The Man in the Stone Cottage: Coffee Pot Book Club Blog Tour.
In 1846 Yorkshire, the Brontë sisters— Charlotte, Anne, and Emily— navigate precarious lives marked by heartbreak and struggle.
Charlotte faces rejection from the man she loves, while their blind father and troubled brother add to their burdens. Despite their immense talent, no one will publish their poetry or novels.
Amidst this turmoil, Emily encounters a charming shepherd during her solitary walks on the moors, yet he remains unseen by anyone else.
After Emily’ s untimely death, Charlotte— now a successful author with Jane Eyre— stumbles upon hidden letters and a mysterious map. As she stands on the brink of her own marriage, Charlotte is determined to uncover the truth about her sister’s secret relationship.
The Man in the Stone Cottage is a poignant exploration of sisterly bonds and the complexities of perception, asking whether what feels real to one person can truly be real to another.
Praise for The Man in the Stone Cottage:
“A mesmerizing and heartrending novel of sisterhood, love, and loss in Victorian England.”
~ Heather Webb, USA Today bestselling author of Queens of London
“Stephanie Cowell has written a masterpiece.”
~ Anne Easter Smith, author of This Son of York
“With The Man in the Stone Cottage, Stephanie Cowell asks what is real and what is imagined and then masterfully guides her readers on a journey of deciding for themselves.”
~ Cathy Marie Buchanan, author of The Painted Girls
“The Brontës come alive in this beautiful, poignant, elegant and so very readable tale. Just exquisite.”
~ M.J. Rose, NYT bestselling author
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| Image (c) Jesse Cowell |
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Excerpt:
Charlotte wants to publish a book of her and her sisters’ poetry in the hopes of making the family fortune, but Emily has denied she has any poems and keeps them locked away in a drawer in her room. Then when she is walking home from the moors from hours with her secret friend in his stone cottage on the moors and realizes she had lost the drawer’s key somewhere…
The storm broke, rain pelting the back of her dress until she was running through the moor gate and through the parsonage door. No one seemed to be home though someone had been here recently. The kitchen lamp still burned dimly, and cold tea sandwiches and some cake lay under a cloth. By the lonely chiming of the tall clock, she knew she had been away several hours. Where had the hours gone? She had missed tea. Had she baked her own cake this morning? But that did not matter. The only important thing was to find that key.
Lighting a candle from the lamp, Emily searched under the table and then in the hall. She mounted the steps, looking near the banister. By the clock hands, she made out it was six in the afternoon. But where was the frayed violet ribbon?
Then she knew she was not alone in the parsonage. Light shone through the open crack of her bedroom door. She saw the yellow flame of the oil lamp shining on the cup of pens on her table and Charlotte standing by it with the secret poetry books in her hands.
Emily shouted fiercely, “What do you think you’re doing, you thief?”
Startled, her sister stepped back a little, grasping the table edge with one hand, saying, “You told me you burned these. I found the key on the floor outside your room.”
“Well, I lied, and you’ve no right to look at them!”
At this moment, all the vague memories of the afternoon disappeared. Emily knew only how she loathed her sister’s conflicted face. Charlotte, who always knew the best, Charlotte, who should have stayed in Brussels as that teacher’s mistress and left them to bumble on somehow here in the parsonage rooms. Ordinary, stupid Charlotte.
Her sister replied stubbornly, “Anne and I share our poetry. These are brilliant. What kind of person are you that you lock them away?”
“Don’t you understand anything? The key at once!”
“Take your wretched key and books then! God only knows why, of all the sisters in the world, I was given you!” Charlotte dropped the key and notebooks on the bed, and Emily locked away her work. Then she fled down the steps.
Charlotte followed her. They passed the clock.
Emily hissed over her shoulder, “I don’t want to talk about the poems. If you insist, I’ll burn them.”
“Be quiet—Papa may come in. He’s gone out with Anne.”
“He ought to bring the neighbors with their staves since we have a thief in our house!”
At the bottom step, Emily felt Charlotte’s hand on her shoulder and stopped. “Listen to me, you foolish girl!” Charlotte panted. “I’ve a plan. We must have a plan. Anne and I have been writing a lot of poetry. The three of us must publish our poems together. We’ll become famous; we’ll earn our fortunes. We’ll be as famous as Lord Byron. We’ll never have to worry about anything again.”
“You and your bloody plans! The answer is never.”
“Why won’t you publish with us?”
Emily hunched her shoulders. “Because,” she mumbled slowly, her fingers feeling the polished banister, “the poems are from the inside of me. What all of you see isn’t the real me; it’s a shadow. If I don’t hold on, what’s real will be taken from me. Who I really am would be thrown away.”
Charlotte took the candle. She walked through the kitchen, opened the cellar door, and descended the stone steps. Emily followed. The cellar had been the dungeon in one of their childhood games. Anne had come with a stick as a sword when they hid and shouted out as fiercely as a little girl can, “Prisoners! Are you there?” About them boxes and beer kegs were strung with abandoned spiderwebs. She heard mice behind a trunk.
Charlotte was looking over their jars of preserves on a shelf. “Blackberries half gone,” she murmured. “I don’t understand the consumption of preserves in this house. It’s months until we can put up more. No one considers, no one cares. Least of all you. Why are you here?”
Emily dropped slowly to a trunk and clasped her knees. “It’s cold,” she said, still clutching the key in her closed hand. “I want to be with you.” She rocked back and forth a little.
“You love us.”
“I do, endlessly. And no one else ever.”
“Including me?”
“Yes,” Emily replied grudgingly.
Charlotte sat down on a box, putting the candleholder on the floor between them. She had removed her spectacles, and her delicate, anxious face was a little gold in the light. “Emily, Anne and I are going to publish our poems,” she said seriously. “Yours are the best. With yours included, we would do brilliantly. Please share. We’d make our fortunes. We’d never have to be apart.”
Emily shuddered. In her mind, they were at school again where she was small. The teacher had slashed the switch across her bare legs, and she had not cried but later she had hurled herself into Charlotte, clasping her about the waist, butting her head into Charlotte’s flat chest, sticking her tiny fingers in between Charlotte’s dress buttons to get closer to flesh and bone. Between the taste of rough cotton and the strong angry beat of her sister’s heart, she knew she would be all right someday. “You will not touch my little sister!” Charlotte shouted later to the teacher. Charlotte was two years older. Such a big girl then.
After that, when they came home, they had begun to write their tiny chronicles. In them they were not little girls but captains in armies from imaginary countries. Branwell formed the battle plans. He’d lead them out, their little feet in imaginary boots trampling foreign bloody mud…safe, safe in their minds, always able to return in a word to their parsonage.
Emily rose from the trunk. “I’ll think about the poems,” she said.
The storm was over as she walked through the graveyard.
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