[Gutenberg 54254] • The Search After Hapiness [sic]: A Tale

Charlotte Brontë wrote this little tale in 1829, when she was thirteen years old.

Written in small, cramped, childish hand--often very hard to decipher--the style already shows Charlotte Brontë's remarkable talent for handling words, and her feeling for nature at its most terrifying and elemental.

The enchanting story will provide readers with plenty of puzzles: just what was in the child's mind when she wrote this rather frightening tale? Was it simply an exercise in descriptive writing, or perhaps a simple story written to prove the dictum that happiness is to be found at home? But then who was the old man who disappeared across the skies in a chariot? What were the mysterious creatures who demanded that their suppliants should become slaves, and then released them from their promise? And what indeed had the Duke of Wellington and his sons to do with the adventures of O Donell?

Carolyn Dinan, whose delightful and sensitive watercolors reflect, so perfectly, the pages of the text, was born in Windsor but has spent most of her life in Ireland. She studied first at the Chelsea School of Art, and then at the Royal College of Art. Now she is free-lancing, and in her spare time is writing and illustrating books for children