CANR
WORK TITLE: ‘Charlotte Bronte: A Fiery Heart
WORK NOTES: PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography longlist
PSEUDONYM(S): Schmidt, Claire Patricia Harman
BIRTHDATE: 9/21/1957
WEBSITE: http://www.claireharman.com/
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: British
LAST VOLUME: CANR 226
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/oct/31/charlotte-bronte-by-claire-harman-review-biography * https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/20/books/review/charlotte-bronte-a-fiery-heart-by-claire-harman.html
RESEARCHER NOTES:
Agent Geri Thoma, gthoma@writershouse.com
PERSONAL
ADDRESS
CAREER
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
The New Yorker May 16, 2016, Harman” Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2011. Literature Resource Center, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=LitRC&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CH1000087974&it=r&asid=63285eb2e8f9bfe57c068bb4952038fe. Accessed 12 Feb. 2017. Halford, Macy. “Claire, “Charlotte Bront�.”. p. 95.
Library Journal May 1, 2016, Neal Wyatt, “Born out of ire and fire: RA crossroads.”. p. 5.
New Statesman Mar. 18, 2016, Lyndall Gordon, “Reader, I stalked him: Charlotte Bronte in Brussels: a study in creative obsession.”. p. 64+.
Booklist Mar. 15, 2016, Margaret Flanagan, “Charlotte Bronte: A Fiery Heart.”. p. 13.
BookPage Mar., 2016. Robert Weibezahl, “Charlotte’s passions.”. p. 4.
Library Journal Feb. 15, 2016, Erica Swenson. Danowitz, “Harman, Claire. Charlotte Bronte: A Fiery Heart.”. p. 104.
Publishers Weekly Jan. 18, 2016, review of Charlotte Bronte: A Fiery Heart. p. 74.
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries Aug., 2016. SA Parker, “Harman, Claire. Charlotte Bronte: a fiery heart.”. p. 1785.
Christian Science Monitor Mar. 22, 2016, Elizabeth Toohey, “‘Charlotte Bronte’ is an irresistible biography of ‘Jane Eyre’ and its author.”.
Washingtonpost.com Feb. 24, 2016, Laurie Stone, “Review: ‘Charlotte Bronte: A Fiery Heart’.”.
ONLINE
New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com (February 27, 2017).
New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com (February 27, 2017).
Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com (February 27, 2017).
ABOUT CLAIRE
Claire Harman began her career in publishing, at Carcanet Press
and the Manchester-based poetry magazine PN Review, where
she was co-ordinating editor.
Her first book, a biography of the writer Sylvia Townsend Warner,
was published in 1989 and won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for
‘a writer of growing stature’ under the age of 35. She has since
published biographies of Fanny Burney and Robert Louis Stevenson
and edited works by Stevenson and Warner. She writes short stories
for radio and publication and was runner-up for the V.S.Pritchett
prize for short fiction in 2008, runner-up for the Tom-Gallon
Award in 2014 and winner in 2016. Her bestselling Jane's Fame:
How Jane Austen Conquered the World was published in 2009 and
her major new biography of Charlotte Bronte to mark the author's
bicentenary was published in 2015 by Viking Penguin UK.
In September 2015, Claire was awarded a Forward Prize for Poetry.
Claire has taught English at the Universities of Manchester and Oxford and creative writing at Columbia University in New York City. She is now Professor of Creative Writing at Durham University. Claire has appeared on radio and television and writes regularly for the literary press on both sides of the Atlantic, reviewing books, films, plays and exhibitions.
She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2006 and became President of The Alliance of Literary Societies in 2016.
Since March 2013, this website has been archived by the British Library as part of their UK Web Archive project. Click here to go to the British Library archive.
QUOTED: "It's such a peculiar phenomenon, with somebody whom we now recognize as a genius, to think of their early years. It's before they have any power to express themselves, and yet they are themselves as much, if not more, than they are in the books through which we know them. The Brontë household was full of these pent-up future writers. ... And of course Charlotte's frustrations would have been very poignant."
