The Brontës and War: Fantasy and Conflict in Charlotte and Branwell Brontë's Youthful Writings by Emma Butcher (review)

Between 1829 and 1839, Charlotte and Branwell Brontë became absorbed in the imaginary worlds of Glass Town and Angria set in West Africa. Their juvenilia and young adult writing (Charlotte was aged between thirteen and twenty-three, Branwell between twelve and twenty-two) are usually read as authorial apprenticeships and as formative background to the social and political values of their mature work. In The Brontës and War: Fantasy and Conflict in Charlotte and Branwell Brontë's Youthful Writings, Emma Butcher argues that their fantasy worlds were founded in and shaped by war imaginaries generated by a "mosaic" of British attitudes to early-nineteenth-century conflicts and manifestations of war trauma (7). Further, Charlotte and Branwell were "important war commentators and historians," offering "a valuable, liberated insight into … military cultures that flourished in post-Waterloo Britain" (20). Butcher identifies five conflicts that dominate the saga: The Twelves War (1829–1830), Rogue's Insurrection of Glass Town (1830–1832), The Wars of Encroachment and Aggression (1833–1834), The Angrian and Glass Town Civil Wars (1835–1837), and Post-War Angria (1837–1839) (13). Charlotte's and Branwell's mediations of contemporary military cultures are liberated by their play in their chosen genres—fiction and poetry—and by their "impressionable" youth (69).

Butcher's methodology is historicist. She has carefully researched traces of contemporary military cultures around the Napoleonic Wars and their aftermath, war with the Ashanti people, and civil conflict in Britain and abroad. She has combed the written record, examining military memoirs, periodical and newspaper articles, and literary texts; she has also looked to the broader record, finding evidence of local war experience and involvement in civic unrest. Butcher demonstrates that Charlotte and Branwell took up representations of wide-ranging civil conflict, in the Jacobite rebellion and the Scottish clan wars, in the French Revolution and the American War of 1812, and, finally, in domestic British rioting of the 1830s. She follows leads drawn from scholarly research on the reading of the Brontë family, military memoirs, and celebrity (using Neil Ramsey's The Military Memoir and Romantic Literary Culture, 1780–1835 [2011] productively). In chapter 2, she contextualizes war writing more generally in relation to classical models and with regard to Walter Scott's treatment of war and its psychological impact. In sifting her archival sources, she identifies patterns of response to conflict and military celebrity, mapping Charlotte's and Branwell's Glass Town and Angrian writings in relation to them. The method allows her "to navigate" her own way and to guide her readers through the "notoriously difficult" texts and to identify broad differences between Charlotte's and Branwell's representations of war (5). It tends to foreclose, though, closely detailed analysis of the "robust dialectic" of the siblings' collaboration and its "cacophony" of "polyphonic" narrative "voices" (Christine Alexander, "Introduction," The Brontës: Tales of Glass Town, Angria, and Gondal: Selected Writings [Oxford University Press, 2010], xx–xxi).

The strengths of The Brontës and War are Butcher's clear exposition of the historical war and military milieu within which Charlotte and Branwell wrote, the methodical signposting of her argument, the particularly deft analyses of the Brontës' representations of the Duke of Wellington and Napoleon Bonaparte and fictional figures based on them, as well as their depictions of war trauma and the legacies of their mediation and processing of war in their later writing. Butcher makes large claims for Charlotte's and Branwell's grasps of the psychology of war trauma: that they were "aware of war trauma in an age where it was not present in contemporary medical terminology" (18); and that they "embedded their acute understanding of this phenomenon within their writings." Her discussions of the ways in which accounts of war suffering facilitated a "vicarious experience" of it and her close reading of the Bront...