A Brontë little book can look less like a manuscript than a folded seed packet: hand-stitched pages roughly the size of a matchbox, covered edge to edge in a script so tiny it resembles printed type. The Brontë little books are miniature manuscripts that Charlotte, Branwell, Emily, and Anne Brontë sewed and filled as children in Haworth, Yorkshire. They belong beside the 14 Famous People Who Kept Journals, but their method was unusual. It was collaborative imaginary-world building, sustained across years. Long before Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, or Agnes Grey, there were toy soldiers.
The featured image shows a related hand-sewn juvenile manuscript, not one of the matchbox-size little books; NYPL records it at 18.4 by 11.1 centimeters.
1. The Brontë Little Books Began With a Box of Toy Soldiers
In June 1826, the children’s father, the Rev. Patrick Brontë, came home with a gift for Branwell: a box of toy soldiers. Charlotte was about ten, Branwell eight, Emily seven, and Anne six. As the Morgan Library explains, the children claimed and named the soldiers, then gave them stories, histories, and a country to live in.
That is the whole origin. Not a diary prescribed by a schoolmaster, not a self-improvement plan. A toy, and the impulse to build a world around it. Play is the engine here, and it is worth remembering that some of the most disciplined writing lives on record started as make-believe you could hold in your hand.
Try this: Pick one small object near you – a mug, a photo, a stone from a trip – and give it a backstory in your journal. Where did it come from, who owned it, what does it want? Five minutes, no editing. You are not writing a diary entry; you are opening a door.
2. Write at a Scale Meant for No Adult Eyes
The books were tiny on purpose. Sized in proportion to the toy soldiers, they were also difficult for adults to read. The children wrote in a cramped near-print hand that imitated a typeset page. A surviving issue of their homemade Blackwood’s Young Men’s Magazine measures about five by three and a half centimeters. Charlotte’s 1830 play The Poetaster, held at the Morgan Library & Museum, runs to sixteen bound pages measuring 49 by 32 millimeters, composed in what the Morgan calls “a microscopic hand.”
Tiny writing did two things at once. It kept the work private in a crowded parsonage, and it demanded concentration because every word required care. Scale changes how you write.
Try this: Take one page and write an entry in the smallest, most careful hand you can. Notice whether shrinking the letters slows down the thoughts, and whether that is a bad thing or a good one.
The soldiers’ stories grew into an entire invented geography. The children first built a shared realm they called Glass Town. Then it split: Charlotte and Branwell developed the kingdom of Angria, while Emily and Anne created Gondal. For more than a decade they wrote its wars, exiles, and doomed loves, building a private universe that only the four of them fully knew.
This is the part that separates the Brontës from most childhood scribbling. It was collaborative and it was serial. A world you return to, week after week, with other people, builds narrative muscle that a one-off entry never will. By the time Emily sat down to write a novel about obsession on the moors, she had already spent years living inside a country of her own making.
Try this: Start a running world in the back of your journal – a town, a household, an island – and add to it whenever you feel like it rather than starting fresh each time. Continuity is the skill you are practicing.
4. Write on Whatever Paper You Can Find
The Brontës were not precious about materials. They used whatever was at hand for covers: sugar bags, scraps of wallpaper, newsprint, and repurposed advertisements. Paper was expensive, and the family used every corner. The scholar Deborah Lutz, in The Brontë Cabinet, describes Emily crowding as many as eight poems onto a single sheet about three by two and a quarter inches, writing across torn edges of letters and bits of card.
There is a lesson buried in the thrift. Waiting for the perfect notebook is one of the oldest ways to avoid writing. The Brontës prove you can build a body of work on sugar wrappers. The container does not make the writing serious; the writing does.
Try this: For one week, ban yourself from buying any new stationery. Write on the backs of receipts, envelopes, whatever is lying around. See if the roughness loosens anything up.
If you like following a real writer’s habits down to the tiny, physical details – the size of the page, the scraps they wrote on – that is most of what I do. I send a short email with one historical journal-keeper worth studying, the research behind their method, and a small thing you can try in your own notebook that week. No hype, no daily pestering. You can subscribe here.
5. Emily Brontë’s Notebooks Show the Power of Recopying
Emily Brontë’s notebooks are where you can watch a writer’s process most clearly, because so much of it was recopying. She did not just draft and move on. She transcribed her poems by hand into a fresh volume, revising and deciding what belonged together. In February 1844 she titled a volume “The Gondal Poems” and began copying verse from her private world. That volume survives as Additional Manuscript 43483 at the British Library, with later additions extending to 1848.
