understate my case by use of ironic implication rather than by grandstanding.

We may or may not have lost something by becoming more guarded and sensitive compared to writers of the C18th and the C19th. Dr. Johnson, of course, in his essays and elsewhere is a vibrant companion whose reflections on the world have lost little of their brilliance in the time since he wrote them. I was immediately a big fan of Jane Eyre when I first read it about 45 years ago. But not everything from those days impressed me quite so much.

I didn't engage with Vanity Fair, which unfortunately was a compulsory essay - a bit unfairly, I thought - at university and I recorded an all-time low mark for my effort, or lack of it. I didn't even see the TV dramatisation a few years ago to the end. I just don't seem to be interested in Becky Sharp. I've never 'got' Jane Austen either and that's not for the want of trying. I have tried a few times. I can't tell which bits are funny, which bits are just the required etiquette of the time and why the whole point of being a girl is predicated on getting married to the right sort of bloke who looks like he is whether he is or not. Or maybe that is the joke. 

Being genuinely involved in a book depends on finding some common ground with it early doors. I always found that easy with Thomas Hardy, Balzac, the manageable James Joyce, George Eliot and the like and Wuthering Heights is another such.

It's a Yorkshire book above all else, just as much as Joyce is Dublin, Lawrence is Notts and Virginia is Bloomsbury. The opening chapters are a portrait in extremis of an obdurate, unco-operative male character paralelled not only by Monty Python's Four Yorkshiremen, Arthur Scargill's charge into the suicide of the trade union movement but also that 1960's county cricket team that included Boycott, Brian Close, Ray Illingworth and Fred Trueman, not to mention Harold Bird. 

I'm a great admirer of Trueman and Close but can't imagine how grim it must have been in such a dressing room, with more bullies than victims to be had, compared to the much less successful Trent Bridge team in which even Garfield Sobers couldn't raise Notts very far above the bottom of the league table.

It's not grim up north. It's cool and has good reason to think it is in Liverpool, it's austerely beautiful and unspoilt in Northumberland, it's got the Lake District. I have reason to find Manchester hard to take, Oasis being evidence both for and against it, but Yorkshire, in some ways implicating itself by considering itself something special, better and apart, spoils the effect, rampaging Trump-like like something that can't abide any other contender.

But that's not Alan Bennett, who moved to London; it's not David Hockney, who moved to California, and it's not Tony Harrison who idenified more with Aeschylus. 

The point of Wuthering Heights is unlikely to be its yorkshireness but if you need an unsympathetic setting for something more generous to be put into then, why not.

Emily and Charlotte lived there, so they would know. Anne's Tenant of Wildfell Hall might have been about her brother but it does little to restore any percieved gap between Yorkshiremen and those of a more conciliatory nature, like those from Notts, whose coalminers could see that Arthur Scargill's campaign was the road to ruin, a vanity project doomed to failure and a gift to Prime Minister Thatcher, who was always going to win that one.

There may or may not be more to say about Wuthering Heights. I'll hope to make it more about the novel as art rather than regionalist prejudice if I can.