ABSTRACT
Unlike the more accommodating juvenilia of Jane Austen (in which the ease and high Mozartian humor of the later stylist are already plainly visible), the early writings of Charlotte Brontë have always proved a stumbling block to her devotees. Some of the difficulty has had to do with the freakish nature of the surviving manuscripts. “An immense amount of manuscript is an inconceivably small space” is how Elizabeth Gaskell described the “curious packet” of juvenilia that came down to her after Brontë's death; as if to mimic the inhuman density of print, the fourteen-year-old Brontë has written nearly all of her earliest stories and poems on tiny sheets of paper in a hand “almost impossible to decipher without the aid of a magnifying glass.” The facsimile pages reproduced in Christine Alexander's new edition—some measuring only two inches by three inches—give a dizzying sense of the near-demoniacal physical labor that went into the originals and of the challenge they pose to anyone attempting to read through or transcribe them.
