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When Charlotte Brontë was thirteen, she wrote ‘The History of the year’ 1829, which begins:
Once papa lent my sister Maria a book. It was an old geography book; she wrote on its blank leaf, ‘Papa lent me this book.’ This book is a hundred and twenty years old; it is at this moment lying before me. While I write this I am in the kitchen of the Parsonage, Haworth … 15
She wrote an account of the ‘Origin’ of the ‘Islanders Play’ and from this period dates the Brontë children's collective compulsion to express and record their childhood fantasy games in writing. The content of their fantasy is not so remarkable as the necessity of putting it into words, and words in the form of imitation printed books. The concept of a ‘book’ seems to have contained for them a sense of finding their family history, of being automatically an appropriate vehicle for the story of their lives. They perused their father's printed volumes (such as, the Cottage Poems, or The Maid of Killarney), and undoubtedly their obsession with writing was encouraged by the sense of social and intellectual ambition, and strong partisanship, emanating from Patrick Brontë. As Mrs Gaskell said, he was ‘silently cognisant’ of their activities;16 he invented a mask-game to detect the ‘signs of rising talent’ in his children, and through his somewhat eccentric mode of education gave the impression — with regard to Branwell at least — that he was nurturing genius. He was fanatically if fondly possessive of Charlotte in the years of her fame. The ‘old geography book’ lent by him to Maria his eldest daughter (who died in 1826 aged eleven), somehow symbolises the function of ‘the book’ in placing the children's identities; they were all fond of drawing and later of music as well, but writing was a necessity. Before Emily could write, Charlotte occasionally wrote down pieces for her, such as ‘A Day at Parry's Palace’, and allowed her influence to speak in records of their ‘bed plays’ (‘Emily and me one stormy night were