Wild, Weird Writing: Charlotte Brontë, Welcome to Die (Patreon)

By Kayleigh Hearn

Brussels, 1892. In a second hand book stall, a professor finds the leather-bound manuscript of High Life in Verdopolis, a novella set in the fantastic kingdom of Glass Town imagined by a teenage Charlotte Brontë. How the manuscript made its mysterious journey to the Belgian bookstall remains unknown.

Rehoboth Beach, 2009. Browsing the shelves at Atlantic Books, I find Tales of Glass Town, Angria, and Gondal by the Brontës. I’ve read and loved Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, but the discovery that the Brontë siblings also developed their own shared fantasy world is new and thrilling. I buy the brick-sized book immediately.

Baltimore, 2019. I buy the first volume of Die by Kieron Gillen and Stephanie Hans at Atomic Books. Reading it, the words of the Grandmaster hit me like a lightning bolt to the brain: “From Angria to Glass Town, all has been prepared for your coming…”

Die, Die, my darlings: in 1991, six British teenagers disappear into a mysterious role-playing game. Five of them return, unable to say anything about where they’ve been or what happened to them. Decades later, haunted by the horrors of their youth and the disappointments of middle age, the friends are reunited after the reappearance of their lost compatriot’s magic die. Suddenly, they are pulled back to the fantasy world of Die and the adventure they thought they left behind. The great game continues.

(Charlotte Bronte on the cover of Die #9 by Stephanie Hans)

A glowing tribute to fantasy role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons, Die is also a sharp, stinging subversion, starting with the catastrophic double-meaning in the book’s title. It warps familiar player character types (The Dictator, The Fool, etc.) and gives us unusual heroes in the Paragons: we don’t follow the first adventure of idealistic, hormonal teenagers, but rather the bitter return of fantasy world-weary forty-somethings. Writer Kieron Gillen and artist Stephanie Hans embrace the people who inspired RPGs while holding daggers behind their backs--in the land of Little England, they bring trench warfare to Middle Earth, with halflings inhaling mustard gas for second breakfast. And then there are the other named kingdoms: Glass Town, Angria, Gondal…

The Paragons (Ash, Isabelle, Angela, Matt, and Chuck) encounter the Masters of Die, who are the spirits (or at least the echoes) of the famous fantasy writers whose works were the fertile soil for this brave new world. J.R.R. Tolkien, head wreathed in pipe smoke, needs no explanation. Nor does H.G. Wells and his glowing gear-eyes, even if The War of the Worlds eclipses his Little Wars. More surprising is the third Master of Die.

She is introduced in issue #8 as Angria’s masked warden, overseeing the imprisonment of the sixth member of the party, the undead Sol. (Madwoman in the attic? Try a zombie in the dungeon.) In the following issue, the rest of the Paragons join Sol in their glass cells for the crime of razing Glass Town. It is Isabelle, a teacher and a Godbinder, who recognizes the architect of what they destroyed, the divinity in their presence:

“No way. You’re Charlotte Brontë.”

“I pray not. I sincerely do,” says the creator of Angria, her genie’s eye shining brightly through her mask. “That would be the worst of things.”

(Page from Die #9 by Kieron Gillen, Stephanie Hans, and Clayton Cowles)

Just what are Glass Town, Angria, and Gondal? Hans’ ethereal, painterly artwork turns to pen and ink as Charlotte explains the historical origin of her creations. Colored by Elvire De Cock in ordinary, earthy browns, Charlotte’s memories are sepia-toned: she is Dorothy and the Wizard, still stuck in Kansas. Reading this comic as a Brontë devotee, what’s startling is how much the story feels like a child’s fantasy. And this is before Gillen dissolves the barrier between fantasy and reality, making their dreams and ambitions (and, eventually, their souls) fuel a new world—they are the fire in Die’s creation myth.

“To begin with, it was a joyous game.” This much is true. In 1826, the four Brontë children—Charlotte, Branwell, Emily, and Anne—were gifted twelve toy soldiers by their father and began creating plays and stories for their wooden warriors. Isolated in the Haworth parsonage of their childhood, their imaginings became a kind of shared alternate reality, one they would occupy into young adulthood (and for Branwell, Emily, and Anne, right up until their deaths). Because their poems and novellas were written for each other, and not intended for publication, they provide fascinating, unfettered looks into their adolescent psyches. They allowed the children of a clergyman to explore themes such as adultery, murder, blackmail, and atheism.

