I'm a very big fan of Victorian Literature and read Wuthering Heights for the first time last year. This novel enhances Wuthering Heights, building on Heathcliffto a point where it explains aspects of his character that appear after his return. One of my favorite aspects of the book is the question of the paranormal. It is an aspects that really sets the tone of Wuthering Heights and is mirrored well in this book. I recommend this to anyone who is a fan of Wuthering Heights as this book expands on a world that I didn't realise needed completing.

Ill Will is an attempt to answer one of the great questions raised by literature (and by one of the most interesting academics, John Sutherland) - is Heathcliff a murderer? More importantly it fills in those three years between Heathcliff running away, after hearing Catherine saying that it would 'degrade' her to marry him, and his return to Thrushcross Grange as a wealthy but heartless man. In the original novel we just have to accept the change but it was one of the things which I had a major problem with. The other one being how on earth I was meant to consider Heathcliff a romantic hero - easy enough when I was a teenager but as an adult I realised he was basically a wife-beater, and probably a rapist too. Which is a bit of a digression but, luckily, it is a question which also gets answered. When Heathcliff does run from Catherine he crosses the moors and falls in with a group of men working for a farmer on the far side of Todmorden - only a few miles but a world away in a time when travelling was unusual. He needs to run a second time when he rescues a young girl, Emily, from a beating. She seems to be able to commune with the dead, an ability met with equal shares of horror and fascination, and they begin to use this skill to pay their way over to Liverpool - where Heathcliff is in search of the truth about his origins. He plans to abandon Emily - he has no plan to saddle himself with the care of a young girl - but their lives are soon linked by lies, by guilt and by a need for each other. And she is no meek little girl - as foul-mouthed and devious as Heathcliff himself. It is what they discover in Liverpool, however, which eventually leads to both his change in fortune and the utter hardening of his personality. The boy that runs away is irreligious and angry, full of spite and profanity: the man who returns has been turned into a bitter and vindictive bully bearing all the trappings of a gentleman. I really enjoyed this book as an explanation for Heathcliff's missing years - the Heathcliff who I recognised, as an adult, as a deeply violent and unromantic figure. He began as a coarse and embittered boy - money, power and the knowledge of how he came to fit into the life of the Earnshaws turn him into a black-hearted and dangerous man.