Bookish Girls

The Little Books of the Little Brontës – written by Sara O’Leary, illustrated by Briony May Smith
Tundra Books, 2023

You probably hope that the children in your life will grow up to read the Brontë sisters’ novels and poetry.  In the meantime, here is a book that offers the perfect introduction to their very early formation as authors. Sara O’Leary (I’ve reviewed other work by her here and here and here) and Briony May Smith don’t take the path of presenting their subjects as young people and then following the main steps of their lives as leading up to accomplishment and fame. Instead, the find one attractive and significant element that predicted Jane Eyre, Villette, Wuthering Heights, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. The young Brontës miniaturized their limitless imagination in the form of tiny books, which they wrote and bound themselves.  The scale of this endeavor is so appealing to children that it allows them to enter the distant world of 19^th century Yorkshire as if it were a familiar and comforting place. The pictures are stunningly delicate and dramatic; the text speaks directly to young readers with elegant simplicity.

First, lift the dust cover to see a kind of facsimile of a book that would have found its way to the hands a child long ago.  Inside, O’Leary invites readers to look through a window and meet Charlotte and Anne seated at a table. Charlotte is creating a small volume while her little sister looks on with anticipation. Anne’s face reflects her response to an artist at work, as Charlotte writes, paints, and stitches. She has created an alternative life for his sister, one with a mother to replace the one who has died, as well as a visit to London and a voyage at sea.  Every object in the pictures is carefully composed and arranged in its relation to others, but, to children, the linking of words and items is invisible.  They are reading and viewing a story about dreaming of a different life.

O’Leary segues to “the real world,” where Charlotte, Emily, Anne, and their brother, Branwell, sit at dinner with their father. Smith’s  picture is a bird’s-eye view of a silent meal tinged with a sense of loss. Still, there is plenty of food and even a dog to feed under the table.  Every gesture and image in the book signals to readers that the Brontës’ world is not their own, but nor is it out of reach.  The children’s lives are both wild and domestic, with the lessons and visitors indoors, and the natural world as an unlimited space. 

The Brontë children never stop reading.  O’Leary enumerates the books they devour: novels, poetry, history, dictionaries, the Bible. Everyone knows that adults who write usually started as children who read, but this picture book doesn’t belabor the logic of that point.  We see the children peeling potatoes and reading, acting out stories in the dark, and using the ordinary props of childhood as a theater for their invented world. Dolls, toy soldiers, and blocks are integrated into the words that they string together on the page, both literally and figuratively. They grow up to be creators. Although the dimensions of their work have enlarged, the original seed of their visions has not changed.

The book concludes with an illustrated guide to making miniature books, a thoughtful author’s note in which O’Leary admits that she has “long been obsessed with miniature things,” a graphically beautiful timeline, and a list of sources.  (The small picture of the Haworth parsonage caused me to look twice, because it so resembles Madeline’s old house in Paris in Ludwig Bemelmans’s books. Even if the homage is inadvertent, it reiterates Briony May Smith’s undeniable place in a long chain of classic illustrators.). The Little Books of the Little Brontës is both artistically exceptional and completely accessible.  Its vivid picture of a bookish childhood demands multiple readings with your children.