Creating a village

My first novel, now safely buried in a box, had too many problems to list. A major one was a lack of setting, and the rules that setting engenders. At that time, I didn’t know Jane Austen’s advice to a niece who aspired to write: ‘Three or four families in a country village is the very thing to work on.’ And had I known it, I would have argued that my novel was set in a city. But properly understood, a village can be very useful to organising almost any story.

Two first novels suggest the possibilities of a ‘village’: Emily Brontë’s , published in 1847,, published in 1952. The differences between the two are many and striking. follows the fortunes of the Earnshaw family over two generations and shows how these fortunes are changed by Heathcliff, the orphan boy of mysterious origins. In , Ellison follows his unnamed narrator over several years as he makes his way from home to college to New York. What the two novels share is a fidelity to their very different settings and to the rules of those settings.