Writers & Company
with Eleanor Wachtel
Sunday March 13, 2016
Claire Harman on the passions and frustrations of Charlotte Brontë
Biographer Claire Harman says there's more to the story of Jane Eyre author Charlotte Brontë than many of us know.
Biographer Claire Harman says there's more to the story of Jane Eyre author Charlotte Brontë than many of us know. (Knopf Canada)
LISTEN TO FULL EPISODE 1:03:21
Jane Eyre, published under a pseudonym in 1847, is one of the most popular novels of all time. Charlotte Brontë's heroine is a subversively rebellious spirit — an independent, morally defiant woman who isn't beautiful, but succeeds thanks to her sparkling intellect and willingness to speak her mind. The book was a hit — even Queen Victoria read it, saying it was "really a wonderful book, very peculiar in parts, but so powerfully and admirably written."
Charlotte Brontë was only 38 when she died in 1855, and the first book about her life appeared barely two years later, when her friend Elizabeth Gaskell published a pious biography that presented her as "a woman made perfect by suffering."
In her new biography of Charlotte Brontë, Charlotte Brontë: A Fiery Heart, Claire Harman presents a different perspective, focusing on Brontë's sorrow, rage, passion and endurance. The book's publication is timed to mark the 200th anniversary of Brontë's birth. Claire Harman spoke to Eleanor Wachtel from New York.
ON BRONTË'S'S TEENAGE DREAMS AND FRUSTRATIONS
It's such a peculiar phenomenon, with somebody whom we now recognize as a genius, to think of their early years. It's before they have any power to express themselves, and yet they are themselves as much, if not more, than they are in the books through which we know them. The Brontë household was full of these pent-up future writers, but until you've written the book and gotten the audience and expressed yourself publicly, you're just this frustrated, unexpressed intelligence. And of course Charlotte's frustrations would have been very poignant. When she was a teenager she had the optimism of feeling that she was going to become a famous illustrator or poet, but everyone knows how old you feel when you're 21 or 22 and you feel like your life is over if you haven't hit the big time yet. As her twenties progressed, her opportunities seemed to just get narrower and narrower, so of course she felt that the doors were closing, or had closed.
ON A MENTOR WHO BECAME A ROMANTIC OBSESSION
Charlotte was inspired by a friend to go to Brussels and spend half a year at a school where she and Emily could acquire a bit more polish to their French. And they went, but Charlotte came back from Brussels heartbroken because she'd become very emotionally involved with the husband of the school's headmistress. The school was owned by Zoë Héger, and her husband, Constantin, was the most charismatic of the seven male teachers. Charlotte wrote a very funny letter describing him, saying he was small, dark and choleric, like an "insane tomcat." He was also very widely read, and he recognized in Charlotte a powerfully intelligent, very ready mind, and someone who truly loved literature. She was really bowled over by that perceived connection, and then because she was starved for affection and romance, it very rapidly became — for her at least — a passionate longing that she wasn't quite able to articulate.
ON BRONTË'S BRIEF, SURPRISING MARRIAGE
After the deaths of [Brontë siblings] Branwell, Emily and Anne, I think Charlotte was just sort of subsisting, emotionally. [Parish vicar] Arthur Nicholls was a very odd choice for her to marry, in terms of his lack of imagination. When he proposed the first time, Charlotte had this brilliant, very forensic description of the occasion. He comes to the door, and she sees how distressed he is, and she suddenly realizes that he is going to propose and that all of his previous sheepish behaviour had been because he was secretly admiring her.
It was the sight of him sweating and trembling in front of her that made her realize that he had strong feelings for her. She had very few feelings for him, but she could sympathize with his unrequited love. After her own experiences of very one-sided, very powerful feelings for Constantin Héger, she could see how he was suffering, and it was sympathy for his suffering that swayed her. To her credit, she did find some contentment in the marriage and was comforted by his company — though only for a short time, because she got pregnant and then died after only eight months of marriage.
Claire Harman's comments have been edited and condensed.
