While the Star Trek
television series could be credited by many with sparking the first ``fandom’’
around fictional characters, Ana showed how the tiny magazines that the Brontë children
created for their imaginary worlds could be considered early versions
of fanfiction. Just like modern-day fanfiction, the young siblings could use
their fictional worlds of Angria and Gondal as an experimental playground to
give their imaginations free rein, allowing them to ask what-if questions about
real-world characters and development totally new characters, too.
But she also suggested
that fanfiction is much older even than the Brontës. Lots of Shakespeare takes characters and plot
elements from earlier works and reworks them. Milton’s Paradise Lost is
a derivative work of the Bible where he repaints Satan as a tragic hero. Dante’s
Inferno is a mash-up of the Bible, The Aeneid, and Greek mythology.
The Aeneid itself is a spinoff of The Iliad, she explained.
On the Brontës, Ana quoted Andy Sawyer, director of Science Fiction
Studies MA at the University of Liverpool and curator of a 2011 exhibition at
the British Library on science fiction, as saying:
``The Brontës are well
known authors with no apparent association with science fiction, but their tiny
manuscript books, held at the British Library, are one of the first examples of
fan fiction, using favourite characters and settings in the same way as science
fiction and fantasy fans now play in the detailed imaginary ‘universes’ of Star
Trek or Harry Potter.’’
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| Brontë fanfiction |
It was a whirl-wind excursion through the vocabulary and history of fanfiction that wound up with a brief survey of all the derivative works that have been inspired by the Brontës over the decades, and which continue today.
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