There is also internal evidence of variance to be gleaned from Emily’s poetry, despite the angry insistence of one critic that “Emily Brontë’s own voice turns to nonsense the hundreds of pages of biography based on [such] subjective interpretation.”[5] The critic is Fannie Ratchford, whose separate volume, _The Brontës’ Web of Childhood_, skillfully reconstructs the two sequences of remarkable legend composed during adolescence by Charlotte and Branwell, and Emily and Anne respectively. But in her impatience with subjectivity Mrs. Ratchford goes to the other extreme of regarding these creations as spontaneously generated and quite unrelated to the lives of their creators. Thus, her discovery that cryptic initials heading Emily’s most “masculine” poems stand for male characters in the Gondal epic leads her to the outburst quoted above. Yet she herself points out that the poems in question were composed over a period of twelve years, and that “lack of agreement between chronology of composition and story sequence shows that they were not written as progressive plot incidents but were merely the poetic expression of scenes ... and emotions familiar to her inner vision....” Ratchford also admits that “only a small percent of the poems carry headings, and [these] ... raise as many problems as they solve. Varying sets of initials appear for the same character ... G. S. in one poem is a boy, in another a woman.”[6] Thus it seems probable that Emily’s lyrics sprang from her own experience, and that the confused initials represent an effort to incorporate them into some whole which would not betray their intimacy. (In the end she achieved her catharsis in prose through _Wuthering Heights_.) For lyric poetry is the most personal of all modes of expression, and Emily was morbidly reticent. All Brontë scholars know the story of Charlotte’s “accidental” reading in 1845 of her sister’s jealously guarded manuscript, and of the violent quarrel which followed. In Charlotte’s own moderate words: My sister Emily was not a person ... on the recesses of whose mind and feelings even those nearest and dearest to her could with impunity intrude. It took hours to reconcile her to the discovery I had made, and days to persuade her that such poems merited publication.[7] It is certain that many poems, along with many letters, were sacrificed to Emily’s passion for privacy.