Claire Harman
Born: September 21, 1957 in Guildford, United Kingdom
Other Names : Schmidt, Claire Harman; Harman, Claire Patricia; Schmidt, Claire Patricia Harman
Nationality: British
Occupation: Writer
Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2011. From Literature Resource Center.
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2016 Gale, Cengage Learning
Updated:Nov. 17, 2011
Table of Contents
Listen
PERSONAL INFORMATION:
Born September 21, 1957, in Guildford, England; daughter of John Edward (a teacher) and Patricia (a teacher) Harman; married Michael N. Schmidt (a publisher), August 25, 1979; children: Charles, Isabel. Education: Victoria University of Manchester, B.A. (with first-class honors), 1979. Addresses: Home: New York, NY; Oxford, England.
CAREER:
Writer and educator. Poetry Nation Review, Manchester, England, former coordinating editor, editor of supplement, "Sylvia Townsend Warner: A Celebration," 1981. University of Manchester, Oxford University, former instructor; Columbia University, School of the Arts, instructor of creative writing.
AWARDS:
John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, 1990, for Sylvia Townsend Warner: A Biography; shortlist, Whitbread Prize, for Fanny Burney: A Biography; Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, 2006.
WORKS:
WRITINGS:
(Editor) Collected Poems of Sylvia Townsend Warner, Viking (New York, NY), 1983.
(Editor and author of afterword) Selected Poems of Sylvia Townsend Warner, Viking (New York, NY), 1985.
Sylvia Townsend Warner: A Biography, Chatto & Windus (London, England), 1989, New Amsterdam (New York, NY), 1993.
(Compiler and author of introduction) Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Other Stories, C.E. Tuttle (Rutland, VT), 1992.
(Editor and author of introduction) The Diaries of Sylvia Townsend Warner, Chatto & Windus (London, England), 1994.
Fanny Burney: A Biography, Knopf (New York, NY), 2000.
Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography, HarperCollins (London, England), 2005, published as Myself and the Other Fellow: A Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 2005.
(Editor and author of introduction) Sylvia Townsend Warner, New Collected Poems, Fyfield Books (Manchester, England), 2008.
Jane's Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World, Henry Holt and Co. (New York, NY), 2010.
Contributor of articles and reviews to British periodicals.
Sidelights
Claire Harman is the author of several highly acclaimed biographies, including works on the British poet and novelist Sylvia Townsend Warner, the pioneering female novelist Fanny Burney, and the writer Robert Louis Stevenson. In her study of English author and poet Warner, Sylvia Townsend Warner: A Biography, Harman delivers one of the few book-length studies of this woman who grew up in privileged circumstances and is perhaps best known for her novel of witchcraft, Lolly Willowes, as well as for her contributions to the New Yorker magazine. A lesbian and committed Marxist, she was also a prolific poet as well as author, with seven published novels. Reviewing the biography in the New Statesman & Society, Anne Boston found it "as lively and perceptive as this idiosyncratic, rewarding writer deserves." The book won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for biography in 1990.
Harman turned her hand to another female novelist in Fanny Burney: A Biography, a "hugely enjoyable read," according to the judges of England's prestigious Whitbread Prize, as quoted in the London Guardian. Daughter of the musicologist Dr. Charles Burney, Fanny grew up in an intellectual household and traveled widely. At age fifteen she began keeping a journal, a task that continued for the rest of her life and which has provided a wealth of information about life in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. She published her first novel, Evelina, in 1778 when she was twenty-six. This is considered to be the first literary novel written by a female. Soon celebrated as a novelist in her native England, Fanny Burney served at the court of George III. She continued writing both plays and novels throughout her life. Harman's biography was praised by critics.
Donna Seaman, writing in Booklist, commended the biographer's "firm grasp and light touch," further noting that she "brings Burney to life with acumen and admiration." Kristen Case, writing in the New Leader, found the work "evenhanded and detailed," while a critic for Kirkus Reviews thought the same biography provided an "important, comprehensive view of the pioneering novelist and playwright." And Kathryn Hughes, writing in the New Statesman, believed that this "excellent biography of Fanny Burney is unlikely to be bettered for many years to come."
