Walk Invisible: The Brontë Sisters (2016)

Who's in it?: Jonathan Pryce (Tomorrow Never Dies, Pirates of the Caribbean) plays the Brontë dad. I wasn't familiar with the other actors, but they're all amazing.

What's it about?: As Branwell Brontë slides into alcoholism and depression, his father and sisters grow concerned about the financial future of the family once Father dies. That's when oldest sister Charlotte starts thinking about publishing.

How is it?: I'm not normally crazy about biopics, but really wanted to see more about the Brontë siblings after reading Glass Town and Infernal Angria. It's possible to make a good biopic though, usually by focusing on one, crucial part of the subject's life and using it to summarize what the film wants to say about the person. I hoped To Walk Invisible (or just Walk Invisible, as it's sometimes called) would do that. And it does.

It opens with some cool shots of the Brontë children on the verge of inventing their Glass Town/Angria/Gondal world, but the film isn't about that. The childhood world they created says something about their creative spirits. And there's also some early mention of how addictive that world became, especially to Charlotte (Finn Atkins), as explored a lot in the Glass Town graphic novel. But To Walk Invisible is less concerned about the creative spirit itself than about what the siblings do with it.

In Branwell's (Adam Nagaitis) case, the answer is, "Not much." He attempts a trip to London to sell himself as an artist, but becomes overwhelmed by the idea and chickens out on the way there. Instead, he spends the time - and all of his money - getting drunk in a village along the road. (Infernal Angria relates this event, too.) Branwell's cowardice and other moral shortcomings send him into a spiral, which spells trouble for the rest of the family. 

They're not particularly concerned about scandal. They're not wealthy or well-placed enough for that to be an issue. The problem is that Patrick Brontë, the family's patriarch, is an elderly, Anglican priest who owns no land nor the parish house that the family lives in. When he dies, according to English law and custom of the day, it will be Branwell's responsibility to support the sisters financially. But Branwell is both unwilling and unable to do that. Which sends eldest daughter Charlotte scrambling for ideas about how the sisters can support themselves.

I won't outline the whole story, but the short of it is that Emily (Chloe Pirrie) needs some convincing about Charlotte's publishing scheme while Anne (Charlie Murphy) is pretty game for it. Emily is angry and resentful about Branwell and the situation he's created, but she's not crazy about sharing her poetry, which is extremely personal to her. And that's a problem because Charlotte's plan is to publish a book of poetry written by all three sisters, but with Emily's as the foundation, because she's the best at it and there's no book without her. If the poetry collection is even moderately successful, Charlotte hopes to parlay it into a book deal where each sister can write her own novels.

So the film is a commentary on gender issues, but it's also about unconditional love (as the family tries to figure out the best way to help Branwell) and various commercial and personal motivations for creating art. The Walk Invisible title comes from Charlotte's plan to use masculine pseudonyms so that the authors' true gender is undetectable and so not an issue for publishers or readers. And I love Emily's suggestion (or maybe it's Anne's, I forget, but it sounds like an Emily idea) to make the gender of the pen-names ambiguous, but masculine-sounding. So Charlotte, Emily, and Anne become Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell.  

This all leads to my favorite moment of the film when Charlotte and Anne have to travel to London and reveal their true selves to their publisher in order to correct a misunderstanding with potentially catastrophic repercussions. I don't want to spoil it, but it's so good.

As is the rest of the film. It's all expertly crafted from the story and the acting to the photography and art design and a closing sequence that seems like it should be nothing, but is extremely emotional and powerful considering all that's come before. 

Rating: Five out of five badass author sisters

The Brontes: Infernal Angria by Craig Hurd-McKenney and Rick Geary

As I mentioned earlier, Isabel Greenberg's Glass Town got me wanting to read Craig Hurd-McKenney and Rick Geary's version of the story, which also explores the Brontë siblings' obsession with the fictional world they created as kids. I read the first part when it was released back in 2004 and was fascinated by it. It was my first exposure to the Brontës childhood creations and I was curious to learn more. It took a while for Hurd-McKenney and Geary to finish the story though (no judgment; graphic novels are monsters to produce), so I'd forgotten all about it until Glass Town reminded me. Thankfully, Infernal Agria was finished a couple of years ago and was all ready for me to dig in.

It's a cool companion to Glass Town. The art style is very different with Geary being perfect for nineteenth century atmosphere and details. It doesn't have the maps or clear geography that Greenberg provides in Glass Town though, so the versions compliment each other. They're doing different things.

