Edna Clarke Hall

(Kent, 1879 - 1979)

Cathy and Young Heathcliff, c.1925

sepia pen and ink on paper
58 x 40 cm.
(framed 71 x 53 cm.)
in a period frame

Provenance
Denis Clarke Hall;
with Goldmark Gallery;
Private collection, UK.

Born Edna Waugh in 1879, she attended the Slade School of Fine Art in London between 1894 and 1899. Fifty years after Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, publication in 1847. A young Edna Clarke Hall would read the novel for the first time, becoming relentlessely entwined within Brontë’s fictional world, and her own imagined visions of it.

Hall’s endless sketches of scenes from Wuthering Heights served as respite from her loneliness and unhappy marriage. Edna used her own body as the model for both Catherine and Heathcliff. ‘I sat for myself,’ in this, she physically became both characters, imagining an entry point into their tumultuous, windswept world and playing with gender and performance. Edna felt that she was inside the novel. in her memoirs, she would write: ‘I lived the characters of Heathcliff and Catherine myself, I simply was them.’ In an echo of Catherine’s own words.