Harman takes on the life of another British writer in Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography. Already the editor of a collection of Stevenson's stories, Harman focuses her research on the creator of the classic split personality, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Sickly for much of his life, and a worldwide wanderer, Stevenson produced a wide array of works that were more popular than deeply literary, in Harman's view.
A contributor for the Contemporary Review felt her biography is "thoroughly enjoyable," and that her "keenness for her subject is refreshing and is balanced by objectivity and wide-ranging research." Similar praise came from an Economist contributor, who thought Harman's "complex portrait paints a man whom she finds both admirable and infuriating."
In Harman's next biography, Jane's Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World she examines the elements of the author's writing that led her to become an icon of the contemporary literary canon. Harman asserts that it is Austen's simultaneously accessibility and wry irony that gives her work such universal appeal and respect.
Reviewing the work in the New York Times, contributor Sophie Gee stated: "Harman's book doesn't contain much about Austen that hasn't been covered elsewhere, but it presents the story of Austen's self-fashioning and later popularity in a convincing, enjoyable way." Open Letters Monthly contributor Rohan Maitzen remarked: "Harman's survey of Austen's rise from obscurity to ubiquity is both thorough and lively." A Kirkus Reviews contributor described the work as "an elegant exploration into the curious journey of literary celebrity, as exhibited by Jane Austen." Booklist contributor Mary Ellen Quinn described the book as "engagingly written and full of fascinating bits of information as well as valuable insights." Spectator contributor Philip Hensher opined: "Harman has written an entertaining book about the afterlife of Austen's novels, and what people have made them signify. She skips over most of the direct engagement of novelists with Austen's practice, and isn't that interested in the misreadings of posterity." Wilson Quarterly contributor Brooke Allen labeled the work a "fascinating and beautifully written study of the shifts and changes in the novelist's reputation." A Publishers Weekly contributor dubbed the work a "sharp and scholarly analysis."
"I became involved with Sylvia Townsend Warner when I found her hiding under a desk in my husband's publishing office. That is to say, I found an enormous package of Sylvia's poems there, awaiting an editor. Such good poems, too, and such an arresting and intriguing author behind them. Then there were the novels to discover, and the stories, and the other fascinating miscellaneous writings. Her peculiarly English wit and her highly literate (and totally nonacademic) intelligence have endeared her whole body of work to me. Her ghost, with gleeful malice, is refusing to let any of it be put through the Ph.D. machine without a fight."
FURTHER READINGS:
FURTHER READINGS ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
PERIODICALS
Biography, March 22, 2010, review of Jane's Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World, p. 413.
Booklist, July, 2001, Donna Seaman, review of Fanny Burney: A Biography, p. 1970; February 1, 2010, Mary Ellen Quinn, review of Jane's Fame, p. 14.
Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, September 1, 2010, T. Loe, review of Jane's Fame, p. 87.
Contemporary Review, June, 2004, review of Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography, p. 377.
Economist, January 29, 2005, "Slinger of Ink," review of Robert Louis Stevenson, p. 79.
Essays in Criticism, October 1, 2009, "Authenticity, Not Originality," p. 370.
Guardian (London, England), November 15, 2000, "Whitbread Book Awards: Biography," p. 7.
Kirkus Reviews, June 15, 2001, review of Fanny Burney, p. 845; February 15, 2010, review of Jane's Fame.
Library Journal, August, 2001, Carol A. McAllister, review of Fanny Burney, p. 107; March 1, 2010, Alison M. Lewis, review of Jane's Fame, p. 84.
London Review of Books, April 30, 2009, "Too Good and Too Silly," p. 17.
Los Angeles Times, November 5, 2001, Merle Rubin, "Lively Portrait of the First Respectable Female English Novelist," review of Fanny Burney, p. E3.
Modernism/Modernity, April 1, 2009, John Wilkinson, review of New Collected Poems, p. 457.
