It would be difficult to overestimate the extravagance of the authorial claims made in the Angrian legend. Even books of folio (half-sheet) size were written in the minuscule hand Gaskell describes. in a hand which it is almost impossible to decipher without the aid of a magnifying glass.” 5 Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë reproduces a facsimile of a manuscript page measuring three and three-quarters inches by four and a half inches, and she has by no means chosen the smallest of the children’s little books Charlotte’s first book, for example, which she wrote for Anne sometime between 18, measures only half that size, as does Branwell’s History of the Young Men, written in 1830. Elizabeth Gaskell, the first to examine the texts of the Angrian legend, describes “an immense amount of manuscript, in an inconceivably small space. Even more striking than the sheer number of manuscripts is their disproportionately small size. By the time they abandoned their created world, Charlotte and Branwell had produced hundreds of stories, many of them novelettes in length, which they carefully wrote by hand, illustrated, and collected in hand-bound volumes. 4 Although Anne and Emily eventually defected to create Gondal, a separate imaginary world, Charlotte and Branwell continued to expand, map, and narrate the legend of Angria at least until 1839, when Charlotte was in her mid-20s, the veteran of two despised governess positions and two uncompelling marriage proposals. 3 Three years later (perhaps because some of the soldiers had been lost), the children began to create magazines and journals for their characters, productions which partly consolidated and finally replaced the physical plays with which the stories began. 2 Inspired by a set of toys given to the four surviving children by their father, probably to mark the end of the mourning year, Charlotte and her three siblings began to “make out” a series of plays, most of them featuring the Twelve, or the Young Men, as the children called the wooden soldiers Branwell received from his father.

The Angrian legend began in 1826, one year after the deaths of Maria and Elizabeth Brontë from tuberculosis contracted at Cowan Bridge School. Charlotte Brontë’s novels tend to occupy the claustrophobic spaces of dependent gentility, but her imaginative life began more expansively, with the invention and lavish elaboration of a fantastic new world, the imaginary African empire of Angria.

Legends Of Angria by Charlotte Brontë