ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how a different choice of poems, and a different critical approach, can produce a completely different feminist reading of Emily Brontë's poems. The biographical slant of the article is used to suggest that Brontë rejected the one in her outward social life and embraced the other in the secret limer world of her poetry. Emily Brontë began writing Gondal poems when she was eight, and in the ensuing years, nearly all of her greatest poetry was generated by her private mythology. Dissociation is the ultimate result. This is certainly not to say that Brontë had come to that state, and in any case, she died too soon to say what would have happened to her poetry had she lived on into old age. However, it seems that Brontë by this time had explored the archetypal Feminine with all its dark splendor as fully in her poetry as she could.
