On the two hundredth anniversary of her birth, a landmark biography transforms Charlotte Bronte from a tragic figure into a modern heroine. Charlotte Bronte 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 Harman s 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 Charlotte s inner life with absorbing, almost novelistic intensity. She seizes upon a moment in Charlotte s 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 Emily s "Wuthering Heights" was eclipsed by "Jane Eyre, "which set London abuzz with speculation: Who was this fiery author demanding love and justice for her plain and insignificant heroine? Charlotte Bronte s 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. "Charlotte Bronte" is a groundbreaking view of the beloved writer as a young woman ahead of her time. Shaped by Charlotte s lifelong struggle to claim love and art for herself, Harman s richly insightful biography offers readers many of the pleasures of Bronte s own work."
