The Twelve Soldiers

The Brontë children grew up in a gray stone parsonage at Haworth, on the edge of the wild Yorkshire moors.Their mother had died when Charlotte was still very young, leaving her father, Patrick, to raise six children largely on his own.With few playmates outside the family, the children turned to one another and to their own imaginations for company.

One evening, their father came home from a trip and brought Branwell a box of twelve wooden toy soldiers.The children crowded around, each choosing one soldier to claim as her own, and giving it a name and a personality.Charlotte’s soldier became the Duke of Wellington, her favorite hero, brave and unshakably calm.

From this simple gift, an entire imaginary world began to grow: kingdoms, wars, and heroes, invented together night after night.The children called their invented land Angria, and later Emily and Anne created a second kingdom of their own, called Gondal.

Charlotte and Branwell filled notebook after notebook with the adventures of Angria’s kings, generals, and rival lovers.To keep their stories private, they wrote in letters so tiny that most adults could barely read them without a magnifying glass.They sewed the tiny pages together into books no larger than a matchbox, meant for no eyes but their own.

For years, this private world of Angria was where Charlotte’s imagination truly lived, long before anyone outside the family knew she could write.The habit of inventing characters, giving them voices, and following them through long, tangled stories never left her.Years later, as a grown woman, Charlotte would draw on that same restless imagination to write Jane Eyre.It had all begun, long before, with a box of twelve wooden soldiers on a kitchen table at Haworth.