Copyrighted Material

1 Experimentation and the Early Writings Christine Alexander

Juvenilia, or youthful writings, are by their nature experimental. They represent a creative intervention whereby a novice explores habits of thought and behavior, ideas about society and personal space, and modes of literary expression. It is a truism to say that youth is a time of exploration and testing. Any child psychologist will tell you that the teenage years in particular are a time of trial and error, a time when limits are tested in order to push boundaries and gain new adult freedoms. Juvenilia embody this same journey toward so‐called maturity, involving the imitation and examination of the adult world. And because early writing is generally a private occupation, practiced without fear of parental interfer- ence or the constraints of literary censorship, the young writer is free to interrogate current political, social, and personal discourses. As writing that embraces this creative and intellectual freedom, Charlotte Brontë’s juvenilia are a valuable source for investigating the literary experimentation of an emerging author seeking to establish a writing self. This chapter will examine the ways that Charlotte Brontë used her authorial role to engage with the world around her and to test her agency in life and literature. The first focus will be on the importance of a self‐contained, paracosmic, or imaginary world for facilitating experiment and engagement with political, social, and historical events. The second will be on the way Brontë experimented with print culture and narrative to construct a self‐reflexive, dialectic method that allowed her to interrogate both the “real” world and her paracosmicCOPYRIGHTED world. Her intense initial MATERIAL collaboration with her brother Branwell—“rivalry” is perhaps more appropriate to describe the competitive tone of their writing—laid the foundations for Charlotte’s conversational method; but she soon experimented in early adolescence with multiple dialogues among her own characters and authorial personas that led to a habit of discourse that is both self‐reflexive and inter‐textual. Finally, the chapter will explore dialogic experimentation in Brontë’s later novelettes, where she is testing not only her heroines’ moral identities but also her own emotional,

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intellectual, and social parameters. Her writing interrogates the self and enacts elements of the bildungsroman in an effort to gain greater psychological realism.

Paracosmic Experimentation and Colonial Expansion

Crucial to Brontë’s experimentation as a young author is her creation of an autonomous imaginary world or paracosm1 as a distinctive representation of adult or Other experience. Paracosms constitute alternative universes in miniature of the real literary, social, and political world: “spaces for construing and ‘playing out’ selective real and fantastic events and ideas circulating in the contemporary British consciousness” (Cohen and MacKeith 22). They are a particular feature of play in literary culture, usually practiced in youth. Brontë herself called the process “making out” (Stevens 160), and together with her siblings2 she created the imaginary world of Glass Town, a federation of kingdoms that later included the new kingdom of Angria. Over a period of some twenty years, Brontë partici- pated in and developed a complex world of interrelated characters and events that both mirror and imaginatively reorder knowledge of the “real” world she had gleaned from books, magazines, newspapers, and her limited experience of life. This imaginary world was readily committed to paper, and the resulting manuscripts document Charlotte Brontë’s intense intellectual engagement with life beyond her parsonage home. The paracosm allowed her to participate in events not normally encountered in childhood. As a self‐contained world, it also afforded her the space to experiment with initiative and power she was otherwise denied as an adolescent girl. In a private world shared only with siblings, she could become author and creator: she called herself “Chief Genius Tallii,” one of four Brontë Chief Genii (modeled on the Arabian Nights and the Greek gods), who presided over a virtual world by protecting heroes, directing mortal affairs, and intervening in the plot of their imaginary world for fun. As author, she could “play” with power and direct social and political events.3 The 1830s, when the bulk of her early manuscripts were written, were years of enormous social and intellectual ferment in Britain. Brontë’s paracosmic world expresses the tremendous energy of this post‐revolutionary period of empire building and expansion by land and sea. It also allowed her to enact in her writing the excitement of the growing periodical press, especially Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and the personality cults it fueled. As an all‐powerful narrative “Genius,” she could appropriate current events and create with immunity conversations that can be seen to function “as an index to historical culture” (Chandler 282). The genesis of this engagement with political, social, and literary culture of the period was the “Young Men’s Play” and several other plays that the Brontë children acted out physically, before committing the results to paper several years later. Eventually these plays coalesced into the paracosmic worlds of Glass Town and Angria. Together with her siblings, and chiefly in partnership with Branwell, Brontë experimented with exploration and territorial expansion, testing her own version of military and mercantile enterprise. The catalyst for the Young Men’s Play was the purchase of twelve toy soldiers for Branwell’s twelfth birthday in June 1826 (Charlotte was thirteen). Inspired by their father’s interest in the Peninsular Wars (1807–1814) and guided by newspaper reports and journal articles on exploration and colonialism, the Brontë children sent the

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“Twelves” (as they called the soldiers) to discover new territory and establish a British colony in an imaginary Africa. On the basis of an article in Blackwoods, with an accompa- nying map (Brontë 1991, 2[1]: frontispiece), they settled their soldiers around the delta of the Niger in West Africa. Their well‐used Grammar of General Geography by Revd. J. Goldsmith reinforced European attitudes to territorial expansion and the need to civilize the “many blank spaces on the earth,” as Joseph Conrad’s Marlow puts it in Heart of Darkness.4 Thus, the four leaders of the Twelves, sponsored by each of the four Brontë creators, become rulers of a federation of lands centered on the city of Great Glass Town (later called Verdopolis). As colonizers, they encounter the indigenous Ashanti and war ensues, inspired by reports of the Ashantee Wars of the 1820s. Complex private lives are invented for the “chief men”: the Duke of Wellington (Charlotte); Napoleon, later Sneaky (Branwell); Parry (Emily), and Ross (Anne), characters modeled on the two greatest antag- onists of recent history in Europe and two famous Arctic explorers. As soon as their heroes had been given identities, it was fitting that they should be provided with books, both to entertain them and to record their progress. A written culture replaced the children’s physical play. Miniature booklets to match the size of the wooden toy soldiers were pro- duced, beginning the richest record we have of youthful literary activity. What can be seen at first as a paracosmic exercise in colonial aggression and European expansion gradually becomes a critique of Europe itself and in particular of France and the various “kingdoms” of the British Isles. In landscape, social custom, and culture, Wellingtonsland is Charlotte’s Tory stronghold in the south of England; Parrysland rep- resents the north with its Yorkshire puddings, stone walls, and dull landscapes;5 Sneakysland is the equivalent of Scotland; and Rossesland is Wales. There is also Frenchyland with its capital Paris, an island to the south and the political base of the Glass Town Republican Party. Paris with its “dark Revolutionary Coteries” is Branwell’s domain, constantly satirized by Charlotte for its “wickedness, rioting, idleness and grandeur,” opinions she has gleaned from the Tory Blackwoods (Alexander and Smith 2003, 316). The sadistic French character “Pigtail” is typical of the “low villains” who terrorize Paris and prey on orphan children; and the foppish narrator of Charlotte’s “Journal of a Frenchman”6 is ridiculed for his vanity: “I first washed myself in rose‐water with transparent soap, then got myself shaved till my chin was smoother than satin: next my cheeks received a fresh bloom by the addition of a little rouge.” Etiquette at the Tuileries Palace is critiqued with considerable aplomb, and Charlotte amusingly adopts a pro‐republican stance, mocking Branwell’s republican enthusiasm following his reading of Sir Walter Scott’s sympathetic Life of Napoleon:

