[In the following excerpt, Ashenburg discusses the prominent role of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847) in Changing Heaven.]

The desire to read or reread the hero's work is a strange but real measure of success in this genre. Judged by this yardstick (as well as by others), Jane Urquhart's second novel, Changing Heaven, succeeds superbly. Urquhart, who bracketed her first novel, The Whirlpool, with scenes of Robert Browning's dying in Venice, has created a tartly level-headed ghost of Emily Brontë for the presiding genius of her new book.

At first Brontë seems peripheral to the main action, which is shared by two sets of lovers—a Victorian balloonist whose professional name is Arianna Ether and her manager, and a contemporary Canadian scholar named Ann Frear who is having an affair with a married art historian. Only gradually, as the two pairs struggle to reconcile obsession with everyday life, storm with calm, and the appeal of two-in-oneness with its horror, does it become clear that Changing Heaven is a sustained meditation on the themes of Wuthering Heights. Just as the child Ann Frear discovered the story of Heathcliff and Cathy during a Toronto hurricane and never recovered (as an adult she is writing a book about Wuthering Heights and weather), so the Victorian novel informs virtually every page of Urquhart's. As Ann Frear points out, there is only one scene in Wuthering Heights that registers zero on the wind scale. Similarly, Jane Urquhart's beautifully written book throbs with the storm and wind of passion and the bitter cold of its withdrawal.

Changing Heaven unpeels its solutions to the problem of writing about a writer layer by layer. It tackles not only the content of Wuthering Heights but the connection between Brontë's life and her work—the question, as Ann Frear sees it, "of how a woman so withdrawn can also be so engaged with life." In a novel remarkable for its freshness and originality, the character of Emily Brontë is the most unexpected touch of all. Utterly focused and pragmatic, she loves only two things: her imagination and her brother Branwell. Although she describes her life's work as "inventing angry love affairs," she declines these "extended tantrums" for herself. The problem with men is that they "only interfere with the inventing."

Changing Heaven presents Emily Brontë as both stunningly ordinary woman and consummate artist. The meagre facts of her life count for very little: it's her work that deserves contemplation, argument, attention. Changing Heaven is a portrait of a mind that harks back again to T. S. Eliot, who in "Tradition and Individual Talent" also wrote that emotions a poet had never experienced would serve as well as the most familiar feelings. He claimed, "It is not in his personal emotions, the emotions provoked by particular events in his life, that the poet is in any way remarkable or interesting…. The emotion of art is impersonal." Jane Urquhart's Emily Brontë would have approved. So, probably, would Jane Urquhart. It's a tough, unpopular thesis that novelists might contemplate before beginning a book about a writer.