Emma Brown: A Novel From the Unfinished Manuscript by Charlotte Bronte
by By Bronte, Charlotte and Boylan, Clare
Category: Fiction , Historical

Charlotte Bronte's death in 1855 deprived the world of what might have been her masterpiece. The twenty unfinished manuscript pages about a lost young girl - which signaled her most compelling work since Jane Eyre - sat in waiting for almost 150 years until Irish novelist Clare Boylan decided to finish it. This tale allows Bronte's tantalizing fragment of a novel, at last, to blossom.Emma Brown is the story of a young girl, Matilda, brought by her father to a small girls' school in provincial England. The school, Fuchsia Lodge, is foundering, so its new headmistress is delighted to welcome a new pupil - especially one so elaborately dressed with an apparently rich father who is "quite the gentleman." But when the school term ends and it comes time to make arrangements for the Christmas holidays, Matilda's tuition goes unpaid, and the headmistress is shocked to find that the identity of the father, Conway Fitzgibbon - like the address he left behind - is a fiction. Before long, it becomes clear that the little heiress herself is not who she seemed.So who is the mysterious Matilda? When the girl refuses to reveal her true identity and then disappears, it falls to a local gentleman, Mr. Ellin, and Isabel Chalfont, a childless widow who briefly takes the girl in, to unravel the truth. In a journey that takes them from the drawing rooms of English country society to the grimy streets and back alleys of London's seamiest reached, Emma Brown follows the search - first for Matilda's real identity and then for the girl herself.