Charlotte Bronte ─ A Fiery Heart

A groundbreaking biography that places an obsessive, unrequited love at the heart of the writer's life story, transforming her from the tragic figure we have previously known into a smoldering Jane Eyre.

Famed for her beloved novels, Charlotte Bronte has been known as well for her insular, tragic family life. The genius of this biography is that it delves behind this image to reveal a life in which loss and heartache existed alongside rebellion and fierce ambition. Claire Harman seizes on a crucial moment in the 1840s when Charlotte worked at a girls' school in Brussels and fell hopelessly in love with the husband of the school's headmistress. Her torment spawned her first attempts at writing for publication, and the object of her obsession haunts the pages of every one of her novels--he is Rochester in Jane Eyre, Paul Emanuel in Villette. Another unrequited love--for her publisher--paved the way for Charlotte to enter a marriage that ultimately made her happier than she ever imagined. Drawing on correspondence unavailable to previous biographers, Harman establishes Bronte as the heroine of her own story, one as dramatic and triumphant as one of her own novels.

CLAIRE HARMAN is the author of Sylvia Townsend Warner, winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize; Fanny Burney; Myself and the Other Fellow: A Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, and Jane's Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and has taught at the Universities of Oxford and Manchester in England and Columbia University in New York.