RETRO READS
WUTHERING HEIGHTS by Emily Bronte
(Macmillan £9.99, 416 pp) tWO hundred years ago, the enigmatic Emily Bronte was born. Her only novel, everyone’s favourite depiction of obsessive passion, still sells in its thousands.
this gorgeous, gilt-edged pocket edition will transport you to the desolate moors of yorkshire, where the doomed love of two wild teenagers, Cathy and Heathcliff, leads to death, disaster and the transformation of Heathcliff into a sadistic fiend.
Battle past the tricky bits written in dialect, and rhapsodic lines such as: ‘Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same!’ will set your spine a-tingle. so will the ghost hand tapping on the window, and the two tormented lost souls for ever haunting the windswept moors. Chills and fever. Bliss.
FROST IN MAY by Antonia White
(Virago £9.99, 224 pp) BAsEd on White’s convent boarding school days, this deeply moving novel describes the subtle cruelty and humiliations endured by student Nanda.
despite being a new convert and considered inferior to the school’s aristocratic-born Catholic pupils, Nanda plunges avidly into the claustrophobic, all-female ethos of censored letters and books, sacred rituals and self-abasement.
she makes a vow of virginity having no idea what virginity is, her normal adolescent responses are quashed, and a penance is to sprinkle salt on her stewed fruit.
despite the torments, Nanda surprisingly experiences moments of great happiness, but the cloying smell of beeswax and incense stays in the nostrils long after you finish reading.
THE TIME MACHINE by H.G. Wells
(Legend £8.99, 112 pp) A fusty old professor, literature’s first time traveller, invents a machine and spins into the extremely distant future — to the thames Valley, in fact — to find beautiful, small, childlike beings surrounded by flowers, butterflies, laughter, singing and dancing.
No old people, no invalids, no sex; they eat only fruit and crowd into communal halls to sleep.
it’s almost paradise — but why do they dread the dark? And who are the pallid, pinkeyed, nocturnal, ape-like creatures who scuttle down vast shafts containing throbbing machinery? Our tt concludes that the upper-world (Eloi) and the under-world (Morlocks) lead separate lives until — horror alert — the latter need meat. A sci-fi classic.