Changing Heaven: A Novel (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Urquhart's second novel (after The Whirlpool ) is a piercingly beautiful tale of obsession, adultery, murder, ghosts and the afterlife, told in sensuous prose. Ann Frear, an Emily Bronte scholar at a Toronto university, has an affair with married art historian Arthur Woodruff, who is obsessed with Tintoretto. When she discovers he's not interested in commitment, Ann flees to England and rents a cottage on the moors, where she imagines Heathcliff and Catherine roaming as in Bronte's Wuthering Heights . An English farmer rescues her from brokenhearted despair, and a final rendezvous with Arthur in Venice seals their doomed romance. This conventional plot is entwined with an otherworldly narrative about Arianna Ether (nee Polly Smith), a parachutist who is in love with treacherous fellow hot-air balloonist Jeremy Unger. When Arianna dies in a crash in 1900, she goes to heaven and meets the ghost of Emily Bronte, an opinionated chatterbox; their decades of spectral conversations eventually move into the present and intersect with Ann's tortured romance. Urquhart has fashioned an intoxicating fiction in which wind, light and weather are palpable presences, mirroring the characters' psychic energies and the moods of Mother Earth.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

A curious blend of fantasy and romance, this second novel by Canadian author Urquhart ( The Whirlpool , LJ 4/15/90) clearly aims for magical realism. Ill-fated hot-air balloonist Arianna Esther (nee Polly) loses her life during a stunt and haunts the rest of the novel. Her story is interspersed with that of Ann, teacher and Wuthering Heights fan, who carries on a thwarted clandestine affair with Arthur, a passionate Tintoretto scholar. The ghosts and howling wind add atmosphere but not much substance, and the various sad stories never quite coalesce.
- Ann H. Fisher, Radford P.L., Va.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: David R. Godine Publisher; First Edition. states edition (February 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 087923895X
• ISBN-13: 978-0879238957
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.8 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,913,018 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars beautifully written, March 25, 2000

By	Sasha (Toronto, Canada) - See all my reviews

Jane Urquhart has created yet another masterpiece. this is the third Urquhart novel i've read, and this brillinat author never ceases to captivate my imagination with her beautiful, poetic prose. this is the story of several seemingly unrelated characters who grow and develop before the reader, and as you get deeper into the story, their lives are inevitably intertwined in peculiar and fascinating ways. the main characters are a turn-of-the-century baloonist; the young Emily Bronte; a woman in the midst of a troubled love-affair; and the man that connects the pieces in this intriguing puzzle. the main themes in this exquisitely written novel are the loves and passions that bring the characters to a common ground. they are all fascinating and eccentric, and reading about their lives and losses has definitely added to my knowledge and perspective of human nature. a must read for those fascinated by human nature and its aftermaths.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars ABSOLUTELY WORTH READING-A MUST!, August 21, 1997

By A Customer

for any classic literature fan who loves Emily Bronte, this book is excellent. The way the ghost of Emily refers to Heathcliffe as "Mr. capital H" is hysterical. This Canadian author is a rare find and I love the way she writes. Maybe one hundred years from now we'll be reading her novels in high school English classes also

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A haunting novel of temporal convergence..., October 29, 2003

By	Steven Cain (Temporal Quantum Pocket) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

This review is from: Changing Heaven (Mass Market Paperback)

THIS is the true sequel to Wuthering Heights. Not that Jane Urquhart intended it to be, but it so outstrips Return To Wuthering Heights by Anna L'Estrange that it cannot help but unwittingly assume that mantle.

Whereas L'Estrange's sequel is a fairly linear novel, which continues the saga through the lives of Heathcliffe and Catherine's descendants, Hareton and young Cathy, Urquhart gets inside Bronte's head and brings us the spirit of her creation, rather than the mere mechanics.

Urquhart's stunning grasp of Emily Bronte's psyche is echoed in Camille Paglia's own cracking assessment of Bronte and her work in the magnificent Sexual Personae. Here, in Paglia's analysis of Bronte's self-referential high romantic prose poem, she writes of how the Byronic Heathcliffe is both Bronte's own projected animus (put simplistically, her Jungian Inner Male component) and in the context of the story, Cathy's as well.

This metathesis, or literary transsexualization comes across in Urquhart's own brilliant re-weaving of the Brontean strands. Yet, such is the subtlety of Jane's unfoldment, that the female characters, including Emily Bronte (in spirit form, as is Arianna Ether) seem almost peripheral to the calculatedly one-dimensional, self-indulgent male characters. Such of course, is the history of patriarchy, in which women have traditionally been the Second Sex.

The only exception to the male group thus defined is the character Hartley, who, by comparison is an almost Shamanic figure - a man in balance, who has surrendered to the wisdom of the eternal Feminine.

I believe that Jane Urquhart has captured the elemental genius of Bronte's original work, with its relatively anarchic temporal shifting and box structure, in particular Bronte's deliberate use of the singular form of 'heaven' (in a related poem), rather than 'the heavens', which would be a more common choice when writing about the weather, the sky etc. The changing heaven is the changing Heaven, and the use of weather as a metaphor in Wuthering Heights, and therefore Changing Heaven, reminds you of the tornado in The Wizard of Oz, which again represented a vortex, connecting the worlds at the opposite ends of the labyrinth. Yin and Yang, Life and Death, Masculine and Feminine etc.

Yet, as Dorothy discovered, when you have truly found yourself, Oz is Kansas. She never left, she merely transformed. Similarly, the temporal convergence that finally connects the female divine Trinity in Jane's epic work is a simliar point of transcendence, and resolution.

I was so impressed by Changing Heaven that I even mentioned it at a pivotal point in my own impending modern gothic novel 'One Star Awake', and in my first work of non-fiction, Sirius Moonlight - concerning the suppression of the Feminine in patriarchal culture - such is the influence that Urquhart's mistresspiece has had on me - likewise, with Camille Paglia.

Even the inspired act of latching onto the Bronte poem's phrase 'changing heaven' and relating it to the absolute core of Wuthering Heights, is a measure of Jane Urquhart's own genius.

I simply cannot recommend this wonderful book highly enough.