New Leader, July, 2001, Kristen Case, review of Fanny Burney, p. 29.
New Republic, October 8, 2001, Lawrence Lipking, review of Fanny Burney, p. 43.
New Statesman, July 17, 2000, Kathryn Hughes, review of Fanny Burney, p. 58.
New Statesman & Society, July 21, 1989, Anne Boston, review of Sylvia Townsend Warner: A Biography, pp. 32-33.
New York Times, April 16, 2010, Sophie Gee, review of Jane's Fame.
New York Times Book Review, February 18, 1996, Claire Tomalin, review of The Diaries of Sylvia Townsend Warner, p. 6; November 4, 2001, Susan Ostraw Weisser, review of Fanny Burney, p. 12.
Publishers Weekly, July 16, 2001, review of Fanny Burney, p. 174; December 21, 2009, review of Jane's Fame, p. 52.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch (St. Louis, MO), August 27, 2001, Jamie Spencer, review of Fanny Burney, p. F8.
Spectator, January 29, 2005, Philip Hensher, review of Robert Louis Stevenson, p. 32; April 4, 2009, "Now Universally Acknowledged," p. 30.
Times (London, England), July 30, 2000, Miranda Seymour, review of Fanny Burney, p. 37.
Times Literary Supplement, July 28, 1989, P.N. Furbank, review of Sylvia Townsend Warner, p. 815; October 6, 2000, Simon Jarvis, review of Fanny Burney, p. 40; January 2, 2009, "Unrhymed Couplet," p. 3; June 26, 2009, "Spinsters and Spinners," p. 12.
Washington Post, September 2, 2001, Lorraine Adams, review of Fanny Burney, p. T15.
Weekly Standard, January 3, 2011, "She's the One; Jane Austen's Greatness Is a Truth Universally Acknowledged."
Wilson Quarterly, March 22, 2010, "Celebrity Jane," p. 89.
Women's Review of Books, June, 1996, Gay Wachman, review of The Diaries of Sylvia Townsend Warner, p. 6.
ONLINE
Art on Air, http://artonair.org/ (June 1, 2011), author profile.
Arts Council of England Web site, http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/ (August 30, 2005), "Claire Harman."
Austen Prose, http://austenprose.com/ (April 17, 2011), Shelley DeWees, review of Jane's Fame.
Book Depository, http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/ (March 30, 2009), author profile.
Claire Harman Home Page, http://www.claireharman.com (June 1, 2011).
HarperCollins Web site, http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/ (August 30, 2005), "Authors: Claire Harman;" (June 1, 2011), author profile.
Open Letters Monthly, http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/ (June 1, 2011), Rohan Maitzen, review of Jane's Fame.*
QUOTED: "masterly biography."
Charlotte Bront�
Macy Halford
The New Yorker.
92.14 (May 16, 2016): p95.
COPYRIGHT 2016 Conde Nast Publications, Inc.. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Conde Nast
Publications, Inc.
http://www.newyorker.com/
Full Text:
Charlotte Bronte
by Claire Harman (Knopf).
In this masterly biography, Harman captures the contradictions that defined the life and work of the author of "Jane
Eyre." Together with her sisters Emily and Anne, Bronte led a life that was tedious when it was not tragic: spent largely
in rural isolation, and punctuated by the untimely deaths of loved ones and stints teaching and governessing. To explain
how genius flourished in such circumstances Harman leads readers on a precipitous journey through the writer's interior
landscape. The Brontes were odd, antisocial, enmeshed, obsessive, and violent; on one occasion, an adult Emily
terrorized her siblings by punching the family dog in the eyes till it was "halfblind." Harman's psychologically astute
portrait deftly bridges Charlotte's world and her work.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Halford, Macy. "Charlotte Bront�." The New Yorker, 16 May 2016, p. 95. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA458724749&it=r&asid=8a8b1147f9fca72fafbe07ab6fcb1f3e.
Accessed 12 Feb. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A458724749
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Born out of ire and fire: RA crossroads
Neal Wyatt
Library Journal.
