It's not often that I think about how close we live to Haworth, where the Bronte sisters lived and wrote. But today was a rainy, blustery day, and when we finally saw a break in the rain, we raced outside to take Nika for her walk. We hiked up to a field on top of a hill, surrounded by more hills on all sides. Dark clouds roiled on the horizon, wind swept across the field and the Yorkshire-stone cottages in the distance...and man, I felt like a Bronte heroine, standing on that wind-swept moor. Or better yet, a Bronte--they were all my romantic heroines when I was a kid, in that way that desperately artistic and romantically miserable women in the past often are for girls who want to be writers. Patrick and I even had a dog racing around us on the moor, just like all the Bronte sisters and their heros and heroines did...although I feel that Nika would have cheered up most of them, with her silly antics and waving tail.

Very inspiring. I don't really want to be a depressive and isolated artist who dies young, anymore--that part stopped seeming romantic quite a while back (Erica Jong has a great essay on that phenomenon)--but I came back from the walk feeling wired. I wrote three and a half pages, finishing Chapter Nine, and taking me a quarter of the way through this novel. Woohoo! Go, me...and the memory of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, of course. :)