Greenberg is impressively well-informed about the Brontës, but handles her facts lightly, allowing full power to the beautiful and sensitive images. The wafer-thin line between Charlotte’s real and imagined life at this date, and her drug-like dependence on escape, finds perfect expression in these dreamy pictures. Greenberg’s subdued palette is particularly effective in the scenes showing Charlotte’s breakdown at Roe Head school, all gloom and stark windows, blending into colour when Zamorna appears in her bedroom at night (he’s been hiding in a chest) and whisks her off to Glass Town. They each hope that somehow they might be saved by the power of their imaginations, but that seems increasingly unlikely. The children progress through school, where the girls are being prepared for drab futures as teachers or governesses.

On adjacent pages, and in stark contrast, the life of the parsonage goes on. Travels in Angria: prize-winning graphic novelist Isabel Greenberg tells the story of the creation of Glass Town and weaves in strands from the Brontë sisters’ fictional worlds / Isabel Greenberg In the process, they spin more stories around the exotic personnel of Angria and Gondal (Emily and Anne’s invention) characters such as the Ashantee princeling Quashia Quamina, Zenobia the bluestocking and Charlotte’s beloved, wicked, Zamorna. “Is it you? After all this time?” she asks.Ĭharles Wellesley, one of the main characters from her long-abandoned stories, has come to take her back to the world she created as a child, and to recall the anarchic pleasures she enjoyed there. It is Charlotte, the last surviving sibling, whose solitude is interrupted by a smart young man in a mustard-coloured coat and sunglasses. She starts with a woman alone on a moor in 1849, a double spread of petrol blue and grey frames. Isabel Greenberg, the prize-winning author of two previous graphic novels, has recognised the sheer energy and oddity of this material and brought it to life in a wonderful way, telling the story of the creation of Glass Town and interspersing it with long strands of the Angrian stories themselves. New West End Company BRANDPOST | PAID CONTENT.

Glass Town by Isabel Greenberg