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Winter in Haworth, sometime in the 1840s. Emily Brontë emerges from the wild, windswept moor where she has spent the day walking and enters the warmth of the family parsonage. He takes off his galoshes, the wooden galoshes that protect his cloth slippers from the elements, but finds that the weather has affected them anyway. They are soaked and she leaves a trail of wet footprints behind her. Mud splatters the hem of her dress (I imagine it as thick, heavy silk because the Brontës’ father insisted on this material; he was terrified that, in an era of stoves and open-flame gas lamps, dresses made of a more flammable fabric material would lead to disaster). Additionally, Emily is wearing a winter hat and a thick woolen coat; Enough to keep her warm, perhaps, but not totally weatherproof. The Brontës certainly knew what it was like to be overwhelmed by the elements, despite their best efforts.
I’m imagining this scene not only because it’s the season to reread Wuthering Heights (not only because a new adaptation from director Emerald Fennell is coming), but also because, at the beginning of my fourteenth winter in Scotland, I am once again faced with preparing my wardrobe for the months ahead. And, living on the edge of the Yorkshire moors, the Brontës understood better than many how our environment shapes our daily lives.
Emily borrowed “wuthering” from her local West Yorkshire dialect, an adjective that would hardly be replaced by any standard English word. The novel begins with Mr. Lockwood, a faint-hearted southerner, encountering this term for the first time: the name of Mr. Heathcliff’s dwelling, he discovers, describes “the atmospheric tumult to which his station is exposed in stormy weather.” . It is a place of “pure, bracing ventilation” that leaves the few trees and hedges that survive there “crying for alms from the sun.” Consequently, coats, cloaks, and furs are repeated throughout the novel, designating not only social class but also whether a character is capable of refinement or, on the contrary, belongs to a wild and unrepentant nature. After all, readers’ first glimpse of Heathcliff, as a mysteriously orphaned boy, is when he emerges from Mr. Earnshaw’s warm shelter. There is something disturbing about this coat; It protects but it can also contaminate, as if it brought something from the outside in.
The novel is a testament to the richness that comes from paying close attention to the elements. We may not all be gifted with Brontë’s literary genius, but we can all increase our awareness of our surroundings and get something out of it.
Getting dressed is an integral part of this. Over the years, I’ve learned that the joy of cold-weather clothing lies in tuning into the specifics of where I am. The east coast of Scotland seems drier but windier to me, buffeted by icy North Sea gales that make maximum cover a priority. Edinburgh is also blessed with the persistent hair which can cover the city with thick sea fog for days. There, I prefer an old suede Creenstone that covers me from chin to ankle. Conditions on the West Coast are different: more rain but less wind, and a tendency to be mild and muggier, but also more volatile, thanks to the warming Gulf Stream. In Glasgow, boots and jackets to protect yourself from the rain and dreich They are a priority.
We can formulate our delicate “winter palette” with a look out the window: dark gray skies, somber browns and the occasional snowy white. But even once the autumn leaves have fallen, a short walk shows that winter is not only sober and monochromatic. There’s the indigo of heather, the deep green of holly, the bright red of yew berries and rosehips, and the eerie yellow stars of witch hazel. In Scottish Gaelic, terms for color move through scales of brightness, saturation and hue, weaving a richer vocabulary to chart the interplay of climate and landscape: “gorm” and “glas” refer to bright greens, but “gorm” is bluish and saturated while “glas” is gray and unsaturated. Both can be used to describe vegetation, metals, seas, and eyes, but their precise deployment depends on how much attention we pay to them.
Tuning in is a continuous process: the season never stops and there is always more to see. The trick, as Emily knew, is to be prepared for the unpredictability, but maybe not so isolated that the elements can’t touch you at all.
Daisy Lafarge’s latest book, Lovebug, is published by Peninsula at £10.99
Models, Aliza Jarmon from Elite and Raffaele Giolli from Lis Rutten. Hair, Kei Terada at the Julian Watson Agency wearing Balmain. Makeup, Lynski. Casting, Ben Grimes in Drive Represents. Photographer’s assistant, Ariel Mihaly. Stylist assistants, Emeline Tavern and Grayce Cooper. Production, matrix