Brontës (58 page)

Aunt. come Emily its past 4 o'clock

Emily Yes Aunt

Anne \Well/ do you intend to write in the evening

Emily well what think you (we agreed to go out 1st to make sure if we get into a humor we may Stay [out? in?] )

After further discussion a final postscript was squeezed up the right-hand margin of the drawing:

I guess that this day 4 years we shall all be in this drawing room comfortable I hope it may be so

Anne guesses we shall all be gone somewhere together comfortable we hope it may be either
⁵²

The sole external event which percolated through into the diary paper was the accession of the eighteen-year-old Queen Victoria. Even then, one suspects that the interest was solely because the romantic accession of a young girl, the same age as Emily herself, was the very stuff of Gondal – and may indeed have inspired the forthcoming coronation in the imaginary kingdom.

The diary paper reveals that Emily and Anne were perfectly
au fait
with what was happening in Angria; they must have read Branwell's work as soon as he produced it, as the events they mention were entirely topical. Without the prose stories of Gondal, which have been lost or destroyed, it is next to impossible to re-create that world.
⁵³
However, it is clear from the poems which survive that Gondal owed much to Angria both in the general sweep of events and scenes and in the detail of character and plot.

We have some clues to its layout. In her copy of
A Grammar of General Geography
by the Reverend J. Goldsmith, Emily carefully inserted in minuscule script the names and brief details of some of the imaginary places in a gazetteer of real ones. We learn that Gondal was a large island in the north Pacific and that Regina was its capital. Just as Branwell and Charlotte had moved on from the Verdopolitan Union to conquer and found the new kingdom of Angria, Emily and Anne had expanded into new territory. Gaaldine was ‘a large Island newly discovered in the south pacific' which was divided up into a large province, Zedora, governed by a Viceroy, and a number of kingdoms, Alexandra, Almedore, Elseraden, Zelona and Ula.
⁵⁴
The last of these, in a manner reminiscent of the early days of the four Genii, was ruled by four sovereigns.

Echoes of Angria occur constantly. There is the same sharp contrast between the harsh climate and scenery in the north, with its moorlands and snow-capped mountains, and the soft, wooded landscape of the south. Names, and possibly characters too, are borrowed: a young pair of lovers, for instance, are called Alexander and Zenobia after Alexander Percy and his
third wife.
⁵⁵
The lives and destinies of these characters, who are all of aristocratic or royal birth, are closely bound up in the fate of their kingdoms. Like the Angrians, they endure wars, civil wars and revolutions: Gondal in 1837 saw the siege and capture of Tyndarum and victory for the kingdom of Almedore, which, like Angria, displayed the crimson ensign.
⁵⁶
Even in death, whether pining for a long-lost lover or fatally wounded in battle, they are, like Mary Percy, children of the earth, torn reluctantly from the beauties of nature.

And there he lay among the bloom

His red blood dyed a deeper hue

Shuddering to feel the ghastly gloom

That coming Death around him threw –

Sickening to think one hour would sever

The sweet, sweet world and him for ever

To think that twilight gathering dim

Would never pass away to him –
⁵⁷

The format of the stories, we can assume, was much the same as for Angria. Emily tells us in her diary paper that she was working on the first volume of a life of Augusta Almeda, a fact that was reflected in the number of poems she produced about Augusta at this time.
⁵⁸
This is consistent with Branwell's recent preoccupation with writing a life of Alexander Percy in several volumes, which also spawned many poems. Like Branwell, Emily had the freedom to pursue her imaginings and capture them on paper and, if the number of poems written in 1837 is anything to go by, she, like him, was the dominant member of the partnership. Anne, like Charlotte, was away from home too much to contribute anything more than the occasional poem.

Though Gondal clearly owed much to Angria, there were subtle differences in style and character which seem to have arisen, in part at least, because this was a world created and directed by women. Warfare and politics were the backdrop for all the stories, but this was not a man's world in which women were simply the beautiful playthings of leisure time. Gondal women play a far greater and more active role than their counterparts in Angria and from Queen Augusta Almeda downwards they are strong-minded, ambitious and resourceful. The passive beauties, literally dying for a kind look from Zamorna, are unknown in Gondal.

