Having published her most novel under a male pseudonym (“Ellis Bell”) to escape the prejudice of male critics, Emily knew this fight all too well.
Cathy is by no means the strongest female lead in the collective Brontë works, but she embodies the spirit of Augusta, fighting to survive in a cutthroat patriarchal society. Like her prototype, Cathy is as wild as the environment she inhabits, and, like Augusta, breaks the hearts of men who yearn for her. It is easy to see how, years later, this regal woman would be seamlessly remodelled into Wuthering Heights’ wilful Cathy. The author had a deep attachment to her heroine who, like her creator, loved her wild and rugged kingdom with its jagged landscape swathed in heather. One dies of a broken heart, another is driven to suicide. After taking lovers, she drives them to exile or imprisonment. She is described as a strong-minded Amazonian beauty who is ruthless in her personal and political relationships. Like Victoria, Augusta would also fight to protect and expand her empire. Not only is the content sensational but also, in a revolutionary move for the era, Gondal is led by a warrior queen.Ĭoinciding with the coronation of Queen Victoria, Queen Augusta Geraldine Almeda ascends toGondal’s throne in 1837.
Her verses are fraught with love affairs between rulers and scenes of exile and death in rotting dungeons. The siblings would plot and act out stories wherever and whenever they could, whether huddled around the fireplace at the Parsonage or on a train journey across the Yorkshire countryside.įor Emily, this imaginary space was an exercise in escapism. Gondal was a Romeo-and-Juliet-inspired saga, with four dynasties battling for both heart and kingdom. As teenagers, they crafted a make-believe kingdom set in a familiar, thunderous Yorkshire landscape called Gondal.įrom 1832 until their deaths in the late 1840s, the pair would escape to their world and immerse themselves in a fantasy of castles, craggy mountaintops and howling winds. It is the earliest documented reference to Cathy’s famous appearance at Lockwood’s bedroom window, where, after roaming the dark and icy moor, the ghostly heroine wails and claws at her childhood bedroom window – “let me in, let me in!”īut, Wuthering Heights’s main origins lie in a collaborative partnership Brontë had with her sister Anne. Aged 11, she had bold visions about what would become key plot details of Wuthering Heights now housed in the Brontë Parsonage Museum, a little picture drawn by Brontë in 1829 depicts a smashed mullioned window, with a hand reaching through. It was better to forge a myth than admit that a rational person could write such things.Įmily had, however, been imagining and writing such things since she was a child. In the preface to the second edition, Charlotte Brontë leaped to her sister’s defence, calling her an innocent, primal child of the moors. After Emily’s death a year later, Wuthering Heights continued to disturb readers with its violent, graphic content. Its characters were described as “demons in human form” and some called for the book to be discarded or burned. After publication in 1847, Wuthering Heights unsettled and outraged critics.