STANCLIFFE'S HOTEL, the lost Bronte. (Charlotte Bronte in general)

Member Name: theediscerning

Product:	Charlotte Bronte in general
Date:	29/10/03 (84 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: It's short...

Disadvantages: ... but ain't sweet

It has to be made known as we begin this, that theediscerning is not a fan of the classic literature of old. For him, acceptable reading tends to begin in the days of HG Wells, or Conrad. But he does have a fondness for the lesser works in authors' oeuvres, and will readily sample the unpopular, small pieces long before the major works.

Which part explains the occasion when he plucked Stancliffe's Hotel from the library shelves. Safe in a basic knowledge of Jane Eyre, this little work, only published this year, and 165 years after it was written, would allow a small glimpse into the Charlotte Bronte career. The current Penguin Classics edition under review is just a small thing, of similar size to throwaway Little Books of Calm, Farting, etc, that one finds as impulse buys by bookstore tills. 80 pages of a smallish print come with a satisfactory introduction, and some notes on the more obscure words and references. The cover artwork is the author's own, interestingly.

The introduction tells us how all four Brontes ~ Anne, Emily, Charlotte and Branwell ~ gave themselves an apprenticeship in literature, not only by reading copiously, but by inventing reports and narratives on their own fictional fantasy world. This allowed them to parody people and authors they read about elsewhere, and to entertain each other with in-jokes and inventions of their own young minds. The whole stock of writing from the four, based in the world of Glass Town, and its neighbouring sequels Gondal and Angria, amounts to much more work than the published books we know them for.

Don't expect the Dungeons and Dragons fantasy, of course ~ this is much more mundane.

And so we come to Stancliffe's Hotel, in the capital of Angria, Zamorna. The background to the story is that Zamorna himself, the King, has had some civil war trouble with his father-in-law (don't we all?), but things are almost back to normality. Zamorna's brot
her has become in a fluid way, a different character, Charles Townshend, and it is he that narrates the tome here.

But what a narrative. Sorry, that should read "What narrative?" For out of eighty pages, the first fifty pass us in bewilderment, as we await any clear indication of the gist of this book. Townshend leaves his female friend with her drugged-up lover, decides to leave the city as the season is over, and fetches up staying in the titular hotel. There he meets a friend, and they talk, before both see "The Rose of Zamorna", a most becoming young society lass. They take it upon themselves to visit her, under false names and pretences, and in the process get caught out.

Yes, the writing is horribly woolly, verbose and just plain uninteresting to the modern ear (or eye), and so doesn't readily allow for much plot per page, but surely there was a reason other than sheer curiosity value for this book to be published?

Well, if there is one, it does come next. In a rather peculiar way we find the people of Zamorna have an equally odd reason for starting a near~riot, which is put across in just a few pages, unfortunately. The domestic aftermath of this which closes the book just goes to prove that this is merely a fragment of a larger opus. Even though the authoress does seem to think Stancliffe's Hotel is a stand-alone 'novelette', it does not work on any level as satisfactory fiction.

The characters may be ironic, or speak in ironic high-falutin' ways. From our remove we cannot tell ~ they act as naturally as we might expect. The drama is so lop-sided towards the bland reportage of anecdote and personal detail the Angria saga may have thrived on as a proper work, but here these just swamp the dramatic point of the political disturbance.

And earlier we safely ignored the real reason for this book being published ~ money. If, as the introduction tells us, Jane Eyre is the
third most popular book ever in the nation's libraries, and as the BBC poll pundits predict will be the nations's most favourite read, there is bound to be interest in other Charlotte Bronte works. It is a pity that Penguin think this works as anything like an equal to the proper novels. This is merely a fragment of something much more personal, not for public consumption. It should have stayed that way.


For those who will insist on picking up this slight fright, they will pay £2.99 for a volume bearing the ISBN 0-141-43995-5. But theediscerning would cast a heavy frown at the sight of them doing so.

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