Gordon & Cremonesi, 1978, 155 p

There is, of course, an ongoing fascination with the works of the Brontë sisters and their genesis, a fascination not restricted to the sisters themselves. Their brother, Branwell, apparently described to his friends a novel he had written but of which no trace was found in his papers after he died. This book is Barbara Rees’s construction of that novel. How much she had to go on, the form Branwell’s effort actually took, is not elaborated on in the surrounding blurb so the reader must just take what is presented to her/him as an example of a Victorian novel.

It consists of the reminiscences of a young girl taken home from Steepleton Horse Fair by Mr Robert Ogilvy to be brought up as a servant in his house, Thirleby Hall. He named her Harriet Dark. In this first-person account “Harriet” refers to herself as a foundling, but since she was four – or five, or six – years old at the time (and could speak well enough) that description is not entirely accurate. Orphan is more so. That such a child would not really remember her mother, nor realise till much later in the book that her mother had died is one of the factors which stretch credulity a little.

Under the unbending gaze and strictures of the cook, Mrs Duckham, Harriet develops a hatred for the household and of Mr Ogilvy but she eventually forms a friendship of sorts with the housekeeper, Mrs Minim, and in the fullness of time as she grows into adolescence, a yen for Mr Ogilvy himself. She finds more acceptance in the family of the local clergyman, Mr Ponsonby, whose wife helps her to read.

The later incursion of Nina Sanctuary, Mr Ogilvy’s intended, into Harriet’s life darkens her outlook. Sanctuary treats her harshly and, in a touch of Gothic, she conceives the thought of herself as in league with the devil against the world; going so far as to believe her wishes directly contribute to Sanctuary’s death in a riding accident, after which Ogilvy falls into what the Victorians called melancholy.

The book displays some of the infelicities of an inexperienced novelist. Whether this is intentional on the part of Rees in trying to replicate what Branwell Brontë might actually have written, or are her own, is impossible to determine. They do, though, lend an air of verisimilitude to proceedings.

Despite Ogilvy’s continuing indifference to Harriet Rees contrives, on Branwell Brontë’s behalf, a happy ending of sorts.

Pedant’s corner:- “‘So you’re back then are you,’ said Mrs Duckingham.” (ought to have a question mark after ‘you’,) “elbows akimbo” (elbows resting on hips and pointing outward?) “will-of-the-wisps” (wills-of-the-wisp, or, better, wills-o’-the-wisp,)

I saw in Saturday’s Guardian that author Lynne Reid Banks has died.

I hadn’t known she had been a reporter with ITN in the 1950s. My first knowledge of her came when I read The L-Shaped Room and its sequels many years ago.

I didn’t read her again until last year with her novels about the Brontë siblings, The Dark Quartet, and then Charlotte, Path to the Silent Country.

Most of her work, including her best known book for children, The Indian in the Cupboard, passed me by I’m afraid.

Lynne Reid Banks: 31/7/1929 – 4/4/202. So it goes.

Charlotte Brontë’s Years of Fame, Penguin, 1988, 238 p, plus i p Foreword and vi p Preface.

In this continuation of Charlotte Brontë’s story from Dark Quartet, she is in deep mourning for her late sisters and brother but left in effect to see to her father’s welfare on her own (except for the two servants.)

Her true identity has finally been unmasked though and on a visit to London she finds herself a celebrity but the unkinder reviews of Jane Eyre received distress her. In particular being brought up as the daughter of a cleric and steeped in that religion she is upset by the criticism that her book was unchristian. In Reid Banks’s account it was fellow writer and social theorist Harriet Martineau who explained to her people’s objections. Other literary luminaries of the time who pop up here include William Makepeace Thackeray, Harriet Martineau and Mrs Gaskell, the latter of whom she formed such a friendship with that she was entrusted to write Charlotte’s biography.

The main tension in the book, though, is her relationship with her father Patrick who acted very autocratically towards her and resented any time she spent away from him. (His main fear was that she would marry and thus fall prey to a then common fate, the rigours and dangers of child-bearing. How much of this is Reid Banks’s imagination or whether he was just being extremely selfish is moot.)

As told here a few men took Charlotte’s attention but none cast the same sort of spell on her as had her employer in Brussels, Constantin Héger. When Mr Nicholls, Patrick’s curate, expressed a romantic interest in her Patrick reacted violently and more or less banished him.

A commission to construct a book from her sister’s the papers brings her grief to the fore again but leads her to destroy the best of their remaining literary pieces, as being poems too personal to publish.

After the publication of Villette her writing ground to a halt, she had too much else on her mind and too much to do looking after her father.

It was her eventual marriage to Nicholls, after a promise never to leave her father reconciled him to the match, that would indeed prove disastrous as, despite perhaps thinking herself too old, she became pregnant and her body could not cope with the concomitant demands on it.

Attempting to fictionalise the lives of real people, especially ones about whom such a lot is known, can not be an easy endeavour. Reid Banks does it as well as can be expected.

Pedant’s corner:- has USian spellings throughout (color, honor, modelling, somber etc.) Otherwise; villain (villain – used later,) unperceivingness (unperceptiveness?)