Ultimately, she decides to set down around six Glass Town characters, each of them connected through love triangles and familial relationships, all of it largely centred around Zamorna.

Greenberg tells us all the places she could have stopped, the broken plots and half-drawn characters. These soldiers expand into the kings and queens, conquests of far-flung lands, and grand exotic kingdoms we’d expect from the minds of imperialist Britain’s children.

Glass Town is born out of the four children’s imaginations which are launched by a collection of toy soldiers their father brings home from Leeds.

Death hangs over their lives, and so they escape to Glass Town where it has no power. They begin at a funeral with the four Brontë siblings as children, the second funeral they’ve been at in one year, the funeral of their sister Elizabeth who died six weeks after their other sister, Maria. When we meet a middle-aged Charlotte, she is wandering alone along the dull blue coloured moors of Haworth only to be greeted by Glass Town inhabitant Charles Wellesley in his otherworldly mustard yellow coat and dark glasses. The imaginary seeping into the real in a beautiful dramatization which Greenberg points out in an opening letter is fictitious, using broad strokes of biographical information. Greenberg interweaves Glass Town with the Brontë’s lives. For Greenberg’s graphic novel adaptation, she chooses to ignore much of these rough edges of Angria and instead focuses on specific characters, using an older Charlotte Brontë to frame the imaginary world and its creators. None of this was meant for publication, and the source material is full of unfinished plots and meandering storylines. Many consider their work some of the earliest examples of epic fantasy world building. This may be why they became invested as children and teenagers in building the fantasy world of Angria and Glass Town where villains and heroes fight, courtships are spurned, affairs are aplenty, and people are regularly resurrected.Ĭharlotte, Anne, Emily, and Branwell had no Middle Earth, Westeros, or Earthsea. InEngland, where the four Brontë siblings grew up, they were surrounded by boredom and death. But, this was not the case on the moors of 19th century Haworth. Colourful content fills our lives to the point that boredom is almost impossible. We drift between series, movies, video games, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and 24/7 news.

Glass town isabel greenberg