141.8 (May 1, 2016): p5.
COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution
permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
"In a remarkable melding of literary history and biography, Harman illuminates the lives of the Brontes, deftly weaving
Charlotte's encounters with those of her most famous heroine, Jane Eyre, demonstrating with skill how the writer's life
gave rise to her art."from Claire Harman's Charlotte Bronte: A Fiery Heart by Neal Wyatt (ow.ly/4mHGfb)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Wyatt, Neal. "Born out of ire and fire: RA crossroads." Library Journal, 1 May 2016, p. 5. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA450998772&it=r&asid=142c59b61071da878032322c7b00b902.
Accessed 12 Feb. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A450998772
QUOTED: "Harman is a superb biographer."
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Reader, I stalked him: Charlotte Bronte in
Brussels: a study in creative obsession
Lyndall Gordon
New Statesman.
145.53065307 (Mar. 18, 2016): p64.
COPYRIGHT 2016 New Statesman, Ltd.
http://www.newstatesman.com/
Full Text:
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Charlotte Bronte: a Life
Claire Harman
Viking, 446pp. 25 [pounds sterling]
The Bronte Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects
Deborah Lutz
WWNorton, 310pp. 17.99 [pounds sterling]
Reader, I Married Him: Stories Inspired by Jane Eyre
Edited by Tracy Chevalier
Borough Press, 195pp. 12.99 [pounds sterling]
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In the runup to the bicentenary of Charlotte Bronte's birth on 21 April 1816, there has been a renewed surge of wonder
at this young woman who speaks so intimately across time"Reader, I married him"that she binds "Reader" to her.
Jane Austen became the prime literary celebrity a few years ago, but in recent years that kind of glory has shifted to
Charlotte, whose anniversary is being celebrated with new biographies and a collection of stories inspired by Jane Eyre;
exhibitions in New York, London and Haworth; and television and radio programmes, including a Radio 3 series
acknowledging Charlotte as not only a novelist but also one of the great letterwriters in our language.
Brussels has emerged as a current site of inspection. Charlotte went there, accompanied by her younger sister Emily, in
1842 and she returned alone for a second year in 1843. The idea was to improve her French and German with a view to
opening a school at the parsonage in Haworth, but a stronger motive was to travel.
"[S]uch a vehement impatience of restraint & steady work," she wrote to her friend Ellen Nussey from her situation as a
governess in Yorkshire in August 1841, "such a strong wish for wings ...such an urgent thirst to seeto knowto
learnsomething internal seemed to expand boldly for a minuteI was tantalized with the consciousness of faculties
unexercised ..."
At the Pensionnat Heger, in the now buried rue d'Isabelle at the bottom of the Belliard steps that lead down from the
park to the old city, Charlotte had the luck to find a born teacher in M Constantin Heger. Her devoirs for "Monsieur"he
would set topics for her French compositionshow the leap she took as a writer. In one piece a poor artist approaches a
patron, declaring: "Milord, je crois avoir du Genie" ("My lord, I believe I have genius"). It's an impassioned baring of
the soul, with a thin fictional cover, asking her teacher to promote her gift. A poem, written in English, shows the
impact of his seeing her for what she felt herself to be. As the laurel descends on the head of a pupil, named Jane, she
feels the successive pulse of "Ambition" and "a secret, inward wound". It was an illicit passion, because Monsieur was
married to the school's head. It was also a creative love, for his wilful, fiery character would light up the heroes of her
novels.
Is there anything new to say about the Brontes, the most written about of literary families? Ever since the intimate
vehemence of Jane Eyre's voice burst on the Victorian scene in 1847, the mysteriously gifted Brontes have piqued the
public's curiosity. Claire Harman's graceful, intelligent and meticulously researched biography returns us to the loss that
looms so large in the Bronte story. This is the "classic" line, laid down by Mrs Gaskell's enduring Life of Charlotte
Bronte, published in 1857, two years after her friend's death at the age of 38. Charlotte's five siblings had all died before
her, and Mrs Gaskell, at the outset, stares at the row of family tombstones rearing up in the graveyard opposite the
Bronte parsonage in Haworth. These premature deaths cast a shadow of doom over Charlotte from birth. Harman, at the
outset, fixes on another kind of tragedy in the summer of 1843 when Charlotte was alone in Brussels.
