Solsbury Hill
A Novel
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3.5 • 4 Ratings
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
"Susan Wyler's contemporary take on a classic love story is utterly beguiling. Solsbury Hill is a gorgeously well-written tale of a fraught love affair that takes you from New York to the wild gothic setting of the Yorkshire moors."—Fiona Neill, author of Slummy Mummy and What the Nanny Saw
The windswept moors of England, a grand rustic estate, and a love story of one woman caught between two men who love her powerfully—all inspired by Emily Bronte’s beloved classic, Wuthering Heights. Solsbury Hill brings the legend of Catherine and Heathcliff, and that of their mysterious creator herself, into a contemporary love story that unlocks the past.
When a surprise call from a dying aunt brings twenty-something New Yorker Eleanor Abbott to the Yorkshire moors, and the family estate she is about to inherit, she finds a world beyond anything she might have expected. Having left behind an American fiance, here Eleanor meets Meadowscarp MacLeod—a young man who challenges and changes her. Here too she encounters the presence of Bronte herself and discovers a family legacy they may share.
With winds powerful enough to carve stone and bend trees, the moors are another world where time and space work differently. Remanants of the past are just around a craggy, windswept corner. For Eleanor, this means ancestors and a devastating romantic history that bears on her own life, on the history of the novel Wuthering Heights, and on the destinies of all who live in its shadow.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Grand love affairs and friendly ghosts inhabit Wyler's ambitious, Gothic-tinged debut. When New Yorker Eleanor Abbott is summoned to her Aunt Alice's deathbed in Yorkshire, England, Eleanor is stunned to learn that she's poised to inherit Trent Hall, her aunt's sprawling country estate. The estate looks like it's straight out of Wuthering Heights, complete with ghosts just like the ones who haunted Emily Bront 's fictitious mansion, including a young woman in a long wool dress who begs Eleanor to find a bundle of letters hidden inside the house. When she finds the letters, Eleanor learns that the ghost is Bront herself, who wrote part of her famous novel while living at Trent Hall. It's soon clear that Wuthering Heights's central theme of finding (and losing) a great love amid the moors was based on actual events. More than that, Bront was not the last resident of Trent Hall who had to make Catherine Earnshaw's famous choice between two men and sooner than she suspects, Eleanor will be forced to make a similar choice herself. Although the Yorkshire setting is vividly drawn and its inhabitants satisfyingly complex, Wyler attempts to interweave so many stories with so many common elements that it's difficult to feel truly connected to any of them, and using the ghosts as expository tools seems forced. More Bront -style atmospheric gloom would have gone a long way.