For the Brontë siblings, creation was exhilaration. They devised the kingdoms of Glass Town (later called Verdopolis), Angria, and Gondal for their characters to live in and then wrote themselves into the saga as four powerful genii with dominion over the lands. Glass Town was an exotic setting, one where they could explore provocative ideas and question the nature of authorship itself (Charlotte and Branwell frequently “argued” through their characters, analyzing and retelling events from differing points of view.) It was an enticing fantasy, but ultimately, to Charlotte, a dangerous one. Haunted by visions of her handsome, ruthless hero Zamorna, she wrote her “Farewell to Angria” in 1839. Still, without these instructive, embryonic works, the Brontë sisters may have never written their masterpieces: Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.

(Page from Die #9 by Kieron Gillen, Stephanie Hans, Clayton Cowles, and Elvire De Cock)

If the Grandmaster’s first mention of Glass Town and Angria had been only a bit of spice added to Die’s mélange of fantasy worldbuilding, I would have been happy. The Brontës’ early speculative writings have long lingered in literary obscurity. Dismissed by Charlotte’s friend and biographer Elizabeth Gaskell as “wild, weird writing,” it’s only been in recent decades that these poems and novellas have been reappraised as significant works in their own right. But instead of an Easter egg, Gillen and Hans have gifted me with the whole damn basket. There was something slightly magical in that obscurity, like a secret shared through the centuries, but seeing Glass Town and Angria fully realized on the page by Stephanie Hans in all their dreamlike beauty is sublime. It’s more than an acknowledgement of the role women have played in shaping the foundations of the fantasy genre. It’s a restoration.

Emily and Anne’s Gondal is a haunted ruin—most of their writings are lost save for the shrapnel of poems and diary papers. By comparison, Charlotte’s Glass Town is as well-preserved as a city in a bottle. That so much of her early writings survives at all feels like a minor miracle, considering their delicacy. Among her Angrian papers are tiny magazines handmade for her wooden soldiers, her handwriting so small and fevered they feel like they were written under a spell. Charlotte’s tales of Angria are visionary artifacts, with facets of history, art, poetry, mythology, and military hero-worship refracted through the prism of a passionate young girl’s mind.

I would recommend that readers of Die (or anyone who hated reading Jane Eyre in high school, for that matter) seek out the Brontës’ juvenilia. Not only for their literary merit but because for stories written in the nineteenth century, they are remarkably predictive of our modern storytelling techniques. The genesis of the tales—children creating stories for little figurines, devising maps and rules, and playing Grandmaster-Genie…is that not the start of a killer role-playing session? Charlotte’s novellas are also, arguably, a form of fanfiction. (Die #9 is even smirkingly titled “Self-Insert.”) Initially writing tales for her favorite wooden soldier, who she named after her hero the Duke of Wellington, her attention shifted to his fictionalized son, the Duke of Zamorna.

(“King of Angria, Duke of Zamorna” by Charlotte Brontë, c. 1834)

“Oh, Zamorna! What eyes those are glancing under the deep shadow of that raven crest! They bode no good…All here is passion and fire unquenchable…Young duke—Young demon!” That’s how Charlotte described one of her greatest creations, the future king of Angria, Zamorna. Or, as Die’s protagonist Ash calls him, “that beautiful shithead.” Brilliant and tempestuous, Zamorna is both idol and tyrant, acquiring a collection of doomed wives and mistresses and incurring the wrath of his brother, who writes of the “black veins of utter perversion...running through his whole soul.”  Zamorna becomes a recurring character in Die; a sometime ally of the Paragons, he courted Isabelle but seduced Ash, fathering her son, Augustus. You could call Zamorna the original “problematic fave,” Charlotte Brontë’s trash son.

Cast by Brontë in the image of the mad, bad, and dangerous to know Lord Byron, his presence in Die is also something of an in-joke for Gillen and Hans. They push the Byronic influence even further, depicting Zamorna as a vampire—Byron inspired Lord Ruthven, one of English literature’s first vampires, in John William Polidori’s “The Vampire.” Gillen and Hans previously paid their respects to Lord Byron himself in The Wicked + The Divine: 1831, depicting the infamous poet and libertine as an incarnation of Lucifer. Young demon, indeed!

