The secret history of Jane Eyre: Charlotte Brontë's private fantasy stories

The raw intensity of Brontë’s novel was unlike anything else when it was published in 1847 – apart from the wild, passionate fiction she began writing privately as a teenager

Before Charlotte Brontë unleashed Jane Eyre on the world, she was already – in secret – an accomplished fantasy writer. Her and her writer siblings’ collaborative worlds of Glass Town and Angria are as complex as Game of Thrones: fantastical, magical kingdoms, steeped in violence, politics, lust and betrayal. In private letters, Brontë called it her “world below”, a private escape where she could act out her desires and multiple identities.

Written in dozens of miniature books, these manuscripts – with curious, secretive titles such as A Peep into a Picture Book, The Spell, A Leaf from an Unopened Volume – are not only an astonishing example of craftsmanship, but contain extraordinary, uncensored content. The Brontës’ father had poor eyesight and could not read them, so Charlotte was able to write in confidence. Over the course of 10 years, she created characters and events that became inextricably bound with her own selfhood, some of whom we know and love in her later works.

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