Charlotte Brontë's short fiction comprises the profuse writings that she produced--in collaboration with her brother, Branwell, and their sisters, Emily and Anne--during their sheltered childhoods at Haworth Parsonage. Until the publication of Christine Alexander's An Edition of the Early Writings of Charlotte Brontë (1987-1991) less than half of these works were available to general readership. Apart from Fannie E. Ratchford and William Clyde De Vane's collection Legends of Angria (1933), Ratchford's study The Brontë's Web of Childhood (1941), and Winifred Gérin's biography Charlotte Brontë: The Evolution of Genius (1967) and collection Five Novelettes (1971), major attention has been denied to the Brontë juvenilia.

The first to recognize Brontë's juvenilia as a part of her development as a writer was Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell, during her research for The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857). During her visit with Brontë's father, the...