Glass Town

Krystyna Higgins is the former book review editor for the Catholic New
Times.

This sophisticated picture book by the gifted Michael Bedard is a
remarkable literary and artistic achievement. Anne, Emily, and Charlotte
Brontл, along with their brother Branwell, were raised in a village
parsonage on the English moors by their widowed father and a stern
maiden aunt. Their everyday lives were constricted, isolated, cheerless;
yet from such apparently barren soil would spring up such classics of
English literature as Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights.

Bedard’s book derives its inspiration from a collection of miniature
books and magazines, painstakingly printed by hand, that were discovered
among Charlotte Brontл’s effects after her death. These tiny
artifacts constitute the detailed, ongoing story of an imaginary place
called Glass Town, invented by the Brontл children in 1829 and
developed over many years of imaginative play.

Glass Town recounts a day in the lives of the children, in the form of
a diary kept by Charlotte. The text interweaves descriptions of their
strictly regimented daily activities—household duties, studies, meals,
exercise, family prayers with their visions of the world built and
peopled by their unfettered imaginations. These two juxtaposed
existences are neatly framed by the very structure of the text, which
opens with the word “Haworth” (the name of their village) and closes
with the phrase “the world within.”

Bedard is able to draw the reader magically, almost cinematically, into
the scene being described. His use of language reflects the formal and
ornate prose of the period; it is challenging without being stilted or
awkward. He capitalizes on the first-person diary format to reveal the
author-to-be within Charlotte through the lyrical beauty of her
reflections. Of Glass Town she says, “[w]e woke a world, a world
within”; upon being summoned back to mundane domestic duties she
sighs, “[w]e turned from dreams to dust again.”

The glorious full-page color paintings by the Toronto husband-and-wife
team of Fernandez and Jacobson are a treasure in themselves, whether
they are depicting the rapt expressions of the children at play or the
windswept expanses of the moors.

A book of this calibre is indeed a rare achievement, and as such
deserves the highest possible recommendation.