Product Description

On the two hundredth anniversary of her birth, a landmark biography transforms Charlotte Bront from a tragic figure into a modern heroine.

Charlotte Bront famously lived her entire life in an isolated parsonage on a remote English moor with a demanding father and siblings whose astonishing childhood creativity was a closely held secret. The genius of Claire Harmans biography is that it transcends these melancholy facts to reveal a woman for whom duty and piety gave way to quiet rebellion and fierce ambition.

Drawing on letters unavailable to previous biographers, Harman depicts Charlottes inner life with absorbing, almost novelistic intensity. She seizes upon a moment in Charlottes adolescence that ignited her determination to reject poverty and obscurity: While working at a girls school in Brussels, Charlotte fell in love with her married professor, Constantin Heger, a man who treated her as nothing special to him at all. She channeled her torment into her first attempts at a novel and resolved to bring it to the world's attention.

Charlotte helped power her sisters work to publication, too. But Emilys was eclipsed by which set London abuzz with speculation: Who was this fiery author demanding love and justice for her plain and insignificant heroine? Charlotte Bronts blazingly intelligent women brimming with hidden passions would transform English literature. And she savored her literary success even as a heartrending series of personal losses followed.

is a groundbreaking view of the beloved writer as a young woman ahead of her time. Shaped by Charlottes lifelong struggle to claim love and art for herself, Harmans richly insightful biography offers readers many of the pleasures of Bronts own work.