Glass Town by Isabel Greenberg review – inside the Brontës’ dreamworld

Before Jane Eyre and before Heathcliff, there was Glass Town. Isolated on the edge of the Yorkshire moors, the Brontë siblings spent their formative years squeezing minute script on to precious paper, collaborating and competing to tell slyly overblown sagas of imaginary lands – Angria, Gondal and the great city of Glass Town.

Isabel Greenberg’s acclaimed previous works, The Encyclopedia of Early Earth and The One Hundred Nights of Hero, foregrounded young storytellers weaving tales of icy wastes, crumbling towers and battles for love and freedom. Now she sets the Brontës’ juvenilia at the heart of her latest graphic novel.

Greenberg shows Branwell, Emily, Anne and Charlotte (her main focus), cloistered “like potatoes growing in a dark cellar”, as a schoolfriend puts it, and the melodrama that sprouts from them. They work together to build Glass Town and its prime movers – the scheming Earl of Northangerland, his reforming wife Zenobia, put-upon daughter Mary Percy, dashing son Zamorna and adopted son Quashia. But Emily and Anne grow frustrated with their elder siblings’ dominance, and abandon Glass Town to create the new land of Gondal. The sisters are sent one by one to boarding school. And Glass Town hurtles to war.

Greenberg blurs fiction and memoir: characters walk between worlds and woo their creators. Pivotal periods such as Charlotte’s schooling in Belgium, where she because obsessed with her tutor, a possible model for Mr Rochester, are omitted: instead Greenberg focuses on the delights and dangers of “an interior world that was brighter, more golden” than reality.

And bright it is. Greenberg contrasts the tropical sky of Glass Town with the wind and rain of the moors, dim English interiors with pungent reds and yellows, picturing epic mountains and seas, lakes of ink and giant quills. Her protagonists look wonky but feel wonderfully real, lips tight with forbearance or smiles wide with joy, while the sharp, concise dialogue rings sad and true.

This is a tale, bookended by funerals, about the collision between dreamlike places of possibility and constrained 19th-century lives. None of the Brontës would reach 40. Branwell, of whom so much was expected, died an unfulfilled alcoholic, while his sisters were held back by convention – Emily, Charlotte and Anne published under assumed masculine names. Yet publish they did: their work still entrances us, and Greenberg gives their tangled early creations gripping and generous life.

• Glass Town by Isabel Greenberg is published by Jonathan Cape (£19.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15.