Glass Town
The Imaginative World of the Brontes
by Isabel Greenberg
by Isabel Greenberg
2020
Glass Town is a graphic novel that presents a lightly fictionalized telling of the life of Charlotte Bronte that centers on the game of make-believe she used to play with her siblings Branwell, Emily, and Anne.
The book opens near its ending, with Charlotte visiting the grave site of her recently dead siblings, and being visited by a vision of Charles Wellesley, one of her imaginary characters, the one most like herself in Greenberg's telling. In conversation with Charles, Charlotte remembers her siblings and their make-believe game, and the rest of the book appears as an extended flashback from this 'present day' moment that we return to again at the end.
The earliest time we return to is also a funeral. The two eldest Bronte sisters have just died of illness they caught at boarding school. Charlotte is now the oldest, and with Branwell, Emily, and Anne, she starts a game they can play together, imagining the city of Glass Town, on a British-colonized African island called Angria. Greenberg portrays Charlotte as a natural leader, but one who defers to Branwell because she believes that, as the only brother, he ought to be in charge of the girls.
Throughout the book, the invented character Charlotte is most interested in is the womanizing poet Zamorna. She clearly loves him, gets jealous of the fictional women she pairs him with, and even changes the narrative to punish them for getting the attention she wants for herself but can't have. Greenberg depicts Charlotte as kind of romantically obsessed with cruel, patriarchal men; she wants someone who can boss her around, but she's so strong-willed that she keeps creating tyrants in an attempt to find someone to rule her. Charlotte seems to try to mold Branwell into this same kind of man, but he crumbles beneath the pressure she puts on him.
The siblings build up Glass Town in the stories they write for each other, especially Branwell who wants war and adventure stories, and Charlotte who wants romance and domestic drama. They spend all day every day playing. Eventually Emily and Anne get tired of always getting overrun and invent their own island, Gondal, to tell their own stories their own way, without their older siblings taking over.
Eventually, their father sends Charlotte to boarding school again. She and Branwell write each other letters to keep the game going initially, but when he stops writing, Charlotte carries on by herself. Things come to a head when the various ongoing plots in Glass Town come to a climax - overlapping love triangles intersecting with a revolution for African independence - and Charlotte worries that she's becoming unhealthily obsessed. She turns away from her fantasy world, she and her sisters publish their novels, and then all the siblings but Charlotte fall sick and die within a year. This brings us to the 'present' when she has the chance to choose again, to return to her fantasy and get lost in it, or to stay grounded in reality.
Greenberg's art is noteworthy. The proportions of the people and the perspective of the buildings resemble's children's art, an impression that's reinforced by the rough linework, which looks more like charcoal than ink. The color scheme of the entire book is autumnal, with reds and pinks, oranges and browns, splashes of yellow and purple, but no blue or green at all. Scenes and characters from Glass Town are in full color, while the living Brontes are monotone. Grey in the present day when Charlotte is in mourning, brown before the game starts, red at the height of the excitement, pink and orange when Charlotte is at school. You really feel that the fantasy world is more lively than reality, both brighter and more saturated with emotion.
Greenberg published in 2020, Catherynne Valente write a YA novel about the Brontes a couple years earlier called Glass Town Game. I'm not quite sure why a 200 year-old kids' game made it into the zeitgeist just then, though I'd guess that it helps that Oxford published a collection of the Brontes' Glass Town writings in 2010.
Lots of kids play let's pretend, but the Bronte siblings wrote their imaginary world down instead of only describing it verbally to each other. And because they became famous, various people had reasons to collect, preserve, and transcribe these childhood writings, which is why we're able to know or care about them. Whereas if you or I did something similar when we were kids, we would each likely be our own stories' only reader, if we kept them at all, instead of boxing them up in the attic or tossing them in the trash, the usual fate of kids' art, even the stuff that once got displayed on the fridge.
I've actually seen essays claiming that the Brontes invented roleplaying games 150 years before Gary Gygax wrote Dungeons & Dragons, or that one or the other of the sisters were the world's first Dungeon Master, but I don't really think that's true, any more so than I think HG Wells invented wargaming when he wrote Little Wars. At most, I think these might be the earliest examples of someone documenting in writing (that survived, and could become part of the historical record) the sort of games that many people played in their heads as kids and young adults, without usually leaving any record behind. And actually, I doubt they're even the earliest, probably just the best known, because these game-players became world famous, and their records got reprinted, rather than being anonymous writings that remain confined to an archive.
Which is not to say there's nothing of value here! Glass Town has kind of caught my imagination, and I'll probably read Valente's book about it at some point too. Lots of kids probably had their own make-believe world, but it's not so surprising to think that the future authors of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights might've had fantasy worlds that were more interesting than most, just as Wells and his opponent Robert Lewis Stevenson probably described their battles between toy soldiers more entertainingly than your average wargamer.
