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a new in-progress folk musical inspired by the imaginations of the Bronte Sisters
book by Anna Miles
music by Valerie Larsen
lyrics by Valerie Larsen, Anna Miles, and the Bronte Sisters
Returning home from their respective governess positions, Anne and Charlotte Brontë let their sister Emily lure them back into their shared childhood fantasy world. Using their old toy soldier as a touchstone, their rituals and games grow increasingly all-consuming until the soldier expands from a tiny plaything into a full-size, flesh-and-blood Byronian antihero, an embodiment of the sisters’ unspoken desires and the seductive pull of fantasy over reality.
Meanwhile, Charlotte is haunted by ghostly cries from the attic, reminiscent of a certain familiar literary madwoman. Combined with her growing attraction to her father’s well-meaning but painfully normal curate, the attic voices disrupt Charlotte’s retreat into fantasy until she can no longer ignore this “madwoman”...revealed not to be a woman at all, but a manifestation of a devastating, fantasy-shattering truth.
When finally confronted by reality, Charlotte is faced with a choice: will she walk the way of the woman in the attic and choose real life over illusion, or will she follow her imagined man into fantasy until she is so immersed she can no longer emerge?
“I had calculated that when shut out from every enjoyment – from every stimulus but what could be derived from intellectual exertion, my mind would rouse itself perforce – late in the evenings and all through the nights – I fall into a condition of mind which turns entirely to the Past – to Memory, and Memory is both sad and relentless.”
-Charlotte Bronte
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“You — you strange, you almost unearthly thing! — I love as my own flesh."
-Rochester to Jane in Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
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“The writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master – something that, at times, strangely wills and works for itself. He may lay down rules and devise principles, and to rules and principles it will perhaps for years lie in subjection; and then, haply without any warning of revolt, there comes a time when it will no longer consent – when, refusing absolutely to make ropes out of sea-sand any longer, it sets to work on statue-hewing. Be the work grim or glorious, dread or divine, you have little choice left but quiescent adoption. The statuary found a granite block on a solitary moor; gazing thereon, he saw from the crag might be elicited a head, savage, swart, sinister; with time and labour, the crag took human shape; and there it stands colossal, dark, and frowning, half statue, half rock: in the former sense, terrible and goblin-like; in the latter, almost beautiful, for its coloring is of mellow grey, and moorland moss clothes it; and heath*, with its blooming bells and balmy fragrance, grows faithfully close to the giant's foot.”
-Charlotte Bronte
Thy mind is ever moving
In regions dark to thee;
Recall its useless roving—
Come back and dwell with me.
I know my mountain breezes
Enchant and soothe thee still—
I know my sunshine pleases
Despite thy wayward will.
I’ve watched thee every hour;
I know my mighty sway,
I know my magic power
To drive thy griefs away.
-Emily Bronte
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