Bonnet

The new book by Carys Davis contains a Brontë-related short story which was previously published in the Red Room collection published in 2013:

The Redemption of Galen Pike
Carys Davies
Publication Date: 15-Oct-14
ISBN: 9781907773716
Salt Publishing

In a remote Australian settlement a young wife with an untellable secret reluctantly invites her neighbour into her home. A Quaker spinster offers companionship to a condemned murderer in a Colorado jail. A tourist, mistaken for a god, finds his position questioned by the beautiful maid sent to look after him. In the ice and snows of Siberia an office employee from Birmingham witnesses a scene that will change her life. At a jubilee celebration in a northern English town a middle-aged alderman opens his heart to Queen Victoria. High in the Cumbrian fells a woman seeks help from her father’s enemy.

The seventeen stories in The Redemption of Galen Pike are about how little we ever know of other people and the unpredictable bonds that spring up between us when our worlds collide. 

The Yorkshire Post gives a few more details:

Each story is a perfectly distilled, intense slice of life and includes the exquisite Bonnet which features Charlotte Brontë who makes an ill-fated journey to London to meet her handsome young publisher George Smith.
He does not reciprocate her romantic feelings and Davies describes their awkward encounter with such delicacy, empathy and economy that the reader is almost able to feel Charlotte’s acute embarrassment as their own.
“That is one of my favourites in the collection,” says Davies. “I have always loved the Brontës and I was re-reading their letters when I just had an image of Charlotte getting on a train in Leeds and going to London; this small Northern woman going off into this strange far away place. I didn’t know why she was going at that point or who she was going to see. Then I just started writing. It is really how I write my stories – I don’t know what the story is going to be and they generally end up a very long way from where they started. Perhaps I was particularly intrigued by the relationship with George Smith because in short stories it’s about what’s not on the page. The story came out of those spaces and silences.” (Yvette Huddleston)