The book opens near its ending, with Charlotte visiting the grave site of her recently dead siblings, and being visited by a vision of Charles Wellesley, one of her imaginary characters, the one most like herself in Greenberg's telling. In conversation with Charles, Charlotte remembers her siblings and their make-believe game, and the rest of the book appears as an extended flashback from this 'present day' moment that we return to again at the end.
The earliest time we return to is also a funeral. The two eldest Bronte sisters have just died of illness they caught at boarding school. Charlotte is now the oldest, and with Branwell, Emily, and Anne, she starts a game they can play together, imagining the city of Glass Town, on a British-colonized African island called Angria. Greenberg portrays Charlotte as a natural leader, but one who defers to Branwell because she believes that, as the only brother, he ought to be in charge of the girls.
Throughout the book, the invented character Charlotte is most interested in is the womanizing poet Zamorna. She clearly loves him, gets jealous of the fictional women she pairs him with, and even changes the narrative to punish them for getting the attention she wants for herself but can't have. Greenberg depicts Charlotte as kind of romantically obsessed with cruel, patriarchal men; she wants someone who can boss her around, but she's so strong-willed that she keeps creating tyrants in an attempt to find someone to rule her. Charlotte seems to try to mold Branwell into this same kind of man, but he crumbles beneath the pressure she puts on him.
The siblings build up Glass Town in the stories they write for each other, especially Branwell who wants war and adventure stories, and Charlotte who wants romance and domestic drama. They spend all day every day playing. Eventually Emily and Anne get tired of always getting overrun and invent their own island, Gondal, to tell their own stories their own way, without their older siblings taking over.
Eventually, their father sends Charlotte to boarding school again. She and Branwell write each other letters to keep the game going initially, but when he stops writing, Charlotte carries on by herself. Things come to a head when the various ongoing plots in Glass Town come to a climax - overlapping love triangles intersecting with a revolution for African independence - and Charlotte worries that she's becoming unhealthily obsessed. She turns away from her fantasy world, she and her sisters publish their novels, and then all the siblings but Charlotte fall sick and die within a year. This brings us to the 'present' when she has the chance to choose again, to return to her fantasy and get lost in it, or to stay grounded in reality.
Greenberg's art is noteworthy. The proportions of the people and the perspective of the buildings resemble's children's art, an impression that's reinforced by the rough linework, which looks more like charcoal than ink. The color scheme of the entire book is autumnal, with reds and pinks, oranges and browns, splashes of yellow and purple, but no blue or green at all. Scenes and characters from Glass Town are in full color, while the living Brontes are monotone. Grey in the present day when Charlotte is in mourning, brown before the game starts, red at the height of the excitement, pink and orange when Charlotte is at school. You really feel that the fantasy world is more lively than reality, both brighter and more saturated with emotion.
Greenberg published in 2020, Catherynne Valente write a YA novel about the Brontes a couple years earlier called Glass Town Game. I'm not quite sure why a 200 year-old kids' game made it into the zeitgeist just then, though I'd guess that it helps that Oxford published a collection of the Brontes' Glass Town writings in 2010.
Lots of kids play let's pretend, but the Bronte siblings wrote their imaginary world down instead of only describing it verbally to each other. And because they became famous, various people had reasons to collect, preserve, and transcribe these childhood writings, which is why we're able to know or care about them. Whereas if you or I did something similar when we were kids, we would each likely be our own stories' only reader, if we kept them at all, instead of boxing them up in the attic or tossing them in the trash, the usual fate of kids' art, even the stuff that once got displayed on the fridge.
I've actually seen essays claiming that the Brontes invented roleplaying games 150 years before Gary Gygax wrote Dungeons & Dragons, or that one or the other of the sisters were the world's first Dungeon Master, but I don't really think that's true, any more so than I think HG Wells invented wargaming when he wrote Little Wars. At most, I think these might be the earliest examples of someone documenting in writing (that survived, and could become part of the historical record) the sort of games that many people played in their heads as kids and young adults, without usually leaving any record behind. And actually, I doubt they're even the earliest, probably just the best known, because these game-players became world famous, and their records got reprinted, rather than being anonymous writings that remain confined to an archive.
Which is not to say there's nothing of value here! Glass Town has kind of caught my imagination, and I'll probably read Valente's book about it at some point too. Lots of kids probably had their own make-believe world, but it's not so surprising to think that the future authors of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights might've had fantasy worlds that were more interesting than most, just as Wells and his opponent Robert Lewis Stevenson probably described their battles between toy soldiers more entertainingly than your average wargamer.
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