Fifteen Wild Decembers

Powell (The River Within) shines in this stirring tale of English novelist Emily Brontë and her siblings. It opens with six-year-old Emily joining three of her older sisters at a school for girls in 1824. They’re appalled by the dirty conditions, especially as classmates start falling ill. After their sister Maria dies from tuberculosis, their widowed clergyman father takes them home, where their sister Elizabeth soon dies. Charlotte leaves for a new school, but Emily is much happier staying at home in Yorkshire, playing with toy soldiers and imagining fantastical kingdoms among the moors. Later, as a young woman teaching at a girls’ school, Emily is exhausted by the deadening routine (“How is a soul to survive when there is not an hour in the day to walk alone and breathe the green air of the distant woods; when the seasons turn and you may only stand at the schoolroom window, like an insect caught in a jar?”). The sisters are fatefully reunited at home after a stint studying abroad, when Charlotte pushes Emily to publish her poems, thus sparking all of their writerly ambitions. With suitably gothic prose, Powell keenly evokes the landscape around Emily’s home as well as her active inner life. Brontë devotees will be delighted. (Apr.)