The most enigmatic chapter in Emily’s history covers the years from 1835 through 1838. All critics agree on the evidence of her poetry that during this time she underwent the major emotional experience of her life, one which gave rise to poems of nightmare, guilt, tragic separation and desire for death, and one which also contained the seeds of the mutually destructive love of Catherine and Heathcliff in _Wuthering Heights_, written nearly a decade later. Emily’s correspondence from this period has been lost or destroyed, Charlotte’s few surviving letters have undergone cutting on her part which leaves them barren, and one must infer pointed expurgation. The precise dating of Emily’s poems written before 1839 might help solve the mystery, but for such precision scholars have striven in vain. The latest and best established chronology, that of Hatfield, will be accepted here. It is known that for three months in late 1835 Emily was a pupil at Roe Head, a boarding school where Charlotte was engaged as teacher. Her speedy withdrawal was laid to Charlotte’s concern for her health; and as her poems before that date indicate that she could not be happy away from the moors and could not endure any sort of constraint, she may well have been literally sick for the freedom of home. Upon her return there, Anne went to Roe Head in her place, and Emily was left in Haworth with Branwell, who must have been sad enough company. He had just failed neurotically in his intention to study at the Royal Academy and was spending his time as a drunken idler at the village tavern. It is because so few poems and so few letters to or from her absent sisters remain from this interim that the hypothesis of a questionable relationship between brother and sister has grown up, and of course, Emily’s rapid decline and death within a year of Branwell’s in 1847 lends some support to the theory. But her poetry bearing the date of 1836 is emotionally thin and immature, and critics are agreed that the major change in it dates from the following year.