Fiction: Charlotte Brontë died in 1855. Some time later, the Cornhill Magazine published the opening chapters of a novel, going under the title of Emma, which was found among her papers.
The chapters usher in the character Mrs Chalfont, a widow of moderate means; describe a school for young ladies run by a trio of sisters named Wilcox; and record the joy of the latter when an apparent heiress, complete with frills and fine laces, is deposited on their doorstep. A Miss Matilda Fitzgibbon. Not many pages into the story, however, it's disclosed that the heiress - or at least her position - is as bogus as a stage villain's moustache, that the man who delivered her, supposedly her father, is not what he seems any more than she is, and that the term's fees are unlikely to be forthcoming. And there, with the ingredients of a tantalising mystery firmly in place, the reader is left high and dry, with no prospect of an explanation.
Or not until now. At this point, nearly 150 years later, an inspired replenisher steps in. One C.B. takes over where another C.B. left off. Clare Boylan has steeped herself in the literature and preoccupations of the mid-19th century (and beyond); she's an assured pasticheur who doesn't eshew the odd touch of Victorian orotundity, or neglect to marshal those massive coincidences that can weld together so joyously all the aspects of a plot. The Brontë fragment makes a vivid starting-point; but the story that follows is Clare Boylan's own. Well, mainly her own: it owes a little to other literary practitioners of the age, from Wilkie Collins, via Mrs Braddon and Mrs Hodgson Burnett, right down to the later (American) Eleanor H. Porter and Pollyanna, in which the orphan Jimmy Bean remarks, "I'd like a home - jest a common one, ye know, with a mother in it instead of a Matron'. This wistful wish is echoed towards the end of Emma Brown, when a sick and deserving waif enquires disarmingly, "Is this a home?" Well, is it? Reader, you need to have progressed through many vicissitudes and devices of an exorbitant undertaking before an answer is supplied.
Emma Brown is an extraordinary ragbag of a novel, with a farouche protagonist, a pungent storyline, and a narrative approach of sufficient energy to fuel the Great Exhibition of 1851 (which comes into the picture). It is wonderfully intricate and intriguing. A Brontëan seriousness of purpose comes out in the social detail, pace Mayhew, concerning mid-Victorian beggary and other evils afflicting lowly parts of London. At moments, all the pathos inseparable from the theme of lost and degraded children comes to the fore. One plot-section borrows the real-life experience of the journalist W.T. Stead, whose 1880s investigations into the trade in young female virgins led to his own arrest and imprisonment on a charge of abduction. Another portion of a barely extant work by Charlotte Brontë, The Story of Willie Ellin, is adapted here to fit the needs of the new imbroglio. In Emma Brown, the character William Ellin, a bachelor living quietly in a Yorkshire village, joins forces with widowed Mrs Chalfont to investigate the mystery of Matilda Fitzgibbon.
What is the mystery of Matilda Fitzgibbon? In one sense, it's the way she progresses from being a fraught and inarticulate victim of circumstances (highly coloured circumstances), soon moving on in life and showing herself a resourceful heroine. The novel is stamped all over with a temperate feminism, expressed in wry observations obliquely upholding female independence of spirit, and deploring such iniquities of the day as the Married Women's Property Acts. If, at times, it seems Clare Boylan has taken on board a mite too thoroughly the conventions of the Victorian novel (though not without a touch of tongue-in-cheek), you can't fault her in the areas of inventiveness and aplomb. The story adumbrated by Charlotte Bronte has - at last - reached an inspiriting resolution.
- Patricia Craig is a critic and author. Her most recent book is a biography of Brian Moore
Emma Brown By Clare Boylan Little, Brown 439pp. £16 99