If there’s one thing I simply can’t resist, it’s a new book about the Brontës. As a longtime fan, I’m endlessly fascinated by them and always eager to learn more.

In The Little Books of the Little Brontës (Tundra, 2023), Sara O’Leary and Briony May Smith show how the love of storytelling and the power of books sustained young Charlotte, Emily, Branwell and Anne after they prematurely lost their mother and two older sisters to illness.

As the story opens, we see Charlotte crafting a small handmade book for her youngest sister Anne. Illustrated with tiny watercolors, the happy-ending tale features Anne as an only child who travels to marvelous places with her rich parents. Real life, however, is quite different.

Living with their father, aunt, and housekeeper Tabatha at the edge of the wild moors, the Brontë children cope with sadness and grief by clinging to each other and creating “a world unto themselves.” Their days are marked by morning lessons and afternoon outdoor wanderings, as their love of stories permeates almost everything they do.

Voracious readers, they devour fiction, poetry, history, geography, fables, the Bible and even the dictionary. “They make up poems as they walk the moors,” invent characters as they work in the kitchen, act out plays at night in bed.

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