Perhaps it owes the breath of authenticity to the conflicts in the children’s personal experience, not least the difference between the freedoms of the surrounding moorland and the more tightly controlled – and motherless – family interior of the Haworth parsonage. Like other Gondal poems by both the sisters, it inhabits the conventions of the romantic adventure-story genre in a free-spirited, independent manner, also reaching beyond our contemporary stereotype of the Brontë “story”. Alexandrina in her dungeon is visited by the North Wind who has been sent, it explains “o mourn and sigh with thee/ And tell thee of the cherished land/ Of thy nativity.” The North Wind, one of the “Gondal poems” by Anne Brontë (1820-1849), concerns the imprisoned Alexandrina Zenobia, a character Anne is said to have based on the archaeologist and explorer, Lady Hester Stanhope. Branwell and Charlotte focused on the one called Angria but, when Charlotte went away to school, the younger siblings Anne and Emily eagerly devoted themselves to the continuation of the drama in their own country, named Gondal. There were four countries in the imaginary Federation. Its role in the literary development of the three sisters must have been considerable. The game evolved into a series of written narratives, penned neatly on numerous doll-sized fragments of paper by the elder children, Branwell and Charlotte, with contributions from Emily and Anne. The Glass Town Federation (the paracosm invented by the four Brontë children), began with a box of toy soldiers given to Branwell in June 1826. Note: ‘time’ replaces ‘void’ in some texts.

Novel by emily bronte