Emily Brontë’s Udolphics: The Gondal and Non-Gondal Poems

For many critics, Emily Brontë’s novels model a new mode of Victorian “New Gothic” (e.g. Villette, Wuthering Heights) that resist or satirize traditional Gothic themes, while her comparatively neglected poems seem unremarkable or juvenile in their overuse of Romantic, “Old Gothic” clichés. This chapter revises that reception, bridging the gap between Emily Brontë’s prose and poetry through a focus on her Gondal and non-Gondal poems. Tracing the strong influence of Gothic romances that permeated the Brontë household through periodicals and print culture, it shows how Emily Brontë’s verses innovatively embody a Radcliffean “Gothics of the everyday” through her superimposition of a violent, foreign Gothic landscape onto the Haworth moors of northern England. This illuminates commonalities between Brontë’s poetry and later Victorian poets. Reading Brontë’s poetry of the 1840s alongside the prison lyrics and confessionals of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, and G. M. Hopkins compels us to recognize a significant corpus of Victorian poetry infused and imprinted with Gothic forms.