"Sold by Nobody, and Printed by Herself, &c. &c."

March 31, 2022 2:28 PM

NYT, 03/30/2022: "A Tiny Brontë Book, Lost for a Century, Resurfaces" [archive.ph]. At the British Library, another 1829 text by Charlotte Brontë "Printed by Herself and Sold by Nobody"--"The Search after Happiness": "NOT many years ago there lived in a certain city a person of the name of Henry ODonell ..." Gutenberg text + edited version. Additional juvenilia [PDF] from 1829 discussed by Nicola Friar in "The Twelve Adventurers," "An Adventure in Ireland," and "Autobiography, Wish-fulfilment, and Juvenilia: The 'Fractured Self' in Charlotte Brontë's Paracosmic Counterworld" [PDF]. More context with an image from Isabel Greenberg's Glass Town graphic novel. See also a review of Catherynne Valente's The Glass Town Game or Friar's upcoming A Tale of Two Glass Towns and anthology.
posted by Wobbuffet (4 comments total)

How interesting. I hope someone snags them and publishes them. I understand it when new works are found by famous authors but not published (the werewolf one by Steinbeck for example), but also... information wants to be free. If it exists, in some timeline we all know about it and it's fine. That's my justification for releasing this one, anyway.
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 2:37 PM on March 31, 2022 [3 favorites]

Glass Town, Angria and Gondal are also locations and plot points in Kieron Gillen and Stephanie Hans's recently-completed graphic novel Die. Die is about how role-playing games shape and are shaped by the world that creates them, and Gillen treats the Brontës' shared imagined space as something in the nature of an RPG. It's worth reading, and Hans's art is incredibly beautiful.

I read Greenberg's Glass Town too, and really liked it. Both that and Die look at the way games can take over your life. Zamorna, the seductive, disruptive Byron/Dracula figure, looms large in both.
posted by Pallas Athena at 3:06 PM on March 31, 2022 [5 favorites]

I hope someone snags them and publishes them.

A dear friend and I are making plans to knock over a bank, fly to New York, and put in a bid. I promise that if we acquire it, we will publish it.
posted by ALeaflikeStructure at 3:54 PM on March 31, 2022 [5 favorites]

Update: "The last Charlotte Brontë miniature manuscript book known to be in private hands has been bought for $1.25m through swift action by the Friends of the National Libraries, and will be donated to the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth, Yorkshire, where it was originally written."
posted by Wobbuffet at 8:19 PM on April 25, 2022 [1 favorite]