LA REGINA DI GONDAL: A PHANTASY SAGA BY EMILY BRONTË
A review by Maddalena De Leo
An absolute first in the Brontë field comes from author Emiliano Vitali, who has reconstructed with meticulous care and detailed information the Gondal saga, conceived by Emily Brontë in collaboration with her sister Anne, initially in adolescence and then continued by her alone throughout her life. Together, the two created a world of fantasy and adventure to contrast with that of their older siblings Charlotte and Branwell (the Angria series), drawing inspiration from two imaginary islands located in the north Pacific Ocean, one called Gondal and the other, smaller, called Gaaldine, a colony of the former and a still unexplored land. On these desolate and wild islands, the two sisters imagined a succession of bloody wars and extreme passions, tormented love affairs and terrible revenge.
Until now, only the many poems and various fragments of Emily Brontë's so-called "Gondal Cycle" were known, as the prose version, perhaps destroyed during the author's lifetime, had never been available. Consequently, reconstructing the cycle's plot and its saga solely from the poems has always been a difficult and ambitious undertaking, as logically organizing the adventures of the various characters who populate it has challenged the skills of Brontë scholars and experts for over a century. The only attempt was made in 1955 by Fannie E. Ratchford with her’ Gondal's Queen: A Novel in Verse’, an essay that reconstructed, in narrative form and in sequence, a possible plot that could serve as a common thread throughout the poems. The perfectly credible essay has been the primary source of information for this hypothetical reconstruction to date, where battles, kings and queens, victories and defeats follow one another around a single central character, the Queen of Gondal, called A.G.A. by Emily Brontë, and whose full name appears as Augusta Geraldine Almeda.
The reworking that Emiliano Vitali proposed to us at the end of 2025 is a novel inspired by Emily Brontë's poetic saga, titled The Queen of Gondal, subtitled "A Song of Dark Times." It is all the more compelling because it channels the "gothic fantasy" genre, which has become immensely popular among young readers in recent decades following the success of writers like J.R.R. Tolkien and J.K. Rowling. With subtle wit, the author manages to fit the many characters and moments present in Brontë's Gondalian poems into their proper place within the supposed plot, incorporating dialogue and verses from them through painstaking research similar to the interlocking of a jigsaw puzzle. All this is imbued with a cryptic and mysterious atmosphere that perfectly matches the lyrical passion Emily intentionally desired. This technique, besides making the narrative much more fluid and credible, above all helps to create a sense of empathy in the reader with what is being told. It also stimulates their curiosity to continue reading to discover the protagonists' subsequent adventures. The overall result is more innovative and captivating than Ratchford's book, which, only in prose form, enumerated the various battles and events of the Gondal cycle.
The undisputed protagonist of the entire novel, and therefore of the cycle, is Queen Augusta Almeda. Raised alone and orphaned from birth, she continually moves from island to island, initially to be with the love of her life, Julius Brenzaida, who died prematurely, and later to pursue power and establish her undisputed sovereignty over the kingdom of Gondal. What emerges from the verses and dialogues skillfully adapted from Brontë's poems is the capricious and authoritarian nature of the protagonist, a fickle and domineering young woman who more than ever recalls the basic characteristics of the future Catherine Earnshaw. Obsessed by a love that transcends time, Augusta is also the victim of powerful hatred and a vengeance that will ultimately lead to her death. As author Vitali rightly notes in the afterword, the world of Gondal "pulses with the dark, gothic, and incandescent substance of Emily Brontë's genius: passion that destroys and redeems, nature as a mirror and nemesis of the soul, destiny as an inexorable force," all themes that will later recur in her great novel, ‘Wuthering Heights’.
Special mention should be made of the attention to detail in the illustrations that introduce the book's various sections and also appear at the beginning of the various chapters. The particularly evocative cover, depicting the Queen of Gondal advancing toward the Celtic cross beneath which her beloved rests, immediately evokes the surreal and mystical atmosphere of the moors, which as never before has a privileged place in the Gondal saga.
In conclusion, an original work worthy of praise and great success, a perfectly accomplished attempt at "literary architecture."
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