Those dealt with ever-shifting fictional locations, but the eccentricity of her people is less suited to the continual illustration of a fixed historical point. It’s here that the limitations of Greenberg’s flat art become far more apparent than on her earlier books. Greenberg is leisurely in setting up Glass Town, spending the first quarter of the book among the young Brontës and their playthings. Not just them though, but also their authors, pulling biographical details from their lives into this meta-fictional exercise. Just as she’s recontextualised familiar stories before, she here takes the Brontë’s world and population to construct her own fictions around them. These stories weren’t considered anything more than juvenilia, not worth preserving as an entity when the Brontë archives were separated, and it wasn’t until the 21 st century that a comprehensive edition saw print.Īs Isabel Greenberg’s previous work has been the inventive retelling of myths in fictional settings, there would seem an obvious attraction to Glass Town. Novels by Anne, Charlotte and Emily Brontë remain in print over 150 years after they were written, yet their first work concerned the shared world of Glass Town, with brother Branwell also contributing to stories about the fictional inhabitants.
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