Nor was the Gondal landscape simply a re-creation of the moorlands of Haworth. Though frequently bleak and undoubtedly hill country, Haworth does not have the snow-capped mountains or ruined castles which are features of Gondal.
⁵⁹
These are borrowed from the novels and ballads of Sir Walter Scott. The wilderness of the northern mountains reflects the Scottish Highlands and the lusher wooded hills of the south conjure up the richer beauty of the Borders. Scott's influence on the Brontës was extremely marked, so much so that Branwell paused at the beginning of a new chapter he was writing in December 1837, to comment on it:

Among all the descriptions I have read I do not recollect one to me more beautiful than that in the commencement of the Tales of My Landlord which describes the Burial-place of the Covenanters at the Valley Head among the lonely Lowland Hills, and I like it so much because there is not about it that selection of the sublime or beautiful in Nature wherewith to seize the mind independantly of power in the writer or of sentiment in his subject for exepting in the Grave stones themselves half buried it is only the picture of one among many ‘lone vales of green Bracken' with a rude ill cultivated Country below and a brown fern Hidden brook within and dull stony swells around and a Marshy monotonous Moor beyond But I born and bred upon the Hill sides want no more of the great or striking to make me adore that discription for I feel enough of the Associations called up at sight of those linnet peopled Hills and well indeed the quiet nook of Grave stones tells me of times when the perils of Life and the sternness of man fitly accorded with the Moors and Mosses of their Mountain Land.
⁶⁰

These sentiments were certainly shared by Emily and Anne, though probably not by Charlotte, who had always had a hankering for the exotic. Branwell was obviously getting at his older sister when he continued:

I would doubt the genius of that writer who loved more to dwell upon Indian Palm Groves or Genii palaces than on the Wooded Manors and cloudy skies of England So when I see upon that page the reflection of objects which I have always been surrounded with I must the more delight in the description itself and in the Noble Head that framed it for it shews me both its own Sacred Grave yard and what I have only to lift my eyes from the pages to look on
⁶¹

Walter Scott had always been one of Emily's passions: as long ago as December 1827, when she was a child of nine, she had chosen him for her
chief man and Arran for her island for the play of‘Tales of the Islanders'. Now she and Anne borrowed the Scottish scenery of his novels for Gondal, and adapted his romantic stories and his characters. There is a strong preponderance of Scottish names among the heroes and heroines of Gondal and Gaaldine. In addition to references in the poems and diary papers, there are at least three extant lists of Gondal characters, scrawled haphazardly on fragments of paper and on the backs of poems. Among the names are Ronald Stew[a]rt and his wife Flora, Una Campbell, Lucia MacElgin, Halbert Clifford, Archibald Muray and Helen Douglas.
⁶²

Another significant Scottish influence, particularly on Emily, was David Moir, whose poetry was published extensively in
Blackwood's Magazine
under the pseudonym ‘Delta'. In terms of subject, style and treatment, his work struck a responsive chord in Emily. Like her, he was frequently moved to rapture by the beauties of nature and included descriptive passages in almost all his poems. Like her, he had a predilection for graveside laments and elegiac stanzas: in his spare and deceptively simple style, with his fondness for words such as ‘drear' and ‘stirless', one can see a model for much of Emily's own poetry. Indeed, complete lines, even whole poems, are occasionally echoed in her verse and his ballad tales of Scottish history and the deeds of Douglas set the scene for many Gondal lyrics and stories.
⁶³

As in the novels and ballads of Scott and Delta, and indeed, in Angria, Emily and Anne's Gondal creations live in stirring times. However, on the admittedly fragile evidence of the poems alone, it appears that the personal relationships between the characters, rather than the grand scheme of things, is the dominant theme. Emily and Anne clearly shared with their sister a romantic interest in the affairs of the heart, but its manifestation is very different. Charlotte's love affairs are nearly all one-sided, the women, whether the Marchioness of Douro, Mina Laury or Mary Percy, being so abjectly in love with Zamorna that they are his slaves, dependent on his whims and caprices for their happiness. Zamorna himself, despite the fact that Charlotte was more than a little in love with him, is a distinctly unpleasant character in his personal life, treating his wives and mistresses with an amused and cynical contempt and accepting their homage as his natural right. It is difficult to see why he exerted such an irresistible spell over his women, including Charlotte.

