Secret Adventures at Woolworths

Via Stuck in a Book we found out that Bloomsbury will be releasing the much sought-after The Brontës Went to Woolworths by Rachel Ferguson, a book mentioned before here on BrontëBlog. The release is scheduled for August and the publisher's website describes it as follows:

A charming novel from the early 1900s that revels in young innocence prior to the First World War and celebrates the fantasies of childhood

Part of The Bloomsbury Group: A new library of books from the early twentieth-century chosen by readers for readers

'How I loathe that kind of novel which is about a lot of sisters’; so proclaims Deirdre at the beginning of The Brontës Went to Woolworths, one of three sisters.

London, 1931. As growing up looms large in the lives of the Carne sisters, Deirdre, Katrine and young Sheil still share an insatiable appetite for the fantastic. Eldest sister Deirdre is a journalist, Katrine a fledgling actress and young Sheil is still with her governess; together they live a life unchecked by their mother in their bohemian town house. Irrepressibly imaginative, the sisters cannot resist making up stories as they have done since childhood; from their talking nursery toys, Ironface the Doll and Dion Saffyn the pierrot, to their fulsomely-imagined friendship with real high-court Judge Toddington who, since Mrs Carne did jury duty, they affectionately called Toddy.

However, when Deirdre meets Toddy’s real-life wife at a charity bazaar, the sisters are forced to confront the subject of their imaginings. Will the sisters cast off the fantasies of childhood forever? Will Toddy and his wife, Lady Mildred, accept these charmingly eccentric girls? And when fancy and reality collide, who can tell whether Ironface can really talk, whether Judge Toddington truly wears lavender silk pyjamas or whether the Brontës did indeed go to Woolworths?

A.S. Byatt is quoted as saying:

'The Brontes Went to Woolworths is about the imagination. It is marvellously successful because it is about every kind of imagination - from mundane tabloid-journalism curiosity to Romantic art and beyond - into the edges of the uncanny and the supernatural'

We have heard wonderful things about this book in the past and we are certainly looking forward to reading it at last (and do check out the rest of its 'Bloomsbury Group' companions, as they are not to be overlooked either).

And just in case you are looking for something to read now, The Secret Adventures of Charlotte Brontë by Laura Joh Rowland was released in paperback in US only last week. It has a weird sort of cover which doesn't compare in the least to the nice one the hardback edition had, but the contents, of course, are the same.

EDIT:

There's a new cover for the The Brontës Went to Woolworths edition.



Categories: Books, Fiction