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 me67
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.
While Emily, assisted by the occasional contribution from Anne, pursued her heroes and heroines through the tangled web of Gondal intrigues, Branwell was still working on his own chronicles of Angria. He had already been working on this project for over three years but his ingenuity in developing new storylines showed no sign of flagging. After their victory over Northangerland and his Revolutionists at the battle of Evesham, Zamorna and Fidena set about retaking and restoring order to the rest of Angria and Verdopolis. Already, though, there were suggestions that all was not well: Zamorna’s self-conceit made him a difficult partner and he was jealous of all Fidena’s successes, believing that his own role as victor was being undermined. Charles Wentworth, who had once been one of Zamorna’s greatest admirers, now mocked his pretensions thoroughly: ‘it has pleased his Majesty to be out parading through the whole night Drudgery which any Subaltern General would have done more fitly – under the idea that he was acting the Monarch Warrior’.68
Northangerland, defeated once more and in a state of mental and physical exhaustion, had retired to his country estate, Ennerdale House, where he sought the forgiveness and support of his long-suffering wife, Zenobia. Like the Duchess of Zamorna, Zenobia had had to put up with her husband’s many mistresses and his neglect of herself, so she was reluctant to take him back. However, in a scene which foreshadowed Helen Huntingdon’s decision to return and nurse her own debauched and dying husband in Anne’s second novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Zenobia devoted herself to caring for Northangerland and was rewarded by the return of some of his affection.69 It seems probable that Branwell intended Northangerland to die at this point as Zenobia, watching him sink into an unaccustomed calmness of spirit, wondered whether this change was simply the ‘prelude to another and awful change’. The manuscript, incomplete either because Branwell could not bring himself to kill his great hero or because the ending has been lost, ends with a poem definitively titled ‘PERCYS LAST SONNET’.
Cease, Mourner, cease thy sorrowing oer the Dead
for, if their Life be lost its Toils are oer
And Woe and Want shall visit them no more
Nor ever slept they in an earthly bed
Such sleep as that which lulls them dreamless laid
In the lone chambers of the eternal Shore
Where Sacred Silence seals each guarded door
Oh! Turn from tears for these thy bended head
And mourn the Dead Alive whose pleasure flies
And
Who lose the Earth from their benighted eyes,
Yet see no Heaven gleam through the rayless gloom.
These only feel the worm that never dies
The Quenchless fire – the Horrors of a Tomb!70
While Northangerland lay dying at Ennerdale, his former associates were being hunted down in Angria. Wentworth had fallen in with Henry Hastings and Charles Townshend and the three of them went on a drinking spree which eventually took them to an inn at Aynsham. There Hastings, abandoned by his companions, had become entangled with a new set of associates, led by the notorious debauchees George Ellen, esquire, and Parson Joynes. Their carousing sessions, which may have owed something to Branwell’s attendance at masonic meetings throughout the year, were chiefly taken up with inventing childish and frequently blasphemous toasts. Hastings, for instance, raised his glass and proposed
‘
The President himself contradicted such a toast swearing that He had enough to do with
In a later incident, Hector Montmorency revived Quashia who had been knocked out in a wrestling match by Parson Joynes:
he held and poured whiskey down the throat of the Ethiop swore the parson must pardon him for administering Infant Baptism But he thought they had better all be confirmed and hoped he should stand excused if he likewise/ practised upon himself Baptism for such as are of riper years!72
These scenes of debauchery, which are hardly convincing as portrayals of real life, were evidently regarded by Branwell as an opportunity to display his wit as a man of the world.
