Charlotte Brontë famously lived her life in a parsonage on a remote English moor with a demanding father and creative siblings. Claire Harman's biography transcends these melancholy facts to reveal a woman for whom duty and piety gave way to rebellion and ambition.
Drawing on letters unavailable to previous biographers, Harman depicts Charlotte's inner life with absorbing, novelistic intensity. She seizes upon a moment in Charlotte's adolescence that ignited her determination: while working at a school in Brussels, Charlotte fell in love with her married professor, a man who treated her as “nothing special.” She channeled her torment into her first novel and resolved to bring it to the world's attention.
Jane Eyre set London abuzz with speculation: Who was this fiery author demanding love and justice for her plain heroine? Charlotte Brontë's blazingly intelligent women with hidden passions would transform English literature.
Charlotte Brontë 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 for herself, Harman's richly insightful biography offers readers many of the pleasures of Brontë's own work.
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Claire Harman is the author of Sylvia Townsend Warner, which won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize; Fanny Burney, which was short-listed for the Whitbread Prize; and the critically acclaimed Robert Louis Stevenson. Elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2006, Harman teaches at the Universities of Manchester and Oxford in England and Columbia University in New York City.
Corrie James has worked on both sides of the Atlantic in theater, radio, and audiobooks. She credits growing up listening to the BBC for her love of the spoken word. Her audiobooks include The Companion of Lady Holmeshire by Debra Brown and Remember Me by Trezza Azzopardi.