Emma Brown - Tapa dura

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.