‘Epic’ into Image: Wuthering Heights and the Gondal poems

Abstract

Only a month or so before the three Brontës decided to submit novels for publication, Emily was still deeply involved with Gondal. ‘We intend sticking firmly by the rascals’, i.e. the Gondal characters, she wrote in 1845. (It was a declaration more appropriate to her own interest than to Anne’s.) The poems show that she remained loyal while Wuthering Heights was being submitted for publication and even after the book had appeared. The ‘thirst for things abandoned now’ of an 1846 poem may be an inexplicit reference to Gondal, and the poem itself shows that Gondal was not at that time abandoned. There is a great deal in the prose notes about Gondal, nothing about Wuthering Heights.