Around this time last year, I was sat outside a local taproom in Newcastle, talking to friends about new names.
I have not worn my name comfortably for some time now. It was not the name with which I was born, but it is the only name I have known. As my gender bends and old designations grow loose, I had been wondering how I might name myself someone new.
My friend Ged suggested a tribute to a favourite author or fictional character. This would not be someone to emulate, but to feel aligned to. I thought how some people choose names for new babies by lovingly appropriating the name of a grandparent or close friend. These names that are not determinative, but rather become tributes that branch out from a river called community. Love flows, carves stone, births rivulets, which grow into rivers of their own. Newness is a confluence. Who might I newly anoint myself as a tributary to and from?
The first name that came to mind was Emily. I have kept it in my back pocket ever since, having friends trial it out from time to time, before old habits reassert themselves because I refuse to assert myself. That changed recently. I have taken up Emily more intentionally. I have taken up ‘Em’ as a transitory syllable for a transitory time.
Why Emily? Since my teenage years, I have loved Emily Brontë. It is an odd time to re-announce this, what with Emerald Fennell’s loose adaptation of Wuthering Heights currently in cinemas. I have not seen it, nor do I intend to. But one review read recently did well to remind me why I love Emily so much.
Mick LaSalle writes for the San Francisco Chronicle on the 2026 adaptation:
The principal mission here was to sex up Wuthering Heights … Why not take mercy on the characters and let them finally have sex after 200 years? … [But it] turns out that some romances loom large in the collective imagination because they’re not consummated … By giving Cathy and Heathcliff an intense sex life, she gets them ready for the next step in their relationship, but there can’t be a next step, because this is Wuthering Heights. It can’t end with grandchildren. So she gives away all the story’s power of spiritual and sexual longing without gaining a thing in their place.
The power of spiritual and sexual longing is everything in Emily’s world. Wuthering Heights take precedence as her only novel to represent this, but to read her poetry is to be plunged far more forcibly into unyielding Gothic desires. Many of her poems describe a yearning so thunderous it might well rip the earth and sky apart. What lingers and sprawls over decades in her novel finds itself powerfully condensed in poetic brevity. Lack has a tremendous gravitational pull here, like that of a black hole, which threatens to swallow everything. It is a desire so intense as to transcend romantic norms. It is subterranean, subversive, and — dare I say — inherently Sapphic.
Take the final stanzas of “Ah! Why, Because the Dazzling Sun”:
O Stars and Dreams and Gentle Night;
O Night and Stars return!
And hide me from the hostile light
That does not warm, but burn—That drains the blood of suffering men;
Drinks tears, instead of dew:
Let me sleep through his blinding reign,
And only wake with you!
It is a poem that reminds me of John Donne’s “The Sun Rising”, which I have written about before. Donne presents two lovers in bed as a world in microcosm, albeit one that is not governed by the sun’s announcing of a new day, which suggests they should vacate their bed. Instead, they tell the sun to shine on them as indifferently as it shines upon the world at large. They will ask no more of it if the sun asks no more of them.
I wonder if Brontë was consciously responding to Donne’s poem with her own. She speaks of a different sun entirely — a black sun. The sun blacked out because her lover is away. To be greeted by it every morning is like walking outside to the unwanted attentions of other men. Brontë will think about getting up when it is her love, not the sun, who wakes her.
I have always had a soft spot for this purple poetry of self-effacing devotion. It is a Gothic love that is nihilistic in its catastrophic flirtation with all that is not but could be. Her romance is nihilistic, that is to say, not because it is doomed but because it is speculative. It is a Gothic romance that wrestles with the world as it is and is willing to risk death in pursuing a world that is different. There is a politics to her melodrama in this regard. A person, or an idea of a person, might as well be a world, or an idea of a world.
It is how I have often felt myself when falling in love. In a person, from time to time, I have seen worlds transformed. In the vast gulf that love opens up in me, I have built cathedrals. It can be unbecoming, to feel so intensely. To get carried away in love is dangerous and unwise, but this is only because the worlds we build in the gulf are vulnerable. At any moment, they might be met with disaster, and when love fails, so do the worlds we inhabit when under its spell.
For all her melodrama, I have always loved Brontë’s fluency in this language of nihilistic love. She gambles on the magnitude of her feelings, because they far exceed the bounds of Haworth, the “hedged enclosure”. Daring to love is, for her, to dare to escape — even if her world is inescapable. Indeed, who knows how much more dramatic she might have become if her desires were consummated…
This is something that happened to me when I left West Yorkshire for Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the spring of 2022. I had moved to Brontë Country in late 2020, mid-pandemic, only to watch a long-term relationship die on the vine. I was devastated when the time came to start my life over, but I had also been preparing myself for it subconsciously for two years. I had started to write more openly about my under-explored queerness, gently cracking my egg, and I wrote Narcissus in Bloom as a closeted essay on coming-out. When I stepped out of the closet, however, newly single and uprooted before the bright Geordie sun, I felt it burn my mind. Given the chance to start over, I almost lost everything.
I have dared myself to escape often. I fear it always, but I have dared. Indeed, I have rarely been successful. I have lost numerous worlds over the course of my life, and each ending has devastated me. But I dare again to build anew, in the hope that, one day, something might stick, or some shared sense of transformative transience might be followed for a lifetime. I don’t so much long for stasis as for continuity. I would like to find a world and watch it change, rather than be doomed to a life of planet-hopping.
I may well have found a home-world recently, although I also came very close to losing it. Fast-forward a few years from Brontë Country yearnings, I am currently typing away in bed next to my partner, who was released from prison on bail one week ago today. I felt more Brontë than ever over the six months spent writing them daily letters and messages, or when pining for each other down the phone, trying to preserve our relationship on opposite sides of prison walls. Sometimes, we felt full of hope and purpose, cultivating our determination to survive the ordeal; other times, it felt like we might crush what we hoped to preserve by holding on too tight. To have bail granted felt like a cruel reprieve, snatching us from the jaws of defeat. Prison felt like being waterboarded. Relief was granted at the precise moment we thought we might drown.
A new chapter begins now. It is dizzying and we are traumatised, but slowly we can start to world-build again. I am thinking about how I might write about it, document it, as I always have done. In truth, I’m wondering if I want to write ever again… But I recognise that this desire to throw it all away, to never again write a word, to pull a Rimbaud or a Wittgenstein, is no measure of an ending but the arrival of new standards. My relationship to the world has changed utterly, and a new person emerges who does not yet know how to speak from a new perspective.
I’d like to try. If I do, let it be known that it will be under a new name.