The trouble is, though, that while Brontë herself could be a master of suspense, our desire to find out who or what is in the attic is only one of the many strands that make Jane Eyre such a magnetic read.
(Ingeniously, Boylan has also managed to incorporate elements of another, earlier novel fragment by Brontë which tells the story of "Willie Ellin's" brutalised childhood.) Taking her cue from this, Boylan has created a plot-driven story, in which Mrs Chalfont and Mr Ellin join forces to solve the mystery. One of the characters in the fragment, Mr Ellin, is described by Brontë as an "amateur detective". To do so, she provides us with a well constructed, labyrinthine narrative, full of suspense, which leads us to the final truth about Matilda's secret history. These are the questions with which Brontë's fragment so enticingly leaves us, and it is more than understandable that Boylan felt they needed answering. Who is this child, so uncomfortably got up in borrowed frills and furbelows? What is her real name, and, more to the point, what is the secret core of self which underlies the inauthentic selves imposed on her by others? Supposedly an heiress, she has been deposited in a boarding school by an aristocratic-seeming gentleman who then vanishes into thin air, leaving her fees unpaid. Through the eyes of the widowed narrator, Mrs Chalfont, we are introduced to a mysterious, silent, suffering young girl, "Matilda Fitzgibbon".
It explores, even more explicitly than her previous novels, Charlotte Brontë's recurrent theme: the construction of female identity. The Brontë fragment in question is indeed a fascinating piece, as tantalising, despite its brevity, as Dickens's unfinished novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood. The question is, is it really possible to get inside the mind of a long dead writer - especially when that writer was one of the most brilliant of a generation in which the novel itself reached its apogee - and produce a convincing pastiche worthy of its originator? Readers have always expressed a desire - even a need - to identify with (and appropriate) the Brontë sisters, prompted largely by the highly emotive treatment of their lives contained in Elizabeth Gaskell's classic 1857 biography, The Life of Charlotte Brontë. Emily's Wuthering Heights has inspired a number of unsuccessful sequels, written, perhaps, in response to speculation that she had started a lost second novel before she died. She is not the first to attempt to make fiction out of incomplete traces left by the Brontës. In Emma Brown, Clare Boylan has set herself the ambitious task of finishing this novel, of which Brontë wrote only two chapters.
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