Before Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte spent decades inventing an island called Gondal
Emily Bronte published one novel, died at 30, and was mocked by critics who found her characters coarse. Behind Wuthering Heights lay a private universe: from about thirteen she and her sister Anne built the imaginary island of Gondal, with a ruling queen whose passions look very much like Catherine Earnshaw's.
She was born on 30 July 1818 in Thornton, near Bradford, the fifth of six children of Patrick Bronte, a curate from a poor Irish family, and Maria Branwell, a Penzance merchant's daughter. The family soon moved to Haworth in the Pennines, a village whose water was later found to be tainted by its crowded graveyard. Her mother died in 1821, when Emily was three, and an aunt, Elizabeth Branwell, stayed on to raise the children.
School went badly. At six Emily was the youngest pupil at the Clergy Daughters' School at Cowan Bridge, a place of poor food, harsh discipline and disease; her two eldest sisters caught typhoid there and died of tuberculosis at home in 1825. Afterwards the children were taught mostly at home, reading freely from their father's library. Patrick was distant and eccentric, reputedly carrying a loaded gun at all times, and the siblings, who kept his Irish accent, had no friends in the village.
They made their own company. A box of toy soldiers given to Branwell grew into the invented realms of Glass Town and Angria, complete with miniature books for the soldiers. Emily and Anne, whom a friend called almost twins, broke away to create Gondal, which occupied them for the rest of their lives. Most of it is lost, but Emily's Gondal poems survive, full of Byronic, doomed figures who anticipate Heathcliff.
Every spell away from Haworth wore her down. She lasted only months at Roe Head school, where Charlotte feared homesickness might kill her. Teaching at Law Hill in Halifax in 1838 meant seventeen-hour days, and she said she preferred the house dog to her pupils. A stay in Brussels with Charlotte in 1842 left her unhappy and teased. At home she did chores, taught herself German and became a skilled pianist. Wuthering Heights appeared in 1847 under the name Ellis Bell, and she died a year later, before its standing as a classic arrived.
Source: Emily Brontë
