When a young woman, wife of a local landowner, disappears - apparently murdered - amid a scene of terrifying violence, Charlotte, Emily and Anne feel compelled to become “detectors” in a bid to find out what has become of poor Elizabeth Chester. Limited as they are by their sex (nobody wants to talk of important matters to mere women) and financial resources, they nevertheless have the benefit of intelligence, determination and boundless imagination. The quest to unravel the mystery takes them in interesting and at times frightening directions.
It was an excellent read, with the distinct characters, as we know them, of the Brontë “girls” shining through, and strands of their known history woven throughout (I was drawn to look up “Miss Celia Amelia”, aka Reverend William Weightman, and he did indeed exist). Of course it would be unthinkable that disguised elements of such adventures, had they really occurred, hadn’t made their way into the Brontë sisters’ writings, and elements of the plot clearly echo, or foreshadow - whatever the right word is here - incidents in their novels.
I wasn’t sure what to expect from The Vanished Bride, but found I enjoyed it very much... a genuinely gripping plot, a very satisfying ending and some insightful observations regarding women’s lives in that era. Coleman is not the first to write about real writers turning detective (Nicola Upson’s excellent “Josephine Tey” series springs to mind), nor is she the first to write a fictionalised account of the lives of the Brontës, but she’s done a great job here of both telling a compelling story and rendering her famous protagonists sympathetic and believable.
Of course, there’s no evidence that Charlotte, Emily and Anne ever really investigated crimes in their spare time. But then - as the author points out in her epilogue - there’s also no evidence that they didn’t.
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