With the bicentenary of Charlotte’s Brontë’s birth in the spring, Claire Harman’s new biography no doubt heralds what will be an associated burst of interest in the writer. Not that Charlotte (along with Anne and Emily too) hasn’t been the subject of steady mythmaking and speculation since Elizabeth Gaskell wrote the first biography back in 1857. We’re endlessly fascinated by the real story behind the Brontës’ fiction – namely how a strangely isolated childhood on the remote Yorkshire moors could have fed such imaginative passion and formidable literary skill – and Harman is no exception, beginning her book with the 27-year-old Charlotte in Brussels about to “transmute” unrequited love, loneliness and despair “into art”. Harman’s Charlotte isn’t radically different from the portraits painted by previous biographers – a woman clearly more complicated and complex than the stereotype of the retiring Victorian woman writer – but her sympathetic account is full of fascinating detail.
Charlotte Brontë: A Life is published by Viking (£25). Click here to order it for £20
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