I found that the greater part of the company were of the ancien regime & that Bonaparte was almost universally detested. this a little disconcerted me for I had almost adored him but nevertheless I heard all with complaisance & said nothing. Wine however soon heated my head & loosened my tongue. it waged glibely about the glory of the French arms, old wom- eish Boubons—&c. &c &c with many other things that I should now be glad to recall. Some old Prigs laughed at me as a young enthusiast & anger having gained ascendency over Reason.

The fourteen‐year‐old creator of this “young enthusiast,” as Brontë calls her Frenchman, was later to address the conflict between passion and reason in Jane Eyre.

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As Carol Bock (2002, 34) argues, a “striking feature of the Brontës’ early writing is its stunning representation of the culture of their times.” Action is centered in Verdopolis, the great capital city of the Glass Town Federation, an imaginary London based on the theatrical architectural paintings of John Martin, whose engravings hung on the walls of the Brontës’ home. Its name suggests a city of glass, insubstantial, and translucent (origi- nally derived from “Verreopolis … being compounded of A Greek & French word to that effect”: Brontë 1987, 1: 298). However, we are assured it is not simply a dream world but “the commercial metropolis of the world,” a working city where “lofty mills and ware- houses piled up storey above storey to the very clouds, surmounted by high tower‐like chimneys vomiting forth the huge columns of thick black smoke” (Brontë 1987, 1: 139). Visions of glittering aristocrats and their entourages amidst public buildings “resplendent with grace, symmetry, majesty and proportion” are juxtaposed beside vignettes of strike action by disgruntled workers, protesting against one of “those vile rumbling mills,” its master, and “the incessant crash of its internal machinery” (Brontë 1987, 2[1]: 26–27). Such scenes are depicted in terms reminiscent of the attack on Rawfolds Mill in Liversedge (11 April 1812) during the Luddite Riots; they foreshadow the raid on Robert Moore’s mill in Shirley. The central incident of another story reenacts the “Peterloo” massacre of 1819 (Alexander and Smith 2003, 366–367). Characters and incidents from the Peninsula Wars, assassination attempts, Chartist and other insurrections, the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829, concerns over the price of cotton on either side of the Atlantic, and debates between the Americans John Quincy Adams and General Andrew Jackson, questions of slavery and suttee, and myriad other topical political events inform the action of the saga. In a paracosmic world, however, contemporary events are enhanced, remade, and complicated by imagination. The Glass Town Federation and the new kingdom of Angria, that Charlotte eventually awards her conquering hero Zamorna and adopts as her center of interest, bear little resemblance to Africa itself. The constant threat of the Ashantee tribes reminds us of contemporary imperialism, but the occasional “African” place names and exotic scenery owe as much to fairy tale, Tales of the Genii, and the Arabian Nights as they do to geographical descriptions of Africa. It is the names, places, and events associated with Wellington and Napoleon that are mapped on to the African colony. Even Quashia, the only indigenous African to be fully characterized in the saga, is associated with Wellington. Just as the historic Duke adopted the son of a chief in the Indian wars, so Charlotte’s Wellington adopts Quashia Quamina, who later rebels, aligns his warriors with the republican rebellion of Northangerland, and lusts after the Queen of Angria, reflecting a nineteenth‐century British conception of African racial degeneracy.7 This single example demonstrates the intricate association within the ever‐expanding paracosmic saga between fictional and historical characters, constitutional and republican rivalries, Victorian anthro- pological anxieties, and the young author’s own particular response to such issues. Throughout her saga, Brontë continues her experiment to fictionalize history. The central plot of the imaginary world is the struggle for power by rival aristocratic characters whose tangled love affairs and political intrigues reflect those of contemporary politicians and heroic figures of the period, not least Lord Byron, who replaced Scott as the main single influence on the juvenilia. The four kings of the Glass Town Federation form pacts like those that were brokered in Europe by the Quadruple Alliance after the defeat of Napoleon; but the situation is complicated by Branwell’s introduction of a new hero,

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Alexander Percy (later, Lord Northangerland),8 and by Charlotte’s growing preference for Wellington’s two sons as more tractable characters for exploring her growing under- standing of the military and political hero she read about in newspapers (Wellington, hero of Waterloo, was now a less illustrious British prime minister). The eldest, Arthur Wellesley (Duke of Zamorna and King of Angria), becomes her favorite Byronic hero par excellence, and the younger Lord Charles Wellesley (later Charles Townshend) becomes her chief narrator and literary pseudonym. The love‐hate relationship between Percy and Zamorna (reflecting the rival relationship between brother and sister) provides the main motivation for the political, social, and cultural life of the saga. A prominent feature of paracosmic experimentation is its detailed planning and construction. The Glass Town and Angrian saga is endowed not only with a definite geography, government, stratified society, and history, as indicated, but also with a future. In A Leaf from an Unopened Volume (17 Jan 1834), Charlotte provides a glimpse of Angria’s future under the increasingly despotic Zamorna, now “Emperor Adrian,” and the destruction he brings to family and friends. In this melodrama, Zamorna is a dangerous Byronic demigod:

The superb mould of his form, the withering keenness of his glance, the high soaring of his insatiable ambition, and the dark, yet deep and exhaustless genius which looked out through all his thoughts, words and actions, gave those who saw him the idea of something more than mortal. It looked … as if Heaven, being wrath with mankind, had sent Lucifer to reign on earth in the flesh. (Brontë 1991, 2[1]: 361)

