Changing Heaven

The novel brings together three women from different centuries. One is Emily Brontë herself, who appears as a rather personable ghost. The second is a turn-of-the-century balloonist, Arianna Ether, who performed for her manager and lover Jeremy Jacobs, the "Sindbad of the Skies." The third is a Canadian, Ann Frear, who has developed her childhood passion for Wuthering Heights into an academic career in English. Shattered by an affair with a colleague named Arthur, an art historian who is living out a similar passion for the darker works of Tintoretto, she takes a sabbatical in Yorkshire to write a book on Brontë's weather. But these are just the axes around which the elemental opposites of the novel revolve: passion and peace, wildness and domesticity, heath and hearth