Copying your own work over sounds like wasted motion. It is not. Moving words from scrap to notebook is where you notice what is dead weight and what still has heat in it. The recopying was Emily editing herself, one careful pass at a time. Virginia Woolf used her diary as a writing workshop, while Emerson mined his notebooks for finished essays and Thoreau returned to the same observations for decades. Reuse is part of a notebook’s value.
Try this: Take an old entry you half-remember liking and copy it out again by hand into a clean page. Change whatever your hand resists as you go. The act of re-transcribing is a quiet, ruthless edit.
6. Keep a Light Logbook Tied to Landmarks
Not everything the Brontës wrote was epic. The Brontë Parsonage Museum preserves what Emily and Anne called “diary papers”: four short surviving reflections from 1834, 1837, 1841, and 1845. Three were written on or near a sibling’s birthday. The first, from 1834, is gloriously ordinary:
I fed Rainbow, Diamond, Snowflake, Jasper pheasant (alias) this morning Branwell went down to Mr Driver’s and brought news that Sir Robert Peel was going to be invited to stand for Leeds Anne and I have been peeling apples for Charlotte to make us an apple pudding…
No punctuation to speak of, just the day itself: the animals fed, the apples peeled. In 1841 she folded away another slip that opens like a time capsule: “A PAPER to be opened when Anne is 25 years old, or my next birthday after if all be well.”
The habit is worth stealing precisely because it is so undemanding. You do not need to write every day. You can write on the same date each year and read back what the last version of you was worried about.
Try this: Pick one recurring date, perhaps your birthday or New Year’s Day, and write a short “diary paper”: what you did today and what you hope will be true by the next one. Fold it away and open it in a year. If this is your first entry, the beginner’s guide to journaling and these real journal examples can give you a gentle starting point.
7. Write Together at the Same Table
The siblings collaborated on plays, stories, and poems from childhood. Charlotte used the term “scriblemania” in her journal. Stuck teaching in a schoolroom, she described being so absorbed in composing that her students watched her write with her eyes shut.
Writing can be solitary, but the Brontës made it social and physical: voices, movement, and a shared surface. If your journaling has gone flat, the missing ingredient might not be a better prompt but another person to read a line to. A small ritual with another person can also help build a journaling habit that actually sticks.
Try this: Read one journal entry out loud, to a friend or to the empty room, and walk while you do it. Mark where your own ear catches on a clumsy sentence. That is your edit list.
8. Save Your Worst Reviews
The scribbling paid off. In 1846 the sisters published a poetry collection under the cover names Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. Jane Eyre followed in October 1847 and became a bestseller; that December, Wuthering Heights and Anne’s Agnes Grey were published together. The critics were not kind to Emily. One notice in the Atlas called Wuthering Heights “a strange, inartistic story,” full of “a sort of rugged power” but “inexpressibly painful.” She kept hostile reviews in her writing desk anyway, tucked among scraps of poetry.
The contrast is quietly instructive. A bad review proves that someone read the work and found it worth arguing with. Emily died of tuberculosis in 1848, at thirty. Branwell died the same year, and Anne died in 1849. None of them lived to see Wuthering Heights become one of the most admired novels in English. The reviewers who called it painful were read for a season. The book outlasted every one of them.
Try this: Keep a page for criticism – a harsh comment, a rejection, a line you cringe at in your own old writing. Revisit it in a year and judge whether it aged into wisdom or just noise. Most of it is noise.
What the Brontë Little Books Leave Us
Nobody handed the Brontës a system. They were given a box of toy soldiers and a shortage of paper, and out of that they built worlds, invented careers as imaginary publishers, and practised for a decade before the public read a word. In her 1850 preface to Wuthering Heights, Charlotte wrote that the novel “was hewn in a wild workshop, with simple tools, out of homely materials.” The little books were part of that workshop: sugar wrappers and microscopic ink, play that became an apprenticeship.
You do not need a Gondal to borrow the method. Write small, write playfully, return to the same private world, and keep the scraps. Among Emily’s papers at the New York Public Library is a watercolor titled Forget Me Not. The title now feels like an instruction the work fulfilled. The odd, magnificent thing is that it started with children stitching books too small for adults to read.
If a beautiful notebook makes the blank page feel like a test, borrow the Brontës’ permission to begin roughly. They wrote on salvaged paper. I send one researched story about a journal-keeper and one small experiment to try. You can subscribe here.
Featured image: Pages 4 and 5 of Charlotte Brontë’s hand-sewn 1830 manuscript The Adventures of Ernest Alembert. NYPL records this larger juvenile manuscript at 18.4 x 11.1 cm; it is not a matchbox-size little book. Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection, The New York Public Library; public domain in the United States. Center-cropped, resized, converted to sRGB, and compressed.
