CHICKEN SOUP FOR THIS WRITER’S SOUL

 

From Linda Lee Greene, Author & Artist

 

I am hard at work on my novel,

THE BRONTË SISTERS AND YOUNG BOY GREEN,

An Alternate History.

It is saving me from going crazy over the current affairs of my country.

Below is an excerpt (a first draft, and subject to change):

 

~Scene Setup~

 

Christmas Day, 1846…Young Boy Green, who works as a helper to the Brontë family, finds Charlotte Brontë sitting at the writing desk in the parlor of the Parsonage where she lives with her father, two sisters, and brother. She is writing the passage in her novel, Jane Eyre, in which Jane and Rochester first meet, and is impatient to get to their first romantic encounter. Young Boy Green interrupts Charlotte to inform her that Magda, their pregnant family dog, is having a difficult time giving birth out in the barn. Charlotte drags herself away from her manuscript and prepares to set out to the barn to assist Magda. Her own galoshes are still sopping wet from an earlier trip out to the woodshed, therefore, Charlotte dons her sister, Emily’s over-shoes.

 

~Excerpt~

 

“Although two years younger than Charlotte, Emily was a hand’s length taller and markedly sturdier—hers were longboats next to Charlotte’s child-size over-shoes. Charlotte wrapped her gloomy brown cloak around her shoulders, a garment so over-sized that it concealed her like a shroud, and then she adjusted the velvet bonnet on her head, the same dismal hue as the cloak and her hair. Her father had surprised her with the outerwear on Christmas Eve—had it been just the evening before? “The Bard’s ‘…inaudible and noiseless foot of time,’” she muttered to herself as she slipped her feet into Emily’s galoshes. Rising to her full four feet nine inches, she glanced in the mirror on the wall above the console table that held place in the formal entry hall of the Parsonage. “Father’s sense of proportion grows more absurd with time. He would keep me hidden from all comers in any way available to him. Just look at me! I am grotesque! Might I not at least find my way to be a foil to my own literary character? Must I revive Jane Eyre’s ghastly reflection in her mirror in every waking hour of my own?”

Forcing her eyes away from the mirror, she inserted her left hand into her white fur muff. She loved the feel of it, its luxury, the way it drew to itself the light that filtered through the glass panes in the entry door. The muff was a relic of her mother, one of the few mementos left to Charlotte by her deceased parent. On fear of soiling it, Charlotte thought better of taking it to the barn and returned it to its customary spot on the console table. Wiggling her hands into a well-worn pair of mittens, she approached the glass-paned door and looked out across the broad lawn. It was carpeted in a deep plush of pristine snow. Countless overlapping boot-prints at the doorstep, the remains of the family’s frozen-morning dash to Father’s Christmas service at the church, were petroglyphs of an ancient order of the family-Brontë: the controlling, regulating power of the church in which pauses or spaces for romance, even daydreams of romance, was mercilessly ill-fitted…”©

Books by Linda Lee Greene are available for purchase at Amazon.com.

#CharlotteBrontë, #EmilyBrontë, #AnneBrontë, #BranwellBrontë, #PatrickBrontë, #VictorianEngland, #JaneEyre, #WutheringHeights, #TheTenantofWildfellHall