1. The Final Bound from Gondal: Emily Brontë's Poetry

Emily Brontë, according to Charlotte, did not ‘draw well’ with Monsieur Heger, their teacher in Brussels. Yet he was a pioneer in his own field and made some intuitive comments about her mind. He described her to Mrs Gaskell as, potentially, ‘a great navigator. Her powerful reason would have deduced new spheres of discovery from the knowledge of the old’; adding that if she had written a ‘history’, her view would have ‘dominated over the reader’, whatever his ‘cooler perceptions of its truth’.1 Wuthering Heights, in fact, can be seen as that dominating history, that new sphere of discovery, deduced from the old sphere of her knowledge and imagination, as it was expressed in her poems. The final bound between the world of the poems and that of the novel, is not solely literary and technical, but also emotional and psychological. She was no longer content to be the omnipotent controller of her material, and became instead a ‘navigator’, explorer and discoverer. At a key point in her development, which I would locate around the time of writing the famous lines known as ‘The Prisoner’ (H.190),2 the visionary mystic within her emerged from its protective daydreamer's chrysalis. As in the lines

she parts from her earlier self. And here, as throughout her poems, there is no essential distinction between Gondal and non-Gondal subjects, in so far as they are all ‘personal’ to her imaginative experience. None of Emily Brontë's prose juvenilia remain, though she was writing the ‘Life of the Emperor Julius’ up to the point of beginning Wuthering Heights. But in any case, it is the emerging poetic quality of her mind, more than the content of her fantasy world, which is most relevant to her novel.

In Gondal, with her sister Anne, she evolved an epic-heroic fantasy in verse and prose. Wuthering Heights certainly has roots