As in Byron’s poetry, themes of revolution, power, and corruption pervade Glass Town characters and countries alike, reflecting recent history and the precocious reading of the teenage Charlotte. The sense of the rise and fall of nations suggests familiarity not only with Scott’s biography of Napoleon but also with Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Certainly Charlotte’s Zenobia, the Verdopolitan Mme de Staël with “a masculine soul in a feminine casket,” derives from Gibbon’s Queen of Palmyra and the East. Against a background of wars and political upheavals, invented and chronicled in obsessive detail by Branwell, Charlotte experiments with the personal histories of Zamorna and Percy, with their despotic political and sexual power, and their relationships with wives and mistresses. Thus an interrogation of gender relationships is set firmly within a social and political context. Stories often have paired titles like The Politics of Verdopolis by Branwell and High Life in Verdopolis by Charlotte, reflecting the concerns of their authors and providing a further stratum of dialogue to the already complex political, social, and cultural conversations in the juvenilia. This dialogue, however, is increasingly carried out within Charlotte’s own manuscripts as she debates the personal and political outcomes of different aspects of Byronic personality manifest in Percy and Zamorna, and then gradually shifts her center of interest to an interrogation of the mixed motifs of her heroines. Her Angrian novelettes (as she called them9), written in her later teens and early twenties, focus on the fate of women associated with the Duke of Zamorna, King of Angria: his third wife, the haughty Mary Percy who becomes a pawn in her husband’s complex relationship with her father Lord Northangerland; Mina Laury, the most loyal of Zamorna’s mistresses; the adolescent Caroline Vernon, illegitimate daughter of Northangerland and ward of

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Zamorna, whose seduction by her guardian we witness; and Elizabeth Hastings, who is a prototype for the later small, plain but self‐reliant heroine of Jane Eyre. Continuation of a paracosmic world into adulthood is rare and inevitably produces conflict for the maturing creator. The nineteen‐year‐old Charlotte Brontë was no exception. Beyond her safe imaginative sphere Charlotte was intensely shy because (as her school friend judged10) she felt misunderstood. Her encounter with classmates at Roe Head school (1831–1832) and with the responsibilities of the real world as a teacher (1835–1838) disrupted her habit of storytelling. During periods away from home, she felt forced to confront the invidious position of female creator of a nonproductive fictional world. Her keen awareness of family responsibilities and the need for financial security was reinforced by evangelical ideals of female meekness, moral rectitude, and domestic duty. Fantasies of power within an exciting imaginary sphere seemed no longer appropriate for a young woman, yet she could not relinquish her “bright darling dream.” Angria degenerated into fitful visions recorded in manuscript fragments during moments snatched from teaching duties: guilt ensued, and she feared her obsession with Angrian heroes and her paracosmic world smacked of idolatry and sensuality. Yet on her return home from school, her Angrian world and writing patterns reestablished themselves, and her saga continued to provide sustenance for her creative energies. The personal mental and physical anguish she had endured at Roe Head allowed her to explore ideas involving tension between passion and restraint that form the basis of her fictional representations of similar crises in the lives of her later heroines, those of the novelettes (mentioned in third section below) and especially Jane Eyre and Lucy Snowe. Even when she deliberately repudiated, at the age of twenty‐ four, “that burning clime where we have sojourned too long,” she admitted: “it is no easy thing to dismiss from my imagination the images which have filled it so long” (Brontë 2010, 314). Her paracosmic world had provided the freedom to experiment with public and personal relationships she could only read about. Her self‐contained imaginative domain had allowed access to a vicarious power denied her as both adolescent and female in early Victorian England; and it had offered the opportunity to develop with confidence her brilliantly precocious early writing.

Pluralism and Narrative Method

Nineteenth‐century Britain was arguably the world’s first pluralistic society, characterized by a diversity and polarization that later became an integral part of British society.11 In the Brontë juvenilia, diversity and debate are certainly the favored norm. If some of the social views in Brontë’s novels appear conservative at times, her early writing can be seen only as radical, especially in the irreverent tone with which it engages with a bewildering range of topics from library theft and opium taking to political speeches and sexual exploitation. The narrative form and method used in the juvenilia is modeled directly on the most vigorous genre of the day: the periodical press, especially that of the Edinburgh literati, who specialized in a particularly virulent brand of journalism. Blackwood’s, and later Fraser’s Magazine, stimulated the Brontë children’s own intense literary competition; and Blackwood’s Noctes Ambrosianae, in particular, provided the model for competitive discussions of literary and current affairs in their own little magazines.12 These

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nineteenth‐century periodicals represented multiple voices in a variety of styles and genres that provided a ready source for experimentation, ranging from Gothic tales to satirical polemics. In the juvenilia, the Brontës play at print culture, writing their own monthly magazine for several years (1829–1830) in imitation of Blackwood’s, recording histories of their plays and composing stories, reviews, poems, dramas, and serials by a range of different authors and editors. The children play not only with the material of their paracosmic world but also with bibliographical features of the literary enterprise itself. Their tiny pages covered with script the size of newsprint are hand‐sewn into paper wrappers in imitation of bound books, a practice Charlotte continues until she begins teaching at Roe Head, after which she uses single sheets of larger paper but retains her miniscule script. The booklets have elaborate title pages, editorials, contents pages, postscripts, advertisements, and index pages that are both respectful of their models but at the same time parodies of the fictive nature of the children’s “publication” process. One of Charlotte’s title pages proclaims, “The Search after Happiness A Tale by Charlotte Brontë Printed By Herself And Sold By Nobody”; and she concocts an inventive range of nonsense advertisements not unlike those of Lewis Carroll in his juvenilia, ranging from the sale of “a rat‐trap, by Monsieur it‐can‐ catch‐nothing‐For‐it’s‐Broken” to “The Art of Blowing One’s Nose is taught by Monsieur Pretty‐foot at his house, No. 105 Blue Rose Street, Glass town” (Brontë 1987, 1: 240). Charlotte also kept accurate records of her “publications” in a “Catalogue of My Books, with the Period of Their Completion up to August 3rd, 1830” (Brontë 1987, 1: 211–214), a listing of twenty‐two manuscript volumes representing her first two years’ engagement with contemporary print culture. The careful presentation of the booklets speaks of the value of the written word and the importance of its “publication” for an imaginary Glass Town audience and for the competitive young authors. Charlotte’s earliest writing thrived in a context of rivalry and diversity. From the moment Branwell received his new set of toy soldiers, Charlotte seized upon the soldier she liked best, named him “Wellington” in opposition to Branwell’s “Bonaparte,” and began to construct the first narratives of the establishment of Glass Town, experimenting with different versions from different points of view. Her exclamation: “This is the Duke of Wellington! It shall be mine!” (Brontë 1987, 1: 5) denotes the sheer delight in the authority of her claim, not only over the life of her favorite character but also over the process of creation itself in opposition to Branwell. She is the first to record the event several years later when we see her beginning to play with narrative by experimenting with different versions of the reception of the toy soldiers. In March 1829, she writes a “History,” docu- menting everyday events and explaining the origins of the Young Men’s Play in relation to other plays invented by the young Brontës. The following month she recasts her history as fiction in “A Romantic Tale,” imagining her authorial relationship from the point of view of her characters. The twelve adventurers obey a mysterious command to march to the evil desert in central West Africa where they are led by a Genius to a palace of “almost insuf- ferable splendour” that owes as much to Revelation as it does to the Arabian Nights:

