Solsbury Hill

February 3, 2014
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 Brontë’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 Brontë 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, Brontë 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 Brontë-style atmospheric gloom would have gone a long way.