The early lives of Charlotte (Victoria Hamilton), Anne (Alexandra Milman) and Emily (Elizabeth Hurran) and their siblings, are revealed. The children are fierce free spirits, whose tender, if eccentric father, Patrick (Patrick Malahide), believes passionately in their education. After his wife's death, Patrick sends his four eldest daughters to boarding school. The conditions were harsh and hastened the deaths of the elder two. (Charlotte used the boarding school as a model for Lowood in Jane Eyre) Eventually Charlotte and Emily return home to Howarth in Yorkshire, where they and their brother, Branwell (Jonathan McGuinness), and baby sister, Anne, are given freedom to roam the moors and read widely. Their creativity begins to blossom and they invent tales of Byronic passion in imaginary kingdoms called Angria and Gondal. It is here that Cathy and Heathcliff begin life.
Gone Like Dreams reveals how the sisters' brother, Branwell, is destroyed by a disastrous love affair and descends into depression and alcoholism; how critical censure of Emily's first novel, Wuthering Heights, possibly causes the destruction of the manuscript of her second novel, and how consumption ravages the family, leaving only the father, Reverend Patrick Bronte, in its wake.