Out of the barren desert arose a palace of diamond, the pillars of which were ruby and emerald illuminated with lamps too bright to look upon. The Genius led us into a hall of sapphire in which were thrones of gold. On the thrones sat the Princes of the Genii. In the midst of the

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hall hung a lamp like the sun. Around it stood genii and fairies without, whose robes were of beaten gold sparkling with diamonds. As soon as their chiefs saw us they sprang up from their thrones, one of them seizing Arthur Wellesley and exclaiming, ‘This is the Duke of Wellington!’ (Brontë 1987, 1: 14)

The young authors are enthroned, wielding their narrative power. When Arthur Wellesley asks why the Chief Genii calls him “Duke of Wellington,” “she” narrates Napoleon’s role as “desolator of Europe,” the establishment of Glass Town, and the return to Africa of Europe’s “deliverer … [whose] name shall be everlasting!” The mix of genres and styles seen in the hyperbolic language, Biblical resonance, elements of fairy tale, adventure, travel writing, romance, and current affairs witnessed in this tale becomes the hallmark of Charlotte’s early juvenilia. Of particular note is the way her version of events is constructed in opposition to Branwell’s conception of the play and narrative method. A year and a half later, he responds to Charlotte’s account, reasserting his authority over the destinies of his toy soldiers in a “real” history: The History Of The Young Men From Their First Settlement To The present time (15 December 1829—7 May 1831). The very title and enormous length of his manuscript written in miniscule script over several months indicates the almost obsessive prosaic detail in which Branwell contradicted much of Charlotte’s imaginative fantasy, recording “exact” dates and maneuvers of battles, parliamentary debates, and government and business activity. But Branwell could control neither Charlotte’s imagination nor her pen. Opposition stimulated emotional and intellectual conflict, encouraging experimentation. The early manuscripts are punctuated by Branwell’s irritated complaints and Charlotte’s wickedly satirical vignettes deriding her brother’s extravagant behavior. In the competitive process, Charlotte defined and experimented with her own authorial interests. These are clearly distinguished from the beginning in the “Islanders’ Play”, formed in opposition to the Young Men’s Play and set in England but using the same favorite characters, especially the Duke of Wellington and his two sons. She even recreates a third version of the naming of the toy soldiers as a mini‐drama, repositioning their origin as part of the Islanders’ Play. Directed by Charlotte, with Emily’s support in particular, this rival play privileges fairy tale and the supernatural in opposition to Branwell’s insistence on war games and conquest of territory. Recorded by Charlotte in four miniature volumes over the course of a year, the play is chiefly presented as a series of adventures that couple as political allegory, told by Charlotte’s characters to a fictitious audience. Here she is developing narrative voice, especially that of Lord Charles Wellesley, who becomes her favorite persona. Branwell is relegated to supervising wayward children in the Palace School on Vision Island, but Charlotte and Emily retain the keys to the school dungeon to restrain his use of “a large black club with which he thumps the children upon occasion and that most unmercifully” (Brontë 1987, 1: 24). Emily’s characters instigate a school rebellion (fore- shadowing the central concern in her later Gondal saga) but, following the Duke’s auto- cratic suppression of the revolt, Tales of the Islanders becomes purely a vehicle for Charlotte’s experimentation in storytelling. The four volumes of Tales of the Islanders (Brontë 1987, 1: 21, 99, 140, 196) display a variety of layers of narrative control. Charlotte signs the stories with her own initials, but the narrative “I” is that of “Little Queen” Charlotte: “Little King and Queens” mimic the role of the four Chief Genii of the Young Men’s Play, but they are not simply creators, they

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play an active part in events. Charlotte’s character Lord Charles actually writes to her in an interpolated letter, asking Little King and Queens to intervene in the plot. In the final volume, Charlotte undercuts her own presumption of narrative authority by playing a joke on her usual persona Lord Charles Wellesley: as third‐person narrator, she subverts his typical spying activities by disguising the Little Queens as “3 Old Washerwomen of Strathfieldsaye,” who, although they pay deference to the Duke of Wellington and his family, behave in a most disconcerting way, “knitting with the utmost rapidity and keep- ing their tongues in constant motion all the while.” Lord Charles’s aim of “much amusement” by eavesdropping is confounded by their sudden silence, and his hold on reality further baffled when they magically move in and out of his vision: instead of crossing the river on stepping stones like “real” people, they “glided noiselessly into the midst of the river and there, turning three times round amidst the shivered fragments of brilliant light in which the moon was reflected, were swallowed up in a whirlpool of raging surges and foam.” He stands “powerless with horror”—horrified at his powerlessness over his version of reality and confounded when he then sees Little King and the three old women “walking whole and sound a few yards before him.” The smug Lord Charles, who usually has narrative control, is made decidedly “uneasy” by his narrator’s playing with her roles as both actor and author and subverting her own narrative voice. He begins hearing voices and believes he has been bewitched by “those beings” who both play with and subvert suggestions of the Gothic. With horror he finds their corpses and, trembling with dread, is suddenly slapped on the back by the laughing Little King and Queens who say, “Charles, don’t be frightened, they were only our enchantments.” But the next moment he wakes up; all appears to be a dream until he finds that the old washerwomen have indeed vanished and cannot be found. Dream is confounded with reality, characters are confused, the narration problematized. Here, at the age of fourteen, the young author is examining narrative experience and questioning the symbiotic relationship between herself, her voice, and the character who was to become her favorite persona.13 Charlotte also experiments in transposing political and literary reference into her narrative using a diversity of inventive situations. Her frequent use of the tale‐within‐a‐tale structure provides opportunity for further layers of narration and enables a combination of political allusion, religious opinion, and elements from the Arabian Nights, Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. This technique of embedding stories within a frame story allows Charlotte to retell multiple disparate tales about her hero and his family that she has gleaned from a variety of sources and to combine these with her own inventions. The Duke’s sons often act as raconteurs, entertaining Little King and Queens and thus making Charlotte simply an amanuensis of her own stories. On another occasion, “Emily and me” witness the kidnapping of the Duke’s sons; and, in response to Whig criticism in the Leeds Mercury, Charlotte writes in her own voice a political allegory based on an assassination attempt on the Duke of Wellington (who is British prime minister at the time). As the Duke lies dying of poison, his doctor Sir Alexander Hume (who was with Wellington’s army at the Battle of Waterloo) commands: “Ring the bell to Queens” and immediately Charlotte, the creator, enters as a “Giant of Clouds” and resolves the situation with a mysterious Christ‐like gesture: “He touched the Duke and new life seemed to be given him.” Elsewhere, she inserts into her narrative an enthusiastic (and much quoted) report of her family’s response to the passing of the Catholic Emancipation