(Zamorna on the cover of Die #10 by Stephanie Hans)

Reader, I’ve hungered for a mainstream adaptation of Tales of Glass Town, Angria, and Gondal from the moment I set the book down on my coffee table. In a post-Game of Thrones media landscape, its potential as a grand, large-scale epic seemed obvious. A romantic, supernaturally-tinged fantasy world with a handsome anti-hero, from the creators of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights! And in the public domain! Youthful imperfections aside, there is a wealth of material to be admired, analyzed, and adapted. Charlotte Brontë had an artist’s imagination and a keen eye for the textures and sensations of Angrian life; surely High Life in Verdopolis, The Spell, and The Duke of Zamorna are overdue for adaptation when we already have a sorority of Jane Eyres? My mistake, however, was assuming that the Angrian tales were made to be prestige television when Gillen and Hans have made the perfect case for another medium: comic books.

Die is not a direct adaptation. Think of it more as fanfic of a fanfic, shared ideas and influences referencing each other like the mystical time loop that creates the world of Die itself. Stephanie Hans is an extraordinary visual storyteller, her art shifting from the sublime to the uncanny as if she were a Master of Die herself--her Glass Town is a Tower of Babel inside a d20, and when Zamorna appears on horseback before Charlotte in a vision, he’s Byron by way of Frazetta. Comic book serialization feels appropriate for this world, given Charlotte’s handwritten magazines for her toy soldiers (dare I call them zines?) and her pencil and watercolor illustrations of her characters. Her 1834 portrait of Zamorna is striking in its recognizability: pale, black-clad, delicate-featured, he is the dark prince of a young girl’s dreams. He’s Lucifer, he’s Lord Ruthven, he’s Edward Rochester...he’s even Edward Cullen and Kylo Ren.

Die recognizes the power of this adolescent fantasy without belittling it. The idea of a Byronic hero like Zamorna has captured many a maiden in its thrall, as Ash and Isabelle can attest. It can give young women a means of exploring burgeoning sexuality and prodding patriarchal power, or it can permit them to feel things that may seem forbidden and scary. But Die is also about the violent collision between fantasy and reality, and the wreckage they leave behind. Zamorna seduces the seventeen-year-old Ash and impregnates her; twenty-five years later, Ash binds Zamorna’s will to hers via the supernatural power of her Voice, compelling him to marry her and make her Queen of Angria. Power fantasies upon power fantasies, twisted and tragic.

“One of us should have known better,” says Ash after using her Voice on Zamorna, transforming the king into her servant.

“I am what Charlotte wished. I am what you all wished.”

(Page from Die #10 by KIeron Gillen, Stephanie Hans, and Clayton Cowles)

And what of Charlotte, Master of Die? Oh Charlotte! What eyes those are glancing under the deep shadow of that raven crest! How fitting that Charlotte’s spirit appears as if she was cut from the same cloth as her creation, dressed in sepulchral black, with a heavy chain of keys fastened to her breast. For her, Angria was a labor of love. Not the blind love of an idolater, but the clear-eyed love of a creator recognizing the power of her works. In Die, Gillen and Hans capture the contradiction at Charlotte’s core: she was a woman of fire and ambition confined to the small roles society allotted her sex. “I could no sooner burn myself,” she says in issue #9, after sacrificing the Gondal works in a failed attempt to prevent her sisters’ untimely deaths. But in the end, she is consumed by Die all the same.

The author who hid behind the masks of narrative personae and the pseudonym Currer Bell hides her face behind a new mask, but the blazing light of her talent still shines through the veil. Die’s Charlotte fears she is not a Master but a pawn of this world, and that is Gillen and Hans’s great act of literary transmutation: the author becomes a character. In reality, Charlotte said her farewell to Angria, but the city still stands--on the page and in the imagination--and it has not said goodbye to her. Ash says it best: “We can survive anything but our past.”

2021. I’m thinking about that leather-bound manuscript of High Life in Verdopolis again, hidden in a bookstall like a magic talisman waiting to be rediscovered. This feels like where a fantasy story should begin. It’s Miaka Yūki reading The Universe of The Four Gods in Fushigi Yūgi. It’s Sarah quoting her favorite book to defeat the Goblin King in Labyrinth. The manuscript was sold to the British Museum, languishing in anonymity for nearly one hundred years. Charlotte Brontë’s High Life in Verdopolis was published for the first time in 1991. If only the Paragons had read it in time. Their story might have had a different ending.

“Now Reader, farewell, until the time that we two meet again.”

• Charlotte Brontë, March 20th, 1834