![]() However, the main narrative is set in the 20th century. If the idea of a black Heathcliff appears to have been inspired by Andrea Arnold’s film of 2011 starring James Howson, Emily’s mystical death-dreams recall her portrayal in the 1946 biopic Devotion. ![]() Charlotte described her sister being “torn panting out of a happy life” but this is the Emily of myth, who “lives in two worlds” and yearns for “the bosom of eternity”. ![]() A central section imagines Brontë on her deathbed, a woman alienated from quotidian reality. In the early scene, the boy’s mother is dying of disease in Liverpool the novel ends with her son being led over the moors by Mr Earnshaw to Wuthering Heights. Left purposefully mysterious by Emily Brontë, his origins are here fleshed out by Phillips, who makes him the illegitimate son of Mr Earnshaw by an African former slave. The Lost Child is bookended by two scenes that feature the seven-year-old Heathcliff. For him, it functions as a symbolic conduit for ideas of alienation, orphanhood and family dislocation. ![]() Caryl Phillips’s new novel takes its cue from Emily Brontë’s original, but only at a slant. W uthering Heights has inspired countless sublime and ridiculous spin-offs, ranging from poetry by Ted Hughes to the Cliff Richard vehicle Heathcliff: The Musical. ![]()
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