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Act of April 1829, a triumph for the “Great Duke” and his Tory minister Robert Peel, making it the reason for her neglect of the Islanders and the ensuing rebellion. For all her adulation of the Duke, however, she is quite capable of undercutting his pomposity: when Little Queens order him to accompany them to the Horse Guards, they are furious when he refuses to visit the bake house because it is beneath his dignity. In another tale, she alle- gorizes him as St George, slaying the dragon of bigotry that pursues Roman Catholicism in Ireland. Influenced by Blackwood’s Tory prejudice or possibly by her father’s opinions, Charlotte displays the first manifestations of Protestant bias and anti‐Catholic bigotry we encounter in her later writing, protesting in yet another tale the wickedness of Catholicism in preventing individuals from searching the Bible for themselves. Her political and religious prejudice is deftly woven into a dramatic fairy tale, coupled with references to Shakespeare’s Oberon and Titania and spoken by a traveler from Ireland, who regales four fairies with a story of necromancy and conversion. Charlotte’s tales, even within the four miniature volumes of the Islanders’ Play, become increasingly allusive, technically inventive, and referentially complex. Branwell’s opposition to the Islanders’ Play stimulates Charlotte’s experimentation with caricature and also underlines their different literary tastes. As Little King, he is a source of disruption and thus a target for ridicule. Charlotte depicts him as continually inciting quarrels, avoiding work and with a “constant disposition to all kinds of mischief”—acting more like “an evil brownie than a legitimate fairy” (Brontë 1987, 1: 202). Clearly Branwell resented the fairy tale element of her play and resisted Charlotte’s influence as much as she resisted his. His interest in the supernatural derived not from fairy tale but from the Greek myths and legends of his Latin and Greek lessons: in the Young Men’s Play he envisages himself as a Zeus‐like figure riding on the clouds and dispensing bolts of lightning and thunder (Branwell had learned that “Brontë” means “thunder” in Greek). He demonstrates a penchant for killing off characters whom his long‐suffering sisters have to “make alive” again in order to preserve the saga. Charlotte’s supernaturalism derives from more eclectic reading—the Bible, Arabian Nights, Gulliver’s Travels, Tales of the Genii, Midsummer Night’s Dream, and myriad tales in the annuals, Blackwood’s, and other magazines. Debate between the two siblings is particularly virulent after Charlotte takes over Branwell’s editorship of his Branwell’s Young Men’s Magazine, changes its name and character (“no more Dullness reigns”: Alexander 1983, 37) and begins to fuse its content and concerns with her Islanders’ Play until the plays eventually elide into the paracosmic world of the Glass Town saga. The Brontës” literary tastes and enthusiasm for books and book‐making is mirrored in their characters, who play out their authors’ rivalry among Glass Town’s literary elite. Writers, publishers, booksellers, and librarians occupy an elevated status and belong to rival literary coteries. Occupations are passed from father to son, and their names adorn the title pages of publications: Captain Tree (prose writer) is published by his bookseller son Sergeant Tree, and Sergeant Bud (“a clever lawyer” and “dusty book‐worm’) assists his father Captain John Bud, “the ablest political writer.” Rivalry is even expressed in genre and in the process literary conventions are interrogated. The Marquis of Douro (later, Zamorna) writes love poetry and Lord Charles Wellesley fabricates Gothic romances, scurrilous journalism, and satirical drama. Competition between the literati results in scandal and intrigue, and even murder. In the early saga, the younger Lord Charles is as deceitful as his elder brother is honest. He fraternizes with “low life” to obtain scurrilous stories

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about literary rivals. In An Interesting Passage (18 June 1830; Brontë 1987, 1: 170–177), he “fabricates” the theft of books from the Glass Town public library, maliciously maligning Captain Tree (Charlotte’s second literary persona). He reports that Tree and his accomplices transport the books by coffin in a burial procession to the cemetery, where next day the robbers are surprised by gravediggers looking for fresh material for Dr Hume’s illegal medical research (the notorious Burke and Hare murders were reported in Blackwood’s the previous year). In this story, theft of library books is as serious as murder: when Hume threatens to expose the book theft (“These books belong to the Public Library; you’ve stole them and buried them here for secrecy. I’ll inform against you!”) Tree is prepared “to pro- cure [him] a living subject every week.” Loss of reputation is more important to Tree than murder, as Lord Charles appreciates—hence the introduction to his story that absolves Lord Charles of responsibility for his revelation of “truth” since he is simply retelling a story passed to him by Tree’s servant and cares little for those involved:

I am aware (to use a cant phrase) that my disclosures will cause a very considerable sensation among those who are implicated … but as I care about them, their views and actions just as much as my monkey, all their censures will pass by me with as little effect as the zephyrs in a hot summer’s day fanning a sea‐surrounded rock.

Lord Charles’s cynical nonchalance and obfuscation are part of a narrative game that he (and Charlotte) play in introductions, editorials, and afterwords that usually function as frame‐stories, revealing the narrator’s power to manipulate character and action. Literary competition becomes a vital part of the pluralistic world of Glass Town, with rival characters (the children’s personas) vying for attention and critiquing each other’s literary performance. Branwell protests Charlotte’s satire as low form and beneath his dignity to emulate but is resigned to his inferior rival: after all, “Homer had his Zoilus, Virgil his Meavius and Captain Tree his Wellesley” (Alexander 1983, 65). As the eminent historian Captain John Bud, he refutes (in The Liar Detected) Lord Charles’s “dose of scandal and self‐importance in the shape of an octave volume” and censures the lack of literary talent in Charlotte’s poem “The Violet.” Charlotte retaliates by ridiculing the would‐be Glass Town poet Young Soult (Branwell) disguised as Henry Rhymer in The Poetaster A Drama In Two Volumes (3–8 July 1830) by Lord Charles. Rather than the Classics, she draws for authority on her knowledge of the late sixteenth‐century War of the Theatres and Ben Johnson’s Poetaster or His Arraignement.14 Rhymer’s hackneyed language, pedestrian rhyme, and fondness for pathetic fallacy are satirized in comically overblown Romantic verse that the young Charlotte clearly had fun writing. To avoid the hangman’s noose Rhymer must promise to take up a useful occupation and write no more. Such literary sparring prompts Charlotte, at fourteen, to consider questions of aesthetics and the production of good writing:

