Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë's only novel, was published in late 1847. The book, which has a complex structure, relates the story of two generations of the households of Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange from 1770 to 1802. The day-to-day history of the families is provided by a series of narrators, sometimes at second-or even at third-hand. But this routine story is enhanced and connected by a second, overarching narrative strand which is provided mainly, but at times indirectly, by the character of Catherine Earnshaw. I call this strand the ‘transcendent narrative’ because it transcends the mundane and empirical within the story, and it enables the reader to step outside time and to move, with Catherine, above and beyond the terrestrial and the corporeal.

The reader is introduced to this narrative by a dream – and dream is its primary vehicle throughout the novel. But Wuthering Heights is not the first manifestation of Emily Brontë's fascination with dreams and dreaming. Her capacity to use dream to support and develop her own imagination has its genesis in a poetry notebook that she completed the year before she published her novel. This chapter explores the development of Brontë's preoccupation with dreams through the poems of what I refer to as her ‘E.J.B.’ notebook, based on the heading that she gave that holograph. It proposes that the thought-system that was engendered in her creation of that notebook was then transformed into an imaginative philosophical experiment within Wuthering Heights, where dream becomes the means through which Brontë invites the reader to transcend the lives of the more earthly characters, to escape the confines of temporal progression and to gain an insight that is not available to most of the participants in the story.

The Poems

Three years before her composition of Wuthering Heights, Brontë began the transcription of two poetry notebooks. One, headed ‘Gondal Poems’, documents the imaginary land that she shared with her sister Anne. The purpose of the second, headed simply ‘E.J.B. Transcribed Febuary [sic] 1844’ is less clear and the poems that it contains are sometimes described as ‘personal’, or more simplistically as the poems that she wrote that are not about Gondal.