Charlotte Brontë

A Life

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Raised motherless on remote Yorkshire moors, watching five beloved siblings sicken and die, haunted by unrequited love: Charlotte Brontë's life has all the drama and tragedy of the great Gothic novels it inspired.

Charlotte was a literary visionary, a feminist trailblazer and the driving force behind the whole Brontë family. She pushed Emily to publish Wuthering Heights and took charge of their precarious finances when her feckless brother turned to opium. In Jane Eyre she introduced the world to a brand new kind of heroine, modelled on herself: quiet but fiercely intelligent, burning with passion and potential.

This is a truly gripping and illuminating account of one of our best-loved novelists.

Harman's sane, unshowy re-telling is exactly right for the bicentenary next April. The result is a retooled classic biographical narrative, shipshape and serviceable for the next 200 years
The Guardian

Revelatory (...) adds freshness and texture to her account with original speculations. As someone who once wrote a book about the Brontës' afterlives, few people can have read as many biographies of them as I have. I thought I was Brontë-ed out, but reading this book-which will be equally accessible to someone coming to Charlotte for the first time-has drawn me back in
Lucasta Miller, The Independent

About Claire Harman

Claire Harman is the award-winning biographer of Sylvia Townsend Warner (1989), Fanny Burney (2000) and Robert Louis Stevenson (2005) and the author of the best-selling Jane's Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World (2009). She writes regularly for the literary press on both sides of the Atlantic and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2006.
Her most recent work is Charlotte Bronte: A Life.

Details

Imprint: Penguin
Published: 07/04/2016
ISBN: 9780241963661
Length: 480 pages
Dimensions: 198mm x 30mm x 130mm
Weight: 334g
Price: £14.99

All editions

Charlotte Brontë

A Life

Format:

Buy the book from:

Harman's sane, unshowy re-telling is exactly right for the bicentenary next April. The result is a retooled classic biographical narrative, shipshape and serviceable for the next 200 years

Finely judged and authoritative

Elegantly written, consistently perceptive...[Harman] succeeds in bringing Charlotte back to life in all her spiky vulnerability

This is a comprehensive biography to enjoy and admire. Harman writes well and she is a fine and sensitive critic

Harman... portrays Bronte's complexity and dark genius in elegant prose with deep human sympathy

Superb retelling of Charlotte's story (...) admirably concise

Harman tells [Charlotte's] story with quick wit, a sharp sympathy, and a fire and fury of her own

Full of pleasing and piquant detail, scraps of passing recollection assembled from the various lives and letters in which the Brontes featured and from which we might reconstruct their world

Elegant, sensitive, beautifully paced and moving. [Claire Harman] has... produced a work that is affirmative, edifying, inspiring and humane

About Claire Harman

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