Some artists reference books — and then there’s Kate Bush.

Since Wuthering Heights in 1978, she hasn’t just drawn inspiration from stories; she has stepped into them.

Her records are sung novels, diaries of consciousness, and reimagined myths. Emily Brontë, James Joyce, Tennyson, Henry James, Andersen, Woolf, Homer, Shakespeare, Dante — they all live within her music, characters of a single dream.

More than a reader, Kate Bush is a translator of emotion. She reads inwardly, and what emerges is melody. Each song below was born from a page, and together they form one of the most literary catalogs in modern music.

1. “Wuthering Heights” (1978)

Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë

Her debut, written at 18 after watching a BBC adaptation and reading the novel in one night. Bush gives voice to the ghost of Catherine Earnshaw, calling Heathcliff across the moors — love as torment, spirit as prison.

2. “Cloudbusting” (1985)

A Book of Dreams – Peter Reich

Based on the memoir of the son of psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, this moving song turns science and memory into myth.

Donald Sutherland plays Reich in the video — a short film of faith, loss, and invention.

3. “The Sensual World” (1989) / “Flower of the Mountain” (2011)

Ulysses – James Joyce
Bush wanted to set Molly Bloom’s monologue to music. Denied by Joyce’s estate, she reimagined it as The Sensual World.

Years later, permission granted, she re-recorded it as Flower of the Mountain, using Joyce’s words verbatim — a bridge between literature and music, syllable by syllable.

4. “The Jig of Life” (1985)

The Odyssey – Homer

Part of The Ninth Wave suite, this dialogue between a woman and her future self mirrors Odysseus’ voyage — a journey of return and self-discovery. Bush merges Homer and Jung into one inner odyssey.

5. “The Ninth Wave” (1985)

phrase from a poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

The second half of Hounds of Love borrows its title from Tennyson’s poetic metaphor for the final, devouring wave.

Bush turns it into a meditation on life, death, and rebirth — a modern Inferno sung at sea.

6. “The Infant Kiss” (1980)

The Turn of the Screw – Henry James

Inspired by the film The Innocents, based on James’s novella. Bush channels the governess’s confusion between maternal love and supernatural possession — gothic literature turned into psychological drama.

7. “The Wedding List” (1980)

La Mariée était en noir – Cornell Woolrich
Inspired by François Truffaut’s film (from Woolrich’s novel). Bush plays a vengeful widow hunting her husband’s killers — a noir ballad of grief and revenge.

8. “Blow Away (For Bill)” (1980)

Othello – William Shakespeare
Includes the line “Put out the light, then put out the light.”
A meditation on mortality and remembrance — Shakespearean melancholy reframed as musical elegy.

9. “In Search of Peter Pan” (1978)

Peter Pan – J. M. Barrie

Playful and wistful, the song reflects the wish to escape time and mortality. Bush once said Barrie “understood the relationship between parents and children better than anyone.”

10. “Oh England My Lionheart” (1978)

inspired by the war poetry of Rupert Brooke and Wilfred Owen

A lyrical portrait of England’s vanished glory, echoing the patriotic melancholy of early twentieth-century verse.

11. “Experiment IV” (1986)

inspired by science fiction of J. G. Ballard and Ray Bradbury

Bush imagines scientists weaponizing sound — dystopian, prophetic, Orwellian. A three-minute science-fiction short story.

12. “Under Ice” / “Hello Earth” (1985)

echoes of Inferno – Dante Alighieri

Part of The Ninth Wave suite, these songs trace a descent and transcendence that parallel Dante’s journey through hell and back — theology turned sonic.

13. “The Red Shoes” (1993)

The Red Shoes – Hans Christian Andersen

Bush retells the fairy tale of the cursed dancer — a fable about artistic obsession. Art as gift, art as curse.

14. “A Coral Room” (2005)

evoking T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf

A song of loss and remembrance. Its flowing, fragmented imagery recalls The Waves and The Waste Land — pure consciousness rendered in sound.

15. “Joanni” (2005)

legends of Joan of Arc / The Song of Roland

Bush reimagines Joan as a symbol of faith and resistance, bridging medieval myth and modern devotion.

16. “Snowed in at Wheeler Street” (2011)

Orlando – Virginia Woolf

A duet with Elton John about lovers meeting across centuries — reincarnation, love, and time. Woolf with synthesizers.

17. “The Magician” (1979, unreleased)

The Magus – John Fowles

Recorded for the film The Magician of Lublin (from Isaac Bashevis Singer), but conceptually linked to Fowles’s novel of illusion and power.

The Reader Who Sings

Kate Bush writes as if she were turning the pages of the human soul. Her records are novels; her characters are voices. In Wuthering Heights, she is Cathy; in The Sensual World, Molly Bloom; in Cloudbusting, Peter Reich; in The Infant Kiss, Henry James’s haunted governess.

In her world, literature breathes, sings, and dances — because for Kate Bush, words were never just text. They were spells.

“Books don’t just inspire me,” she once said. “They open a door — and I just walk in.”