Like “Jane Eyre,” Fawkes’s biography starts with Thomas Bewick’s “History of British Birds,” although the volume is not (as in the novel) being chucked at our protagonist’s head by a cousin, but being read by her sister Maria. Brontë fans will find plenty that rewards close reading. The book is marketed for teenagers, but it will appeal to adults as well. So it seems fitting that two new graphic novels examine what happens just before the blockbuster moment where childhood makes way for nothing less than iconhood in the making.įawkes’s textured retelling of one such story, CHARLOTTE BRONTË BEFORE JANE EYRE (Disney/Hyperion, 92 pp., $17, ages 10 and up), traces the writer’s life from her girlhood on the moors of England to the age of 31, when she submitted the manuscript for her first novel to its publisher. And, as everyone knows, extraordinary women start as girls - smart, determined and chafing against society’s notions of what they should be.
Thankfully, today’s shelves are filled with stories about and by women who wouldn’t oblige. But creative aspirations? Forget about it. He warns her, “Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life.” Find yourself a husband, he says write poems on the side if you must. Glynnis Fawkes’s graphic biography of Charlotte Brontë opens with the 20-year-old aspiring writer receiving a letter from the poet Robert Southey.
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