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Review

The Brontës Went to Woolworths

Jane Mornement

By Rachel Ferguson
Virago Modern Classics, 1988

Former suffragette Rachel Ferguson – best known as ‘Rachel’ in the magazine Punch – went on to become an actress and dance teacher before writing nine novels. The Brontës Went To Woolworths, originally published in 1931, was her second – and possibly her most popular. A little delving has revealed that The Brontës … was something of a cult classic, which the recent Persephone Books’ reprint of Rachel’s more heavy-going novel, Alas, Poor Lady, will hopefully rejuvenate once again.

AS Byatt, who first loved the book as a teenager, writes in her introduction: ‘I was intrigued by the title, which seemed to suggest some impossible meeting of the urgent world of the romantic imagination and the everyday world of (in my case) Pontefract High Street’. And, indeed, the title alone is precisely how the book caught my eye.

The three Carne sisters, Deirdre, Katrine and Sheil, live with their widowed mother and starchy governess in a state of relative poverty. However, they try to find ways of making their shabby existence brighter by constructing a fantastical world for themselves, in which the dead come back to life and inanimate objects become animate.

Deirdre is a journalist and becomes infatuated by Lord Justice Toddington when she first discovers him archly presiding over his London courtroom. Fascinated by his presence and what she imagines his life to be like, Deirdre and her family incorporate their fictitious version of him into their real life. ‘Toddy’ joins their imaginary friends Dion Saffyd (a doll named after a real-life cause célèbre), Ironface (a French doll) and Freddie Pipson (a larger-than-life music hall producer). But it is during a bored night away from London that the Carne family finds itself reluctantly welcoming the ghosts of the real Brontë sisters into their world, and suddenly Toddy has a much larger role to play …

As the novel picked up pace, I found myself turning the pages ever more rapidly, as I not only feared for the characters, but was also willing them to succeed. The way the family incorporates both the imagined and the real Toddy into their lives is touching, but when reality and the Carne family’s fictional world start to seep into each other, the girls pull together and face up to the fact that real life is not quite so cosy as the world they have built to protect themselves.

Where the novel succeeds is in its beautifully written prose and wonderfully eccentric tone. The simple story of three girls struggling to cope without a father figure and trying to make the best of what life has dealt them is a touching consideration of grief and the possibility of an afterlife, as well as a good period piece of London life pre-Second World War.

Reading The Brontës… it is possible to see where Kate Atkinson found inspiration, specifically for her nineties novels, Human Croquet and Behind the Scenes at the Museum; both authors seamlessly blend reality with the supernatural to create haunting and affecting stories. And there is something wonderfully refreshing about both Kate and Rachel’s approach to death and the afterlife. In a touching scene in The Brontës … Deirdre recounts the time her deceased father reappeared to the family in their library. Rather than being alarmed at having a ghost in the house, their mother gets the girls dressed up in their Sunday best and sends them to sit in the library with the ghost of their father so that they can tell him what they’ve been up to lately. And it is with sadness that Deidre later expresses her disappointment that his ghost visited them only once.