A thousand different things in this world are magic and they are intoxicating, teasing, all-enveloping. All magic, magic things but infinitely different. We read it as one thing, but it’s so often another. But it’s something else entirely, and I think that something is magic.
Technically this is a graphic novel, a blend of fact and fiction, a story of the Brontë juvenilia and the stories held within, and it is that. And so I worked my way into their world, reading books about them and books by them and books like Glass Town by Isabel Greenberg, books that are something so magical and wild and weird and delicious that they spill out of simple classifications and into something else entirely. My route to the Brontës began with Emily and Wuthering Heights, and the slow realisation that I could not ignore storytelling as fierce as this. And also, that it doesn’t matter what route I take to get to a text. It’s something I took a while to figure out: my reading has validity.
Reading not for the reaction of others but for the reaction of myself. This isn’t about literacy nor the understanding of shapes and comprehension of words, it’s about reading. But I have learnt how to read since then, and by ‘read’, I mean to read for myself. Something dull, something ‘bonnety’, something related to distant schooldays and the memories of tearing a text from limb to limb and leaving little to nothing left there to love, to lose onself in. I would have fought against this a few years ago, I think, reading them as something distant from what they are. I am increasingly conscious that I am moving closer to the world of the Brontës, falling in love with it, and not being remotely mad about this, not at all. Glass Town: The Imaginary World of the Brontës by Isabel Greenberg
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