Gondal (fictional country)

None of the prose fiction now survives but poetry still exists, mostly in the form of a manuscript donated to the British Museum in 1933; as do diary entries and scraps of lists.

Early on they had played with their older siblings Charlotte and Branwell in the imaginary country and game of Angria, which featured the Duke of Wellington and his sons as the heroes.

As in the case of Angria, Gondal has its origins in the Glasstown Confederacy, an earlier imaginary setting created by the siblings as children.

Charlotte wrote: Branwell came to our door with a box of soldiers Emily & I jumped out of bed and I snat[c]hed up one & exclaimed this is the Duke of Wellington it shall be mine!!

[Wellington was the current Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and he had defeated the French leader Napoléon Bonaparte at the famous Battle of Waterloo.]

The only surviving remnants of the Gondal works are made up of poems, diary entries and some occasional memory aids such as lists of names and characteristics.

Gaaldine is subject to Gondal, which may be related to the period in which the stories were written, the early nineteenth century, when Britain was expanding its empire.

It is believed that the stories about them, all now lost, were filled with melodrama and intrigue, and that Anne Brontë used characters that her sister Emily did not.

She had several lovers, including Alexander of Elbë, Fernando De Samara, and Alfred Sidonia of Aspin Castle, all of whom died.

[9] In most cases, Emily destroyed her notes after transcribing the poems into fair-copy manuscript, and where draft versions survive they show only minor differences.

The non-Gondal notebook was discovered in 1926 by Mr. Davidson Cook and reproduced in the Shakespeare Head edition of Emily's poems.