Emma Brown
By Clare Boylan 

     At the time of Charlotte Bronte's death in 1855 she was working on a novel concerning a lost child whom she had tentatively called Emma; only twenty pages survive. Now Clare Boylan has finished the manuscript for her and at last Bronte fans (and anybody else who savors a good mystery) can find out what happened, at least according to Ms. Boylan. A man calling himself Conway Fitzgibbon deposits a child at unsuccessful school Fuchsia Lodge and vanishes. The child boasts a vast wardrobe of grand garments and is assumed to be an heiress, so she is made much of by the three sisters who run the establishment. But she is unhappy and appears to want to be anywhere else, so when her fees are unpaid by the end of the first term and her benefactor has vanished, the Misses Wilcox are glad to see her gone. But who is she, what is the dreadful secret she says torments, her and where has she gone? It is up to bored widow Mrs. Chalfont and her friend Mr. Ellin to find out, and what they uncover will change their lives forever.

     I was most impressed with this effort, which can perhaps be described best as "a real Victorian novel for modern people." To appeal to the modern in the readers there is the underlying theme of the lot of women and how differing females cope with it, at the mercy of their husbands or families or belonging to nobody but themselves. To appeal to the hidden Victorian in us there is the sort of pathos (particularly involving children and animals) that they would love, and to appeal to both parts there are some truly graphic descriptions of poverty and plenty of page-turning suspense. I was surprised at how adeptly Ms. Boylan had managed to get under the skin of 19th century writers and there are many "set pieces" so beloved by illustrators, such as the scene at the Crystal Palace or Emma hugging the hermit's dog. Dickens would have used more humor to season his tragedy and social comment, but the Brontes were of sterner stuff and preferred to show it unvarnished, so this is how it appears here. Even the characters are straight out of a 19th century novel; Emma is highly reminiscent of Jane Eyre, there is the brooding hero (actually two of these), an ex-governess turned respectable grocer's widow, and Jenny Drew is pure Dickens (Jenny Wren). This is not a short novel, but one which packs a punch with its sheer vigor and stays in the mind afterwards.