SOURCE: "Inside Stories," in Saturday Night, Vol. 105, No. 2, March, 1990, pp. 53-5.

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...