The headlights go up on a fact Mrs Gaskell suppressed: Charlotte's hopeless love for her "master", her first and keenest
literary mentor. This love, we assume, was the substance of Charlotte's confession in the Cathedral of Saint Michel and
Sainte Gudule, near the pensionnat. Here, an antiCatholic daughter of an Anglican clergyman is driven to unburden to a
Catholic priest, and though he tells her that le bonheur of confession should not be available to her, she is "determined"
to speak"a real confession", she confided to Emily.
The confessional cubicles of the cathedral are still there, as is the Protestant church where Charlotte and Emily
worshipped, but for a long time it was assumed there was nothing much to see of Bronte sites. In 2000 this was
disproved by a Dutch investigator, Eric Ruijssenaars, in Charlotte Bronte's Promised Land, ably followed by Helen
MacEwan with detailed topography and vivid detail about sleeping arrangements and foodpistolets for breakfast and
pears from the garden cooked in winein The Brontes in Brussels (2014). MacEwan leads a vibrant Bronte Society in
Brussels which offers tours of the sites, including a visit underground to what remains of where Charlotte and Emily
lived, studied and taught.
Claire Harman's dominant story is about an obsession. This is the Charlotte who writes to Monsieur that she is "the
slave of a fixed and dominant idea which controls the mind". In stressing her reckless emotions, Harman diverges from
Mrs Gaskell's portrait of a wellconducted, dutiful woman who put the needs of others before her own. Four surviving
letters that Charlotte wrote to Monsieur after she left Brussels are indeed "heartbreaking", but also, in Harman's view
not unlike the understandable view of Mme Hegeroutrageous.
Here is a Charlotte who is something of an epistolary "stalker". Though Harman is too sensitive to state this bluntly, that
word does jump out with startling boldness. We are confronted with a question of manners: Charlotte's pursuit as a pain
to the Hegers and a threat to their school. All the same, we can't be sure what happened between Monsieur and this
pupil. Given his proneness to stir girls' emotions, with a report of girls weeping in his classes, we cannot know how far
Monsieur had invited Charlotte's response (though all would agree that he had not expected to awaken passion on the
Bronte scale). If he was implicated, if he went in for emotional manipulation of his pupils, then Charlotte's letters read
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as a courageous response to what today we would recognise as a teacher crossing the boundary of stimulation and
playing on a pupil's wish "to be forever known". Her eloquence is part of what she is saying: displaying her gift, she
begs him to continue her "master" in the sense of mentor.
Then, too, we might take in the fact that French freed her to say things she might not have said in English, which makes
her final words to Heger, a PS in English, a point of no return. "Out of the fullness of the heart, the mouth speaketh". To
bare her feelings in her own language, rooted in the eloquence of the King James Bible, touches her so strongly that she
adds something which no naked eye noticed until it was blown up by a cameraman filming the letters in a small, dark
room at the British Library two years ago. I was reading the postscript aloud and the cameraman was filming over my
shoulder when suddenly he exclaimed, "What's this?" Blown up on screen, what had looked like the full stop at the end
of this leavetaking turned out to be a minute heart.
This invisible message to Heger is tantamount to Mr Rochester calling to Jane across an impossible space. Harman
believes that Rochester's call was something that Charlotte Bronte experienced, and it's the artistic finale to a biography
that opens with her act of confession in Monsieur's home town.
In this narrative, the sequel to Charlotte's pushy obsession with M Heger is her "impertinent" behaviour, some years
later, towards her London publisher, the handsome young George Smith, when she leans forward in a carriage with her
hands on his knees. At this moment, after a London party, she is teasing Smith about marriage to a beautiful poetess.