By contrast, Emily and Anne's lovers are more equal and, like Scott's lovers, are brave, passionate and faithful unto death. The scenario of
Old Mortality
, for instance, where Henry Morton and Edith are separated by political loyalties, which result in Morton being banished for so many years
that Edith believes him to be dead, is repeated many times in Gondal.
⁶⁴
In that world, love is often the result of the close sympathy arising out of growing up together, developing gradually and usually because of separation, into the passion of adulthood. Heathcliff and Catherine are prefigured in Gondal stories some ten years before their creator put pen to paper to write
Wuthering Heights
. The inevitable separation as one or the other leaves to seek his or her fortune or, more usually, becomes the victim of politics and is exiled or imprisoned, inspired poem after poem. Longing for the loved one and the native land, grief sinking to despair at separation and mourning when death intervenes are the principal themes. In spare and simple language, as different as it is possible to be from the frequently turgid and hyperbolical versification of their sister, Emily and Anne created a haunt-ingly elegiac mood for Gondal. Typical of these is a poem written by Anne at Haworth at the end of January 1838, a few days after her eighteenth birthday. Alexandrina Zenobia, imprisoned in a southern dungeon, is comforted by the sound of the wind.

That wind is from the North, I know it well.

No other breeze could have so wild a swell.

Now deep \and/ loud it thunders round my cell,

      Then faintly dies,

      And softly sighs,

And moans and murmers mournfully

I know its language thus it speaks to me –

‘I have passed over thy own mountains dear,

Thy northern mountains – and they still are free,

Still lonely, wild, majestic, bleak, and drear,

And stern, and lovely, as they used to be

When thou a young enthusiast,

As wild and free as they,

O'er rocks and glens and snowy heights,

Didst often love to stray.

I've blown the wild untrodden snows

In whirling eddies from their brows,

And I have howled in caverns wild

Where thou, a joyous mountain child,

Didst dearly love to be.

The sweet world is not changed, but Thou

Art pining in a dungeon now,

Where thou must ever be;

No voice but mine can reach thine ear,

And Heaven has kindly sent me here,

To mourn and sigh with thee,

And tell the[e] of the cherished land

Of thy nativity.'
⁶⁵

It is tempting to see the recurring pictures of dungeons and captivity as reflecting Anne's own feelings at being confined to Roe Head, particularly as the sound of the wind also conjured up visions of home and Angria to Charlotte.
⁶⁶
This cannot be taken too far, however, as the same image occurs just as frequently in Emily's poems even though she was in full enjoyment of her liberty at home. For Emily's prisoners, it is not just the natural world which has the power to console: the great comforter – and one which all the young Brontës recognized – was the imagination.

I'll come when thou art sadest

laid alone in the darkend room

When the mad days mirth has vanished

And the smile of joy is banished

From evenings chilly gloom

I[']ll come when the hearts real feeling

Has entire unbiassed sway

And my influence oer thee stealing

greif deepening, joy congealing

Shall bear thy soul away

Listen 'tis just the hour

The awful time for thee

dost thou not feel upon thy Soul

A Flood of strange sensations roll

Forunners of a sterner power

Heralds of me
⁶⁷

Again, it is tempting to regard this poem as a personal statement by Emily, describing the visitation of imagination as if it had some sort of quasi-mystical external embodiment. It is comparable to Charlotte's diary fragments written at Roe Head and it is clear from many of Emily's other poems that evening was the time she habitually devoted to the imagination and her writings. While the poem may have been based on personal experience, it almost certainly belongs to the Gondal cycle: it has the initial O at the top of the manuscript, which usually indicates a Gondal pseudonym, and the reference to ‘mad days mirth' seems an unlikely description of Emily's own life.