High Life In Verdopolis: A Story From The Glass Town Saga. - Review - book reviews

HIGH LIVE IN VERDOPOLIS: A STORY PROM THE GLASS TOWN SAGA by Charlotte Bronte. Presented with facsimile illustrations from the manuscript and drawings by Charlotte Bronte. Introduced and edited by Christine Alexander. London: The British Library, 1995. xxiii + 103 pages. $24.95.

On 20 February 1834 Charlotte Bronte wrote to her dear friend Ellen Nussey, who, two months shy of seventeen, had gone to London for her first season. In a self-deprecating but satirical manner, Bronte thanked Ellen for taking time to write amidst the "splendours, and novelties of that great city." On that same day, Bronte commenced work on High Life in Verdopolis, a novella-length addition to the Angrian or Glass Town chronicles that she and brother Branwell had been creating since childhood. Charlotte was just one year older than Ellen and madly curious about the great city, but poverty and extreme shyness kept her from enjoying in person the urban pleasures Ellen described. Instead she turned--as, so often, she had--to the imaginative world that sustained her. In this world her passionate, romantic and rebellious spirit found expression through characters whose fates she controlled, unfettered by the prosaic and sometimes grim realities of life at Haworth parsonage.

Bronte scholars and fans know how, in the process of compiling material for her biography of Bronte, Mrs. Gaskell discovered a cache of Charlotte and Branwell's juvenilia, written in the cramped and tiny hand they both employed. Gaskell's husband estimated at that time that the whole collection of fictional letters, journals, poems, stories and other writings "would make more than 50 vols [sic] of print," and Mrs. Gaskell recorded that the wildness and the sheer volume of these writings suggested to her the "idea of creative power carried to the verge of insanity." To readers familiar with Bronte's life story, it now appears more likely that the creation of the Angrian chronicles helped to maintain the sanity of one whose emotional and mental powers demanded expression despite--or perhaps because of--the obscurity and isolation of her situation.

High Life in Verdopolis falls roughly in the middle of the Angrian chronicles that so unsettled Charlotte's biographer: Charlotte and Branwell began to record their "secret plays" in 1829, and Charlotte penned her "Farewell to Angria" in 1839. The tale involves highly colored scenes of adventure and self-indulgence--of aristocrats sporting at voluptuous parties, engaged in political intrigue and clandestine romance. It offers a portrait of Charlotte's hero, the Byronic Duke of Zamorna, just at the stage when the pernicious and self-destructive aspects of his nature begin to reveal themselves. This is also the tale in which Bronte introduces the heroine of her history, Zamorna's third wife, Mary, daughter of Zamorna's chief political rival.

Lovers of Jane Eyre and Villette will find little of the suspense, wit and psychological penetration of those novels in this early work. Indeed, one of the fascinations of the text is the degree to which it reveals Bronte's abiding interest in certain topics--cruel, powerful romantic heroes; women suffering unrequited love; apparitions that dwindle to fog or solidify to flesh and blood--without evincing so much as a hint of the control and craftsmanship she would later develop to deal with them. In an unwieldy bit of dialogue from from High Life, Mary's father advises her to "Go to the heartless, arrogant, noble scoundrel [Zamorna] yourself." Zamorna is an UrRochester--but wooden. The narrator of High Life tells us he is roguish and dangerously charming, but we are unconvinced. More than a decade will pass before Bronte is able to create the verbal swordplay of Jane and Rochester, or Lucy and Paul Emmanuel, and show how rude and despotic "masters" can also bedazzle and seduce.

The editor of this slim volume, Christine Alexander, is also editor of a much-praised, multi-volume critical edition of The Early Writings of Charlotte Bronte (Blackwell, 1987-91) and co-author, with Jane Sellars, of The Art of the Brontes) (Cambridge, 1995). In High Life in Verdopolis she offers an accessible and engaging entry into the world of Charlotte Bronte's early creative life. The text is carefully annotated to provide guidance to the Bronte neophyte, and enlightenment to the specialist, without the intrusion of such detailed textual apparatus as might jar and confuse the casual reader. The fourteen plates that add so much to the beauty of the book are reproductions from amongst Bronte's own manuscripts and watercolors and will retain their interest for Bronte readers whether tied to the Angrian tales or viewed separately. High Life in Verdopolis was never intended for publication and was, almost certainly, the gift of an infatuated young woman to her Belgian teacher, Constantin Heger. In this lovely British Library edition, Christine Alexander passes the gift on to us.

GAYLA S. MCGLAMERY Loyola College in Maryland

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