If Branwell really did kill off Northangerland at the end of October 1837, he soon found he could not write without him. Before the year was out, he began an unfinished story relating to Northangerland’s early career when, like Walter Scott’s Rob Roy, he was a simple cattle drover. More interesting, and written with a great deal more flair than his efforts at depicting low life, the story centres round Darkwall, a lonely farmhouse on the edge of the moors:
with large black walls and mossy mistal and a plantation of gloomy firs one clump of which the oldest and the highest stretched their horizontal arms above one Gable like the Genii of that desolate scene. Beyond this House its long feild walls made a line with the November sky and the path across them led on to an interminable Moor whose tracks might furnish a long days sport after Snipe or Heathcock, but no birds flew near the House except the Linnets twittering by hundreds on some wet old wall. and yet despite its loneliness this House was one of no common note in the Extensive Parish and half the fireside tales of times gone by were sure to take ‘Darkwall’ for their scene and its owners for their
Like Wuthering Heights or Wildfell Hall, Darkwall has its secrets: its owner, Mr Thurston, is a drunkard and a violent man who alternately neglects and harasses his beautiful wife, Maria, who is going to fall in love with Alexander Percy. Though the story was abandoned, it had potential which Branwell later recognized, attempting to develop it into a full-scale novel.74
Charlotte’s contribution to Angria throughout the year 1837 was negligible. In the summer holidays she wrote another volume by Charles Townshend, but again it was simply a collection of unconnected scenes rather than a developed narrative: Julia Thornton flirting with Captain Hastings, Louisa Vernon, Northangerland’s opera singer mistress, now trying to ingratiate herself with Zamorna, and yet another attack on the hypocrisy of Methodist preachers.75 Most of her effort was directed towards poetry. Robert Southey had not forbidden her to write or described her work as utterly without merit; he had advised her to write poetry for its own sake and, once she had got over the disappointment his letter had caused her, she found renewed energy. Between January 1837 and July 1838, she produced sixty poems, by far the highest number she had written in such a short time since the early days of the ‘Young Men’s Magazines’.76 Though most of them were still Angrian in context, increasingly she produced shorter, lyrical pieces, more like her sisters’ poems than the long narratives she had favoured before. Undoubtedly this change reflected the fact that her time was not her own: short poems were easier to write in the odd half hour or so of snatched leisure between lessons and supervision duties. Unlike prose narratives, which were so often interrupted and broken off, poems could be thought over and redrafted to achieve at least a measure of completeness – though the number of poems which Charlotte left unfinished suggests that even this was difficult.
Charlotte’s last extant diary fragment was written about the time she received her reply from Southey77 and thereafter she used the poems as an alternative vehicle for the expression of her frustrations and sense of isolation at Roe Head. A typical poem, later reworked as ‘The Teacher’s Monologue’ for her first publication, was written between 12 May and 15 May 1837.
The room is quiet thoughts alone
People its mute tranquillity
The yoke put off, the hard toil done
I am, as it is bliss to be,
Still and untroubled, now I see
For the first time, how soft the day
O’er waveless water and stirless tree
Silent & sunny wings its way
Now as I watch that distant hill
So faint so blue so far removed
Sweet dreams of home my heart may fill
That home where I am known & loved
It lies beyond, that azure brow
Parts me from all earth holds for me
And morn & eve my yearnings flow
Thither ward tending, changelessly …
For youth departs, & pleasure flies
And life consumes away
And youth’s rejoicing ardour dies
Beneath this drear delay
And patience weary with her yoke
Is yielding to despair
And health’s elastic spring broke
Submits to tyrant care78
In the end, however, it was not Charlotte but Anne whose spirit and health broke under the regime at Roe Head. We have no account and no hint from Anne herself of what happened, but Charlotte wrote to Ellen Nussey during the Christmas holidays of 1837 to explain:
You were right in your conjectures respecting the cause of my sudden departure – Anne continued – wretchedly ill – neither the pain nor the difficulty of breathing left her – and how could I feel otherwise than very miserable? I looked upon her case in a different light to what I could
etter – though she still requires a great deal of care – however I am relieved from my worst fears respecting her –79
Knowing how taut Charlotte’s nerves were at the time, it is easy to accept Mrs Gaskell’s verdict that Miss Wooler’s diagnosis of a common cold was correct and that Charlotte simply over-reacted to the whole situation. However, Mrs Gaskell not only placed the incident in December 1838, a year later than it actually happened, but also wrongly believed that it occurred at Dewsbury Moor, where the school relocated at the beginning of that year.80 More importantly, there is independent evidence to corroborate Charlotte’s account of the seriousness of Anne’s illness. The Reverend James La Trobe, the minister and teacher of the Moravian chapel and school at Well House in Mirfield, visited Anne several times during her illness. ‘She was suffering from a severe attack of gastric fever which brought her very low, and her voice was only a whisper; her life hung on a slender thread.’81
If Charlotte was right to be concerned about Anne’s state of health, it is even more interesting to discover that Anne’s illness seems to have been exacerbated by a religious crisis. Once she had overcome her natural shyness at meeting a total stranger, Anne was deeply grateful to James La Trobe for his visits:
I found her well acquainted with the main truths of the Bible respecting our salvation, but seeing them more through the law than the gospel, more as a requirement from God than His gift in His Son, but her heart opened to the sweet views of salvation, pardon, and peace in the blood of Christ, and she accepted His welcome to the weary and heavy laden sinner, conscious more of her not loving the Lord her God than of acts of enmity to Him, and, had she died then, I should have counted her His redeemed and ransomed child.82
Brontës Page 43
