As a family - their mother dies very young - and they have an extraordinary literary
childhood, so that their father gives them the run of the library and together they collaborate
on these two extraordinary fantasy worlds, Angria and Gondal and there's an amazing little
illustration by Emily Brontë. She draws them, working together on these fantasy worlds they
create - they create little magazines, they have drawings, they have maps, they have extraordinary
violent political events and together the two younger ones - that's Emily and Anne - they
create a world called Gondal and then the two older ones, Charlotte and Branwell - they
create a world called Angria and they live in it in the most profound way, I think - throughout
their adolescent years and into their early twenties, creating and elaborating these fantasy
lands in which all sorts of things that couldn't happen in the everyday world can happen. It
was very often quite violently erotic, often very military and they lived them in the most
passionate and excited way.
So, this is Emily Brontë's diary paper and it's dated June 26th 1837 and it's a lovely
piece, because she's actually included a sketch of herself and Anne seated at the dining room
table and you can see all the papers around them. She always starts out by setting the scene,
so she gives us an account of where each member of the family is at the time.
So we know that Charlotte's working in Anne's room and that Branwell's reading to her and
that her and Anne are sitting at the dining room table and they're working on the Gondal
saga. It's evident from the diary paper that Emily's fantasy world of Gondal is every bit
as real to her as any of these domestic events that she's kind of chronicling in this diary
paper, so it's a weird mixture of fact and fantasy, so in the paper, Emily's telling
us about events in Gondal and she's talking about the emperors and empresses of Gondal
and Gaaldine preparing to depart from Gaaldine to Gondal to prepare for the Coronation which
will be on the 12th of July and then she goes on to say, ‘Queen Victoria ascended the
throne this month’, so clearly events that were taking place in the real world, were
having an influence on events in Gondal in the fantasy world.
She's also reporting conversations as they take place - a quite mundane conversations
- for example, her aunt has clearly walked into the room and said, "Come, Emily, it's
past 4 o'clock” and Emily replies, “Yes, Aunt", so I don't know what the significance
of 4 o'clock is - maybe it's time to clear the table for tea - but, so you get these
little conversations reported in the papers.
It's quite interesting because when Branwell was a child, his father bought him some toy
soldiers as a birthday present and this was really the beginning of the Brontës fantasy
world. Each of the children adopted one of the toy soldiers and gave him a name and a
character and they would create little plays around the toy soldiers, which continued as
they got older and they got more and more complex and sophisticated. So they invested
these soldiers with character and they went from acting out little plays to writing them
in these tiny books which were intended to be small enough for the toy soldiers to read, if you like.
During Charlotte's time as a teacher at Roe Head School, near Mirfield, she kept what
we call The Roe Head journal and it's not a journal in the normal sense of the word
- it's a series of jottings, poetry and prose, along with accounts of what is happening at
school and it's very clear that Charlotte was completely absorbed with the fantasy world
of Angria and longing to escape into that world and from the realities of her duties
as a school teacher - and you get accounts of her being completely absorbed and then
being jolted back to reality by one of her pupils demanding something of her. You get
all kinds of accounts of that happening in the journal.
There's a really remarkable bit of writing that Charlotte does when she's a young teacher
at a school and she says it's been the end of a very long day. She's obviously tired
out and she starts to fantasise about one of these imaginary worlds, about Angria and
it's this very erotic, a rather exciting, sexually charged kind of scene set in Africa,
and then suddenly someone knocks on the door and brings in a plate of butter and she just
moves seamlessly from one world to the next and so often I think, in the earlier writing
these two things are separated and gradually, as they refine their art and so, although
they don't write many novels, by the time they're writing them, they're really really
experienced writers - they've tried lots of different genres, they've experimented. It's
been like a literary kind of workshop - the four of them working together and so by the
time they're writing Wuthering Heights or Jane Eyre, they're very sophisticated users
of those forces and bringing them together into a fiction that can speak to all that
excitement and passion - at the same time make it disciplined and realistic too.