How most people in general are deceived in their ideas of great authors. Every sentence is by them thought the outpourings of a mind overflowing with the sublime and beautiful. Alas, did they but know the trouble it often costs me for me to bring some exquisite passage neatly to a close, to avoid the too frequent repetition of the same word, to polish and round the period and to do many other things. They would soon lower the high standard at which our reputation is fixed. (Brontë 1987, 1: 192)

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Although tongue in cheek and in the voice of Lord Charles impersonating Captain Tree, Charlotte is well aware that narrative proficiency is not simply achieved by “an inspiration dream” (Brontë 1987, 1: 237) or “overflow of powerful feelings” but by criticism and revi- sion. She rewrites events created by Branwell in order to explore the psychological nuances of a situation: the death of Mary Percy (engineered by Branwell), for example, proves to be a rumor based on her depressive illness and her fraught relationship with her husband Zamorna. The dialectical opposition helps create depth and variety of character, fueling Charlotte’s interest in psychological motivation. She ensures her characters have a past and she experiments with elements of Romantic and Gothic genres, gleaned especially from Byron’s Manfred and Don Juan, and from James Hogg’s use of the doppelgänger. From an Adonis‐like Greek hero in her manuscripts of 1829‐30, Zamorna’s character becomes ever more complex and conflicted as he morphs into the ambitious and profligate King of Angria of the 1839 novelettes, discussed in the next section. To account for this psychological transformation, Lord Charles fabricates an elder brother for Zamorna (in the novelette The Spell, an Extravaganza), a splintering of self through which he can explore the duplicitous character of his sibling and his relationships with very different women. At the same time, Charlotte as author is questioning the realist commitment to the concept of an autonomous self. Using such tactics, she plays with characterization while her narrator Lord Charles plays with his Glass Town audience, manipulating “reality” to reveal a deeper psychological truth:

Reader, if there is no Valdacella there ought to be one. If the young King of Angria has no alter ego he ought to have such a convenient representative, for no single man, having one corporeal and one spiritual nature, if these were rightly compounded without any mixture of pestilential ingredients, should, in right reason and in the ordinance of common sense and decency, speak and act in that capricious, double‐dealing, unfathomable, incomprehensible, torturing, sphinx‐like manner which he constantly assumes for reasons known only to himself. (Brontë 1992, 2[2]: 237)

Lord Charles affects a cynical Byronic individualism that extends through Charlotte’s juvenilia to his later incarnation as Charles Townshend in the novelettes. His callous, noncha- lant attitude undercuts any pretension to the Gothic or romance, allowing Charlotte to challenge generic conventions and nimbly change narrative voice. The ironic detachment of the narrator Lord Charles is used to distance the author from any indulgence she may have demonstrated in the often‐tragic romantic relationships of her fictional lovers. Through the use of this antithetical narrator, Charlotte remains removed and in control of her material, sending up novelistic conventions in much the same way as the young Jane Austen satirized Gothic and romantic genre in her juvenilia.15 In a postscript to The Spell, Charlotte writes:

A novel can scarcely be called a novel unless it ends in a marriage, therefore I herewith tack to, add and communicate the following post‐scriptum which may perhaps be pronounced the only real piece of information contained in the book. (Brontë 1992, 2[2]: 236)

Any unmediated identification with her “real” subjects occurs only in the fragmentary Roe Head Journal and associated manuscripts, written away from home and at a time of

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emotional stress. As I have discussed elsewhere,16 Charlotte nurtured her pictorial imagination by which she could visualize “in [her] mind’s eye” the scenes and characters of her paracosmic world; but only in later adolescence and especially at Roe Head did she practice the “trance‐like” headlong‐style that has led critics to assume her early composition was void of self‐criticism and control.17 Her years of frustration as a teacher and later as a gov- erness, however, provided new material and stimulated a greater focus on the predicament of young women in society. Charles Townshend, a male narrator, assumes an increasingly androgynous character and allows further exploration not only of authorial but also of female agency.

Psychological Realism and Interrogation of the Self

Experimentation in Charlotte’s later novelettes can be discerned in the way her dialogic method of narration enacts elements of the bildungsroman, in particular the motif of a troubled quest for identity. Central to the bildungsroman is “the notion of individual self- hood achieved through growth and of social experience as an education which forms, and sometimes deforms, that self” (Abel, Hirsch, and Langland 1983, 1). If one considers the Glass Town and Angrian saga as a whole, the development of a number of characters is traced from childhood to adulthood, not least Charlotte’s male hero Zamorna; but any sense of self‐reflection or psychological growth can only be gleaned from the lives of the heroines. Through heroines like Mina Laury, Elizabeth Hastings, and Caroline Vernon, Charlotte begins to explore and contrast varying situations and motivations of female agency; and in the process provides opportunity to interrogate her own emotions, desires, and possible actions. Mina Laury, a motherless peasant girl, has been Zamorna’s most devoted mistress from the age of fifteen. Inspired by W. Finden’s engraving of Byron’s “Maid of Saragoza” that Brontë copied in watercolor (as in the case of all her favorite heroines),18 this Byronic heroine’s all‐consuming self‐abnegating love is explored in numerous stories, especially the novelette Mina Laury (Brontë 2007, 175–220). Mina serves her “master” with religious fervor: it is “the destiny I was born to” she says, despite the fact that she knows “he can never appreciate the unusual feelings of subservience, the total self‐sacrifice I offer at his shrine.” Charlotte was fascinated by such masochism and the nature of infatuation. Mina is intelligent (“Strong‐minded beyond her sex—active, energetic, accomplished”) and is offered marriage by Zamorna’s aristocratic colleague Lord Hartford, yet she is in thrall to a fatal attraction: “she could no more feel alienation from [Zamorna] than she could from herself.” In Zamorna’s presence, she is “as weak as a child—she lost her identity.” Charlotte had realized at Roe Head that she too was losing her identity, her ability to act as a moral being in relation to a society she found lifeless and restricting compared to her paracosmic world. The Angrian visions of her Roe Head Journal and associated poems, unmediated by Lord Charles, reflect her own infatuation with her hero, whose power is cruel, gratuitous, and hypnotic: “I had really utterly forgot where I was and all the gloom & cheerlessness of my situation. I felt myself breathing quick and short as I beheld the Duke lifting up his sable crest” (Brontë 2007, 156). She has assumed Lord Charles’s role of voyeur. In another fragmentary scene she describes the debauched Quashia defiling the bed

