Gondal's Queen A Novel In Verse [Paperback]

In Gondals Queen, Fannie Elizabeth Ratchford presents a cycle of eighty-four poems by Emily Jane Bront?, for the first time arranged in logical sequence, to re-create the novel in verse which Emily wrote about their beloved mystical kingdom of Gondal and its ruler, Augusta Geraldine Almeda, who brought tragedy to those who loved her.

Thanks to previous publications by Ratchford, the imaginative world of Gondal is well known not only to Bront? scholars but also to general readers. Only in the present book, however, with Emilys lovely poems restored to the setting which gave them being, can the full impact of this extraordinary literary creation be realized.

The life story of Gondals Queen, from portentous birth to tragic death, is set in a world compounded of dark Gothic romance and Byronic extravagance; yet out of it emerges not only a real country of wild moor sheep and piercingly beautiful nights but also the portrait of a real woman, whose doom was wrought not by the stars but by the clashing complications of her own nature.

In A.G.A. (the appellation most usually applied to the Queen), Emily Bront? created a personality, not a puppet reciting lovely lines. And Ratchford, in reconstructing her story, has re-affirmed the dignity, beauty, and richness of Emilys poetry.

Gondals Queen is the end of a long trail of research and literary detection which has led Ratchford to all known Bront? documentary sources. This quest was originally stimulated by curiosity over a tiny booklet signed, C. Bront?, June 29th, 1837, in the Wrenn Library at the University of Texas at Austin. Ratchfords intense and astonishingly fruitful interest in the Bront?s had its origin in her attempt to unravel the fascinating puzzle presented by this little book, which seemed to be merely a series of childish vignettes held together by a shadow of a common character and a tendency toward a unified plot.

Bit by bit, Ratchford alc(