At one point recently, Lynda and I were talking about the Demish poetry anthology that she has planned, and I was telling her about Emily Brontë's Gondal poetry. Gondal was an island imagined by Emily and Anne Brontë, which remained vital in Emily's imagination until close to her death. Some of her best-known poems are actually written in the voice of one of the lords, queens, fugitives, rebels, lovers, or mystics of Gondal. Alas, the prose literature of Gondal no longer exists, unlike the tales of Charlotte and Branwell Brontë's shared kingdom, Angria. Forties scholar Frances Ratchford stitched the poetry in to a single epic narrative in Gondal's Queen by interpreting poetry written under three different personae as being about one character.

There's a copy of the Complete Poems of Emily Brontë (1908) in the Internet Archive, which I found courtesy of the BrontëBlog. The poems have been included in the form in which they were edited by Emily for their first book of poetry (which they paid to publish and which sold two copies), by Charlotte for later publication and by the volume's editor Clement Shorter - ie, bereft of Gondal annotations. The British Library on-line images collection has images of some of the Brontë manuscripts, including the first page of Emily's Gondal poems notebook. Some of the poems are posted on-line here. An article by Michael JA Howe about the Brontës' juvenilia (mostly Angria) is on-line at Fathom.

Labels: Emily Brontë, imaginary countries, poetry

posted by Alison at 22:15   comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments