Emma Brown: Amazon.ca: Clare Boylan: Books

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From Amazon.co.uk

Clare Boylan's expansion of Bronte's scrap of plot into Emma Brown is powerfully imagined and stylish, with enough melodramatic twists to keep the momentum going until the end. She is distinctly successful in recreating faithfully an idiom both familiar yet obsolete. Charlotte Bronte left a fragment of a novel at her death, subsequently published under the title Emma, concerning the placement by a rich father of a haughty and unresponsive daughter at a school for young ladies. As with Jane Austen's Sanditon or Dickens' Edwin Drood it has offered later writers the challenge of guessing a dead author's intentions.

Paradoxically, one of the opportunities that such an enterprise offers is the possibility of subverting the apparent direction of a plot-line, or undermining the perceived character of participants in the story and Clare Boylan takes extensive--perhaps too extensive--advantage of her freedom in this regard. A modern author's preoccupations are unlikely to be the same as those of a mid-Victorian and Boylan's story takes Charlotte Bronte's characters into darker milieu, and with a greater explicitness of social detail, than their creator is likely to have permitted herself. Rather like Charles Palliser did with Dickens in The Quincunx, Boylan seems to be trying to strip away the euphemism and restraint required of the great 19th-century novelists to show the reality of the world they mirrored. Students of Victorian social history will recognise elements drawn from Mayhew and WT Stead, among others: indeed Stead and the incident for which he is now best remembered--the purchase of a child--has clearly influenced a key character and plot element.

There is much of Dickens, and perhaps even more of Wilkie Collins, in the plotting, which survives a tendency to the schematic or mechanical to deliver a story that ranges widely through 19th-century England and society. This is a remarkable achievement in many ways. While clearly not the novel that Charlotte Bronte would have written, it is a successful resuscitation of the forms of high Victorian fiction as a vessel for 21st-century concerns. --Robin Davidson

From Publishers Weekly

When Charlotte Brontë died in 1855, she left behind a 20-page manuscript, which Irish novelist Boylan (Holy Pictures, etc.) uses as the first two chapters of her own sprawling novel. The result is a deeply satisfying Victorian mystery, at once cozy, witty, didactic and melodramatic. A young girl named Matilda Fitzgibbon is deposited at a ladies' school run by the "fantastic, affected and pretentious" Wilcox sisters. But Matilda is a "pseudo-heiress," unrelated to the elegant (and now vanished) gentleman who enrolled her. Spurned by the Wilcoxes, Matilda is taken in by motherly Isabel Chalfont, a childless widow whose comfortable station and "middling" temperament conceal a passionate romantic history. But Matilda proves to be "no ordinary child"â€"secretive and prone to fainting spells, she claims to have no memory of her past, other than having been "sold like a farmyard creature." When she runs away, stealing the money still due the Wilcoxes, Mrs. Chalfont turns to her enigmatic friend Mr. Ellin, who tries to determine what happened. Searches through London's dirty streets reveal nothing. Meanwhile, Matildaâ€"who realizes that her name is actually Emmaâ€"faces hunger, homelessness and conscription into child prostitution, as she searches for the mother who gave her up. Boylan's evocation of Victorian London is bleak but enthralling, and her characters turn Brontë's sharp sketches into nuanced creations. The plot is feverish and overly dependent on coincidence, and there are a few anachronisms, but who'll complain? Brontë purists, maybeâ€"but other readers will embrace this as a treasure unearthed.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

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Emma Brown (Hardcover)

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