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of Mary Percy in a drunken stupor, “savagely exulting” in his sexual and political power. Even her fantasies here, however, are not without profound self‐reflection: they are juxtaposed beside autobiographical fragments that reflect on the dichotomy between mental freedom and the mental bondage of teaching.19 In terms of her evangelical upbringing, the nurturing of individual creative talents is in conflict with her female duty. Further, divorced from her home that offers collaboration and inventive space for her writing, she becomes fixated on her creative need and through biblical allusion she documents her “inward agony.” Her “divine creations” are also referred to as her “infernal world” (Alexander 1983, 144), compromised by the possible sin of idolatry. She now fears “the fiery imagination that at times eats me up” (Brontë 1995, 1: 144) and articulates the need for balance between creative and emotional freedom and complete restraint, a central theme she explored in the heroines of her last novelettes and in her novels. Through the character of Elizabeth Hastings, in the novelette Henry Hastings (Brontë 2007, 201–322), Brontë experimented for the first time with an alternative response to unrestrained passion and female desire. Her heroine, like herself, is “plain and undersized,” retiring and thoughtful yet proud and passionate and subject to “feverish Dreams.” She paints landscapes, is interested in politics, derives from Pendleton in the moorland prov- ince of Angria, loyally defends her degenerate brother, and has established her independence as a teacher with her own school. Yet despite achieving social respectability, she still longs for emotional fulfillment. When Sir William Percy, to whom she is attracted “with an intensity of romantic feeling that very few people in this world can form the remotest conception of,” offers her love but not marriage, she suffers “the hard conflict of passionate love—with feelings that shrank horror‐struck from the remotest shadow of infamy.” Her strong sense of personal worth, prefiguring the strength of Jane Eyre, gives her the courage to resist Percy and to rely on her own integrity despite the prospect of a solitary future. Here Brontë is searching the depths of her own character for a moral response for her heroine, reappraising the sadomasochistic model she adopted from Byronic romanticism, and exploring her own frustration with the limited alternatives open to intelligent women with no fortune like herself. Elizabeth’s self‐examination, however, is not a first‐person narrative as in Jane Eyre: narrative authority in the juvenilia is always fragmented and dialectical. The heroine’s relationship with Sir William Percy is mockingly observed by the knowing cynicism of Charles Townshend, who is now a full‐fledged dandy and purveyor of gossip about the lives of the aristocracy. As Heather Glen has pointed out (Brontë 2007, xix), Brontë has read the most famous of the “silver‐folk” novels, Edward Bulwer Lytton’s Pelham, whose sardonic narrator, like Charles Townshend, sports the latest fashions and aristocratic slang, and has the same “studied languid air and sharp, voyeuristic eye.” In Caroline Vernon, the last of Brontë’s novelettes, he is a cash‐strapped hack writer who is at his “dirty work” again, grubbing up scandal about the Duke of Zamorna (Brontë 2010, 222). His story deflates the predatory machinations of Zamorna, recasting him as a passé Gothic seducer, more akin to an absurd and aging “tom‐cat.” Heroes are no longer glamorized in Brontë’s juvenilia; instead, she is now interrogating her own earlier uncritical enthrall- ment to Byronism. In Caroline Vernon (Brontë 2010, 221–313), Brontë experiments with a crucial episode of the bildungsroman: the process of adolescent development and sexual awakening.

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Caroline is fifteen years old, and we are told that “reading Lord Byron has half‐turned” her head. She has been given a good education and raised to be a bright ornament in society, despite her illegitimate parentage. She has her own strident political views: she has read about her father, Northangerland, who is modeled politically on Napoleon, so she espouses Republicanism, although she modifies her views about monarchy so she can accommodate her guardian Zamorna’s position as King of Angria. Caroline has reached the age when she is ready to launch into society, and her narrator frequently reminds us that the young heroine is developing: “By this time the reader will have acquired a slight idea of the state of Miss Caroline Vernon’s mental development & will have perceived that it was as yet only in the chrysalis form—that in fact she was not altogether so sage, steady & consistent as her best friends might have wished.” We next see Caroline after she has spent four months in Paris acquiring “a perfect finish”:

She changed fast in the atmosphere of Paris. She saw quickly into many things that were dark to her before. She learnt life & unlearnt much fiction. The illusions of retirement were laid aside with a smile, & she wondered at her own rawness when she discovered the difference between the world’s reality & her childhood’s romance. (Brontë 2010, 272)

Change is implicit in every sentence here: the heroine has “learnt life,” she has discovered the “world’s reality,” she has become more knowing: we can measure her development against what she was like in her earlier chrysalis phase and we find that she is not as inno- cent as we might expect. Throughout the novelette there are narrative markers that allow the reader to trace changes in the protagonist and that indicate Brontë’s efforts to convey a greater psychological realism. The focus of Caroline Vernon is on puberty and the disastrous results of an impassioned imagination and lack of parental modeling. Caroline is eventually seduced by her guardian the Duke of Zamorna, a man married to her sister and with a bevy of mistresses. She is just another pawn in the power play between Zamorna and Northangerland. Yet the detailed development of Caroline’s character suggests the new importance Brontë placed on the interior life of her heroine. This is the first time the plight of the victim has been central to one of Brontë’s stories or the heroine’s conflicting emotions analyzed in such detail. Despite these experimental advances, however, the narration is unstable. Insight into Caroline’s motivation is mediated by the unsympathetic Charles Townshend, whose habitual cynical stance appears to break down at moments of emotional crisis in his storytelling. There is a disjunction in his narration between the Gothic clichés and comic irony he directs toward Zamorna’s patriarchal power and the sense of thrill experienced by Caroline as she struggles with a still embryonic moral identity:

He caressed her fondly & lifted with his fingers the heavy curls which were lying on her neck. Caroline began to feel a new impression. She no longer wished to leave him, she clung to his side—infatuation was stealing over her. The thought of separation or a return to Eden was dreadful.20 … She feared, she loved. Passion tempted. Conscience warned her. But in a mind like Miss Vernon’s conscience was feeble opposed to passion. Its whispers grew faint & were at last silenced. And when Zamorna kissed her & said in that voice of fatal sweetness which has instilled venom into many a heart, ‘Will you go with me to‐morrow, Caroline?,’ she looked up in his face with a kind of wild devoted enthusiasm & answered, ‘Yes.’ (Brontë 2010, 308)