Hurd-McKenney and Geary's story also makes Angria/Glass Town a real (though fantastical) place. It's like Wonderland, Narnia, or Oz in that it's separate from the real world, but fairly easy for the kids to access. But like Greenberg's story, Hurd-McKenney and Geary's take focuses on the obsession that the Brontë kids had with the place. Not just Charlotte - who's the focus for Greenberg - but all of them. Infernal Agria argues that this obsession was heightened by tragedies in the Brontë family, and the obsession itself becomes its own kind of tragedy piled onto past ones. It's a bleak take that I didn't enjoy as much as Greenberg's more universal one. I don't always agree with the actions of Greenberg's Charlotte Brontë, but I understand them and see myself in a lot of what she does and thinks. I mostly just feel really bad for Infernal Agria's Brontë kids.

I'm absolutely glad I read it though. I'd love to see the story and world expanded even further and am super curious now about seeing the 2016 biopic, Walk Invisible.

Glass Town: The Imaginary World of the Brontës by Isabel Greenberg

Glass Town is an immersive look at the young lives of the Brontë siblings: Charlotte, Branwell, Emily, and Anne. As children, they created a fictional world together and populated it with their individual, but interacting characters in a shared storytelling exercise. Greenberg chronicles some of those stories while also helping readers get to know the Brontës themselves.

All the kids get some attention, but Greenberg focuses primarily on Charlotte and her growing obsession with the fictional world. It threatens to consume her to the point where she's not only ignoring real-world responsibilities, but is also seeing physical manifestations of her characters and having conversations with them. There's a powerful parallel to the allure of modern world-building video game simulations and the potential for addiction. But it's also a commentary on the act of storytelling itself and the nature of fictional characters who sometimes do surprising things quite outside their creators' control.

Greenberg has an art style that I struggle to describe. There's a naïf quality about it (especially the characters) that I don't always connect with, but she's a master at storytelling and page composition. She also includes great, period details and amazing maps and architectural structures. I felt pulled into the Brontës' world.

I'm eager to dig into their literary work, but before I do that I want to spend more time with them as characters themselves. There's another graphic novel that I read the first part of a few years ago. The Brontes: Infernal Angria by Craig Hurd-McKenney and Rick Geary was originally going to be serialized and the first installment was published in 2004. It was finally finished a couple of years ago and I'm going to revisit it now. I remember being rather confused by it at the time (not being familiar with the Brontës or their Angria/Glass Town concept), but Greenberg has primed me for another go. There's also a 2016 biopic called Walk Invisible: The Brontë Sisters that I'll be taking a look at.

31 Days of Gothic Romance | Wuthering Heights

Two months after Charlotte Brontë published Jane Eyre, her sister Emily came out with a second example of gothic romance that people could take seriously. Wuthering Heights is a darker, meaner book than Jane Eyre, but it's cruelty has a purpose. Like a lot of the Brontës' work, it was designed to challenge the social structure and morality of its day. And it doesn't pull punches in doing that.

Like Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights does this using gothic romance tropes and imagery as its framework. Readers are introduced to the titular house long after it's ceased to be a vibrant home. As the book opens, the desolate building has become dark and haunted. Brontë explains how it got that way in a series of flashbacks that focus on Catherine, the daughter of the house who has now become its ghostly visitor, and her adopted brother/love interest, Heathcliff.

In addition to the theme of decay and the supernatural elements, Wuthering Heights also has the young woman menaced by a sinister master. Emily Brontë puts a huge twist on this though. Heathcliff eventually becomes master of the house, but that's not what gives him power over Catherine. It's her own feelings for him. He's socially her inferior, but his crudeness influences her in extremely negative ways.

31 Days of Gothic Romance | Jane Eyre

1847 was a big year for gothic romance. Ann Radcliffe popularized the genre 50 years earlier and even legitimized it for many people, but it took Brontës to make it Literature. In October 1847, Charlotte Brontë published Jane Eyre under the pseudonym Currer Bell, even pretending to have edited an autobiography of an actual Jane Eyre.

The story follows its eponymous character as she grows from child to adult and was revolutionary for the way it handled character development. But as important as it is to the evolution of novels, it hangs its achievements on a gothic romance plot. Jane comes of age in a creepy, old house with secret rooms protected by a dark, brooding master. In many ways, the story is a mature version of Beauty and the Beast. Rochester is handsome, but he's off-putting in other ways and Jane sees through that to the good soul beneath. There's even an element of the supernatural in Jane's dreams, her vision of a ghost, and the disembodied voice of Rochester calling her away from a suitor and back to Thornfield Hall.

There have been a ton of film adaptations, but the one that's freshest in my mind is Cary Fukunaga's excellent 2011 version starring Mia Wasikowska, Michael Fassbender, and Judi Dench.