Glass Town: The Secret World of the Bronte Children - Hardcover

Bedard, Michael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0773729976 ISBN 13: 9780773729971

Publisher: Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 1997

Synopsis

In 1829 three remarkable young sisters and their brother began to invent a saga that carried well into their adult years. Only after their deaths, were over a hundred miniature books and magazines, all written in microscopic hand printing, discovered. The tiny manuscripts chronicled a world the children created and kept secret all their lives, a world they called Glass Town.

Raised in an austere home, set against the loneliness and isolation of the vast English moors, these children became authors whose works continue to captivate generations of readers right up to the present day. Here master storyteller Michael Bedard offers a glimpse into the lives of Anne, Emily, And Charlotte Bronte who would later give us such classics as Agnes Grey, Wuthering Heights, and Jane Erye.

About this title

About the Author:

Text by Michael Bedard and paintings by Laura Fernandez and Rick Jacobson.

From School Library Journal:

Grade 3-6. In Emily (Doubleday, 1992), Bedard explored the fertile ground that a life of seclusion provided for the imagination of a 19th-century American poet. Here, he crosses the ocean to Victorian England and creates a story to celebrate the unusual childhoods of that venerated trio of writers?Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Bronte (and their brother, Branwell). A foreword reveals that, following Charlotte's death, over 100 miniature books and magazines were discovered, handwritten in tiny print by the foursome. From childhood through adulthood, they had penned a secret world?the majestic "Glass Town." Bedard's story is narrated by Charlotte, whose telling fades in and out of reality, thus offering both a slice of the family's eccentric life in the English parsonage and the fantasy world to which the children frequently fled. The single- and double-page oil paintings contrast the dark, humorless world of their strict father and spinster aunt with the highly romanticized views of raging seas and windswept moors of their imaginations. Many of the landscapes depict a low horizon with dramatic, ever-changing skies and vast expanses dwarfing the buildings. The language is carefully chosen, in a style consistent with that of young writers honing their skills: "We woke a world, a world within.... We dip our pens in dream." With its foreboding aura and relatively unknown subject (most elementary children haven't read the Brontes), this book will have to find its audience: other introspective children, budding authors, those who dwell in their own interior worlds. But they will find it to be well worth the effort.?Wendy Lukehart, Dauphin County Library, Harrisburg, PA
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Fitzhenry and Whiteside
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0773729976
• ISBN 13: 9780773729971
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 32
• Illustrator: Fernandez Laura, Jacobson Rick