Leonie Swann’s Three Bags Full is layered with literary allusions, drawing on canonical works of literature to enrich its satirical crime narrative. Chief among these intertexts are Emily Brontë’s Gothic classic Wuthering Heights, Shakespeare’s Othello, and Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer—three works that share preoccupations with obsession, transgression, and the darker recesses of the human soul.

Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel Wuthering Heights is a foundational Gothic romance defined by destructive passion, revenge, and supernatural intrusion. Its central figures, Catherine and Heathcliff, are consumed by an obsessive love that defies social convention and reverberates tragically across two generations. Brontë’s bleak Yorkshire moors, her use of ghostly visitation, and her exploration of the porous boundary between the living and the dead have made the novel a touchstone for later meditations on love beyond death. In Three Bags Full, Heathcliff’s tortured cry after Catherine’s death (“I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!” [267]), read to the flock by Rebecca, gives Miss Maple insight into humans that starts the flock down the path toward the truth about George’s death. 

Shakespeare’s Othello, referenced by one of the main sheep’s names, offers a very different but complementary meditation on love, jealousy, and manipulation. The tragedy traces how Iago’s insinuations corrode Othello’s trust in Desdemona, transforming devotion into murderous suspicion. The play is preoccupied with the fragility of reputation, the ease with which language can distort perception, and the fatal consequences of misreading signs. Othello’s downfall hinges on his inability to read others accurately—a theme that connects to Swann’s novel, in which the sheep’s success depends on observation, evidence, and the interpretation of behavior.

Maturin’s 1820 Gothic novel Melmoth the Wanderer, again referenced through the name of a sheep, extends this lineage into more explicitly supernatural territory. Maturin’s titular figure, having bargained his soul for extended life, wanders the earth seeking someone willing to take his place, and the novel’s nested narratives of suffering, temptation, and damnation exemplify the late Gothic’s fascination with the soul as a bargaining chip. Maturin’s work probes the limits of endurance and the moral consequences of transgression, offering a bleak counterpoint to the more Romantic soul-longing of Brontë. By naming the wayward sheep in the novel Melmoth, Swann imparts an undercurrent of despair, loneliness, and hard-earned wisdom to the character.

Together, these three texts furnish Swann’s novel with a rich hinterland of allusion. Rebecca’s readings introduce the sheep to human ideas of soul, jealousy, and damnation, which they interpret with pragmatic literalism—Maude, for instance, concludes that a soul must reside in one’s sense of smell. The juxtaposition of these canonical works with ovine logic sharpens the novel’s comedy while foregrounding its central question: What, exactly, distinguishes human meaning-making from animal perception?