Reading this leaves you with the unambiguous belief that it was never meant for publication, at least not in this form. The stories are disjointed; they presuppose a greater familiarity with characters and setting than I could have had - especially in an edition with no introduction and no dramatis personae, which I think is a huge mistake, because some of the characters are referred to by about four different names. Doing some research enlightens you in some regard: Knowing that the fantasy world of the Very Very White Angria which apparently is supposed to be in Africa? was something the Brontës developed together and played together helps. Especially in the sense you get that these stories were just transcribed out of Charlotte's notebooks without having an underlying background text.

But it doesn't help that much. It took me till about the third story to understand who the narrator was and that each story had the same narrator - who is occasionally a character and occasionally omniscient. It's certainly interesting that there is so much adultery and dissolution going on, but, well, it's a little repetitive? It kind of reads like how playing Barbies used to work: you spend absolute ages developing a setting and backstories and plot points - but your Barbie always does pretty much the same stuff. There is something to be said for Charlotte's witticisms and pithy dialogues, but so much of the book is really dense and nigh-on incomprehensible that it's really hard to figure out what.

I literally just finished this book, and I don't remember the narrator's name. I did kind of find the stories Henry Hastings and Caroline Vernon memorable. The former follows a disgraced soldier and his sister, who tries to protect him; the second an illegitimate girl being brought into society and realising her love for what might be Angria's antagonist, or possibly protagonist, it's really hard to say. At its core, this is not a collection of short stories. It's a scrapbook of bits of a longer story that should by rights either be sold as an annotated edition for scholars or, with the use of a ghostwriter who adds in some introductory stuff, smooths out the chronology and figures out what to do with the narrator, sold as a novel. It worked for Sanditon, didn't it?