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As Brontë progresses with her story and becomes more involved in revealing Caroline’s feelings, she seems to forget Charles Townshend’s cynical stance and to participate in the passion. Yet the short, sharp sentences that focus Caroline’s conflict (“She feared, she loved. Passion tempted. Conscience warned her.”) indicate that, unlike the Roe Head Journal, Brontë is still in control of her material, despite her unstable narrator. She is even display- ing the same deliberate personification of passion and conscience that we find in Jane Eyre (“conscience, turned tyrant, held passion by the throat”; ch. 27). This is the work of a nascent writer, exploring her own sexuality, her own ideas and values, the possibility of her own powerlessness in a similar situation. Her persona as a “man” of letters or cynical purveyor of opinion is no longer appropriate. Yet this is juvenilia, and there is inconsistency in the young writer’s narrative experiment as she struggles to rein in her preference for Romantic passion. Although Brontë is still searching for her authorial voice, she has already indicated her fascination for the emotional growth of a young girl well before she wrote her famous buildungsroman, and she is already articu- lating the question she later asks in Villette: “When imagination once runs riot where do we stop?”

Conclusion

Early experimentation with voice, and with the cut and thrust of debate derived from contemporary journalism, established within Charlotte Brontë’s juvenilia a practice of dialogue through which she was able to negotiate her place in the world. Critics have pointed out that in Brontë’s novels dialogue scenes “enact” the new “importance accorded to self‐reflectiveness and social contextualization” by cultural, historical, and philosophical ideas at the time (see Chapter 25 in this volume; see also Glen 82). That Brontë began this dialectical performance in her juvenilia is without question. Her paracosmic world functioned as a safe space in which she felt free to experiment, to test adult behavior from colonial to sexual exploitation, and to explore her narrative voice in a variety of generic styles that are themselves questioned. The juvenilia document not only the fact that Brontë was witness to contemporary debates involving the political, social, and individual, but that the resulting new ideas and social upheaval formed a vital part of her creative play and of what can only be called her revolutionary, even transgressive, early writing. In the process of engagement with the real world, Brontë developed a narrative practice of dialogue, involving a fragmentation of the authorial self that empowered her role as youthful writer. As she grew older and moved beyond the initial rivalry of journalists and the competitive war games of military heroes toward their complex relationships with women, she began to reflect more on the motivations of her heroines and inevitably on her own position as a young woman. When, at the age of about twenty‐three, she finally decided to bid “Farewell to Angria” (Brontë 2010, 314), her eye was “tired of the picture so oft recurring and now so familiar,” but she acknowledged it was “no easy thing” to leave her dynamic dialogic context that had encouraged self‐reflection and enabled her to interact with a social and political milieu otherwise beyond her reach.

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Notes

1 A sociological term, coined in 1976 in a British William Percy begins a theme of antagonism survey on imaginary worlds: see Alexander between two brothers that evolves into a (2012a), “Playing the author: creative writing, similar rivalry in Charlotte’s later novels paracosms, and the construction of the family The Professor and Shirley. This is just one of a magazine.” number of Angrian vestiges that appear in the 2 This essay focuses on Charlotte’s juvenilia, later novels. which exceed in volume all her later novels 9 In her letter to Hartley Coleridge, 10 combined. Branwell’s output exceeds that of December 1840, thanking him for comment- Charlotte, and his initial role in the Brontë’s ing on a post‐Angrian story she had sent him paracosmic world is referred to in this essay. (Brontë 1995, 1, 241). Apart from isolated references in diary papers, 10 Stevens (ed). (1972), 158. none of Emily and Anne’s prose writings sur- 11 Stephen Prickett, “The philosophical‐intellec- vive. Their extant poetry with enigmatic allu- tual context,” in Marianne Thormählen (ed.), sions to Gondal, discussed in John Maynard’s 2012: 224. essay in this volume, is all that remains of their 12 See Alexander (1994), Readers and writers: saga, the reconstruction of which is still subject Blackwood’s and the Brontë; and Bock (2002), to debate (see Alexander and Smith 216–221). “‘Our Plays’: the Brontë Juvenilia”. For a discussion of the collaborative nature of 13 This relationship is further explored in Brontë’s the Brontë juvenilia and a selection of the story “Strange Events”, in Glen (1997), juvenilia of all four Brontës, see Christine “Configuring a World: Some childhood writ- Alexander, The Brontës: Tales of Glass Town, ings of Charlotte Brontë.” Angria, and Gondal: Selected Writings. 14 See Monahan (1981), “Charlotte Brontë’s The 3 For a discussion of the way Brontë converts the Poetaster: Text and Notes,” 475. traditionally powerless position of the child 15 See, for example, “Lesley Castle” and author into one of empowerment, see Alexander “Introduction”, in Austen (2014). (2005), “Autobiography and Juvenilia,” 161ff. 16 See Alexander, C. (2008), “Educating the ‘the 4 For a discussion of the influence of the Brontë’s artist’s eye’: Charlotte Brontë and the picto- geography books on the juvenilia, see Alexander rial image.” (1996), “Imagining Africa: the Brontës” crea- 17 Following Winifred Gérin’s judgment of the tions of Glass Town and Angria.” Roe Head Journal (1971, 16), Gilbert and 5 In “A Day at Parry’s Palace,” Emily Brontë’s Gubar assumed that all Charlotte’s juvenilia “kingdom” is satirized for its mundane realism: were essentially “automatic writing.” Brontë (1987), 229–233. 18 See Alexander and Sellars (1995), 236 and 6 A serial in Charlotte’s Young Men’s Magazine: color plate. see Brontë (1987). The following quotations 19 See especially Alexander (2012b), “Charlotte from the number for September 1830: unpub- Brontë and the ‘Treasures of the Bible’: Roe lished MS, Musee des Lettres, Paris. Head, the Infernal World, and the Well of 7 See Meyer (1996), “‘Black Rage’ and White Life,” 277. Women: Charlotte Brontë’s African Tales,” ch. 2. 20 Caroline has fled from Eden Cottage, where 8 Northangerland takes on the dark side of the she is virtually a prisoner. Playing on the bib- Byronic hero and evolves into the sinister lical Eden, Brontë casts Zamorna as the serpent Gothic villain of Romantic literature. His in the garden of Eden who is precipitating unnatural hatred for his sons Edward and Caroline’s willing temptation and fall.

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