Clare Boylan (1948–2006)

I started this book with trepidation. Often, works based off of unfinished manuscripts are horrible. The worst of the genre being those that just recycle characters and plot points from other works by the same author.

Thus, I was pleasantly surprised by how Boylan took 20 pages of a manuscript from Charlotte Bronte and wrote a story that was all her own and highly entertaining in its own right. The first chapter from Boylan was a bit of an abrupt transition. As the story gained in momentum show more though, Boylan found her own rhythm and voice that was reminiscent of Bronte without being derivative or fake.

All in all, I really enjoyed this and would have been quite happy to read it even without the Bronte connection. show less

I wouldn't actually call this a beach read. It's far too thick to lug to the beach and, honestly, the way I sobbed a little reading it on the train would also be inappropriate for the beach. You'll just have to let this one slide. My blogging schedule is very tight these next few weeks so you get what you get.

And what you're getting today is a beautiful book inspired by some twenty-odd pages Charlotte Brontë abandoned in the two years before her death. These same pages (it is assumed) show more inspired Frances Hodgson Burnett's A Little Princess, wherein a well-mannered and well-off little girl is established at a boarding school but, when she loses her father, the school keeps her on as a maid, of sorts, until she meets with a happy ending at the hand of an exotic gentleman who was previously a friend of her father's.

Most people know the Shirley Temple version or the 1995 version (Liam Cunningham FTW!!.... sorry... sometimes I'm a 15 year-old-girl...), both of which took liberties with that story and resolved the plot with the girl's father being recovered from an injury in the war (oh, he's not dead... we just thought he was dead!) and they're reunited la-dee-da. Well. It's interesting to see the way twenty pages of introduction can influence two decidedly different stories.

Boylan begins her version by including Brontë's twenty-page text, and then continues in Brontë fashion, that is from the perspective of a youngish (30s) widow. It is from her that we learn Emma's tale. You can almost see Mr. Carrisford and others in Mrs. Chalfont and in Mr. Ellin, whose backstory is taken from another unfinished Bronte work, and who, with Mrs. Chalfont, goes about Emma's salvation. True to Charlotte's style, there's more here than meets the eye--everyone involved seems to always have more history to share. Boylan fleshes them out in the form of self-narrative, something Charlotte Brontë was very accustomed to doing.

Boylan not only carried on in Brontë style and character, she considered Charlotte's life - her experiences in her later life which would have surely influenced this novel, had she completed it. She was very attuned to the plight of London's poor, and since Charlotte wrote best about what she knew, it's almost certain that similar episodes would have made it into her text. But while little Emma holds the title's name, it is the narrator's life story that is the most sympathetic and the most genuine.

Part of this surely comes from the fact that Charlotte was yet again writing as a governess whose life was not ideal - I'll grant Charlotte the credit for that. But the way in which Boylan brings her to life - quite literally by mashing together tiny bits and pieces of Jane Eyre, Shirley and Vilette. As Mrs. Chalfont's youth unfolds as young Isa on the page, she is vibrant and alive and, most importantly, full of passion. Passion is perhaps one of the most important qualities in a Charlotte Bronte novel. After all, it was she who criticized Jane Austen, saying "...she ruffles her reader by nothing vehement, disturbs him by nothing profound: the Passions are perfectly unknown to her; she rejects even a speaking acquaintance with that stormy Sisterhood..."

True, passion is of the utmost importance and Boylan has written it beautifully. But while these similarietes stand, and the key features are honored, there is a certain unease in the pastiche. Boylan did, I'm sure, her best to capture Brontë's voice and tone, but by clipping together her past works and then laying her later life's experiences over them, the voice of the novel seems off. There is almost as much of Brontë in the stroytelling as there is of Thackeray and, perhaps even more so, Dickens.

I can see how that would irk a Brontë scholar, and it must be observed that, as much as we would like it to be Charlotte's novel, it is only Clare Boylan's. But for being her novel, it is touching and passionate and excellent. I borrowed this one from the library, and I truly regret it - I wish I'd sucked it up and bought it for myself. But hey, Christmas is coming!

Lauren Cartelli
www.theliterarygothamite.com show less

A really fine book. Boylan did not try to be Charlotte Bronte, and there are darker events in the book than you find in Victorian novels, dealing as it does with the lives of street children and adolescent prostitutes. I think the key is that the fragment was so short. It was enough to establish a few characters and an intriguing situation, but not so long that it over-committed the new author. Still, Boylan had the task of keeping her characterization consistent with the Bronte’s show more beginning, and she succeeded. And despite the darker elements, there is much about this novel that is genuinely Victorian: the conventionally happy ending (complete with rescued street urchin); an episode involving imprisonment, forgery, and mistaken identity from Mrs. Chalfont’s youth; the notion that a marriage between a very young woman and a middle-aged man can be a happy one. There are some lighter elements that are rarely found in nineteenth-century novels, however, including Mrs. Chalfont’s brief moment of rekindled passion in mid-life (the nineteenth century favored very young heroines) when she is reunited with the man she once loved. It is a nineteenth century novel for a twenty-first century sensibility, possessed of both Bronte’s generosity of spirit and the modern willingness to have a little reality mixed in with our fantasy. show less

While it may be "Brontean," it has much more a feel of Anne to it than Charlotte. The abused governess recalls Agnes Grey, and there are times when the novel's tone much more resembles the greater religiosity of Anne than Charlotte.

A more serious problem, though, is the author's problem with narrative point of view. Although Isa Chalfont is the ostensible narrator, the author has a tendency to slip into a more omniscient narrator in those chapters in which Mrs Chalfont isn't immediately show more present. This just isn't the skillful handling of a first person narration that Charlotte demonstrated in Jane Eyre or Villette or that Emily demonstrated in Wuthering Heights. It's the much less skillful narration of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.

This book just doesn't have the feel of Charlotte to it. show less