Illustration by ChatGPT Evil has a peculiar charm, a charm which seems to belong to an alien world. But somewhere deep in our hearts we know that it is our own world, not an alien world. We romanticise it as Lost Paradise, Rama Rajya, Utopia, or whatever. That ‘romance’ is what I love about Emily Bronte’s novel, Wuthering Heights . Emily died at the age of 29. Most Romantics died young. But those Romantics like Keats and Shelley imagined beautiful worlds and died because their souls knew that such beautiful worlds were impossible. Emily was born just three years before Keats died and four years before Shelley followed Keats. But the literary age was changing to the more prudish Victorian morality as Emily grew up. Victorian morality was more than prudish. Women were supposed to be the western counterparts of India’s Satis, women who immolated themselves on their husbands’ funeral pyres. How could a woman like Emily Bronte, daughter of a Christian parson, born and brought up in a
Cerebrate and Celebrate