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?)

The Story of the Brontës, Penguin, 1986, 409 p including ii p Foreword and ii p Postscript First published 1976.

In her foreword Banks mentioned that when she was approached with the commission to write this book she was daunted – as who would not be given its subject is three of the best-known writers of the nineteenth century, plus their unfortunately less gifted brother? Much of course is known about the Brontë family (and even more written about them) but gaps remain. The fascination they hold for many is such that any exploration of their lives will attract readers eager to glean how such a hotbed of literary invention should arise within one family from a small village in the back of beyond.

So does Dark Quartet illuminate much? A novel is likely to be more accessible than a drier academic piece but has a different purpose and as a novel Dark Quartet suffers from a lack of focus. Here, four main characters are too many, attention to each too diffused.

A lot, especially in the book’s initial stages, is told rather than shown, making any differences between Emily and Charlotte (not so much Anne, as she was younger) haze over. It is only in the latter stages where Emily’s fierce – and thwarted – desire to remain incognito distinguish them. Branwell, praised as he was within the family and over-indulged by his father, did not have the self-possession to rise above that estimation – though surely he secretly must have known, or at least suspected, that his talents were minimal, something which no doubt contributed to his descent into dissolution. It is his learning by accident (for the others had taken pains to keep it from him) that his sisters had attained the validation of publication that precipitates his final crisis. Emily and Anne succumb to consumption, the former by apparently willing it, the latter with forbearance. The unhealthiness at the time of Haworth as a village, the one with the worst death rate in England, the Brontës’ home sited just above the packed cemetery whose decaying contents seeped into its surroundings during any rainfall, running under the church and into the village, goes unremarked here.

Mention is made of the young Brontë siblings’ inventions of imaginary worlds, their notebooks filled with tiny writing, but only on the odd occasion does anyone take to the fabled moors – for inspiration or otherwise. Anne’s (actually not well evidenced) falling in love with her father’s curate Mr Weightman, who was soon to die of cholera, is stated rather than shown but Anne is depicted as being undemonstrative. Similarly Charlotte’s formative sojourn in Brussels at the Pensionnat Heger is treated somewhat cursorily.

As an introduction to the family’s history Dark Quartet is an admirable endeavour but perhaps inevitably it fails to conjure up the inner nature of these remarkable people, fails to render them whole. Maybe the novel as a form needs its authors to have free reign, its characters not to be too slaved to historical individuals, to convince completely. Or is it that in this case the task is simply too great?

Pedant’s corner:- Miss Evans’ (Miss Evans’s,) “one of the Miss Woolers” (one of the Misses Wooler,) whiskey (several times; whisky,) Mr Williams’ (Mr Williams’s,) Mr Nicholls’ (Mr Nicholls’s.)

Virago, 1998, 202 p.

Fifteen year-old Melanie feels on the cusp of womanhood and wonders to herself how having sex or being married will feel. Her cosy middle-class existence is disrupted the night after she tries on her mother’s wedding dress – damaging it in the process – as in what she interprets as a piece of (un)sympathetic magic she receives news her parents have both died on the trip they had been on. Along with brother Jonathon and much younger sister Victoria she is packed off to live with Uncle Philip, their mother’s brother, who is married to Margaret Jowle, in turn rendered dumb ever since her wedding, communicating by means of chalk and blackboard. This new home is a constrained environment, ruled by Philip with a frugal rod of iron, Margaret and her brothers Finn and Francis (whom she brought with her to the marital home) living in fear. Philip is a toy/puppetmaker and they live over the toyshop which gives the novel its title.

The book has an odd sensibility, tonally and atmospherically redolent of Dickens, with some relationship dynamics reminiscent of Joan Aiken’s The Wolves of Willoughby Chase but also containing faint echoes of The L-Shaped Room. The occasional references to such things as radios and other manifestations of (relative) modernity feel quite strange in comparison with the Victorian atmosphere which pervades the book even in the earlier chapters where Melanie is untroubled by straitened circumstances. This disjunction verges on magic realism as there is an aura of weirdness hanging over things throughout yet which never declares itself openly.

As the novel progresses Melanie’s revulsion to Finn’s lack of cleanliness and his interest in her is countered by her burgeoning awareness of sexuality. The twist near the end is one which I suspect neither Dickens nor Aiken would have dared essay though it might not have troubled Lynne Reid Banks.

Pedant’s corner:- “Scarborough-is-so-bracing” (in the posters it was Skegness that was so bracing,) focussed (focused.) “There were a number of shops” “There were a number of cake tins” (there was a number,) “some armless, some legless, same naked, some clothed,” (some naked,) “in two hundreds beds” (hundred,) “greasy Orientals” Vyella dress (Viyella,) tremulo (tremolo.) “The first of Jonathan’s wooden ships were up for sale” (the first was up for sale,) “in the butchers” (the butcher’s,) “open eyes of pure of colour” (has an “of” too many.) “She spread out her skirts and put shells into it” (skirts is plural; so, ‘put shells into them’,) pigmy (pygmy,) “who had laid in bed” (lain,) Aunt Margaret must have fried up everything friable in the larder” (fryable; “friable” means crumbly,) hiccoughing (hiccupping, the supposed resemblance to a cough is a misattribution,) “and she not sure” (and she was not sure,) a missing end quotation mark.