Harman suggests that Smith would not have liked Charlotte's gesturehe said long after her death that he liked her best
when she was in Yorkshireyet there's much other evidence that he enjoyed her company when they were together, to
the extent of inviting her to accompany him on a trip to Edinburgh and then urging a Rhine journey. Though excited by
the prospect, she was prudent enough to back away from the Rhine, fearing his mother would not like it.
Smith was put out by her portrait of him as the princely but imperceptive Graham Bretton in Villette (Charlotte's 1853
novel, named after her fictionalised Brussels); this was because the heroine, Lucy Snowe, comes to prefer a choleric
French master. In fact, it was part of the teasing relationship between Bronte and Smith that he had asked her to include
him in this novel.
Surviving facts about Charlotte Bronte are so abundant that a definitive biography is impossible. As Lucasta Miller has
shown in her brilliant and witty book The Bronte Myth (2001), one approach succeeds another. Harman is a superb
biographershe has composed wonderfully vivid portraits of Fanny Burney and Jane Austen in particular and there is
ample evidence for a cooler portrait of Charlotte Bronte. The challenge (it's the challenge all biographers have to face)
is that our subjects are complex and can be inconsistent. Charlotte's character, tested by loss and her power to turn loss
to gain, is, like all great drama, open to endless interpretation.
Brussels again is a crucial site for Deborah Lutz, whose scrutiny of nine objects in The Bronte Cabinet includes a
chapter on the letters to M Heger. Concentrating on material detail, Lutz retells the amazing history of these letters: how
Monsieur tore them up; how Mme Heger fished the fragments out of her husband's wastepaper basket and sewed or
stuck the fragments together, and how she kept them in her jewellery box for the next fifty years. Lutz suggests that the
reason the Hegers' daughter gave for keeping the letters, that the amour was all on Charlotte's side, "doesn't feel like the
whole truth". The history of stitching and storing in the jewellery box "has a tinge of obsessiveness to it, as if the
troubled relationship between the two women" remained as active for Zoe Heger as it did for Charlotte.
A selection of objects is a form of biography that surrenders narrative momentum for the sake of physical intimacy
through relicsa very old form of intimacy. Letters, walking stick, portable desk, dog collar, sampler, locks of hair and
other posthumous relics are examined intently for marks, stitches and scratches. Might a scratch on Emily's deskbox be
the residue of initials? "Was this a message from the dead ...?" Lutz asks. Here are closeups of the Brontes' lives
through objects they handled and made. It is in a way a collection of essays, opening out from each object to encompass
events in the family's lives and, more widely, to see the objects in the context of their times.
I especially delighted in the chapter on the tiny booklets that the Bronte children put together and wrote themselves
under noms de plume, what Lutz aptly calls the "microtomes". Bookmaking was part of their fantasy lives. "Rather
than just a holder of 'content' or text to be read, like today's electronic books, books were things to be manipulated,
made personal, appreciated in a tactile way."
Where the Cabinet invites us to inspect, touch and even smell a collection of treasures, a different kind of closeness may
be found in Reader, I Married Him. It's a terrific set of stories by some of our leading novelists, each of whom engages
with a chosen aspect of Jane Eyre. Everyone entranced with Mr Rochester will love "Dangerous Dog" by Kirsty Gunn,
in which a fitness instructor, at once alarmed and courageous, tames a fearsome pit bull terrier, confounding the bullies
who torment him. And all who enjoy a pained laugh will relish Linda Grant's "The MashUp", about a disastrous
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wedding where the Jewish bride and Persian groom are stymied by obstacles. In "The Orphan Exchange", Audrey
Niffenegger dreams up a heartfelt lesbian version of the solace Jane finds in Helen Burns at the cruel Lowood school. In
a masterly contribution by Jane Gardam a girl presses her grandmother about her marriage, feeling her way past barriers
of time and modesty into a recessed past where there is a glimpse of marital passion. It bears on Jane Eyre's confidence
that: "No woman was ever nearer to her mate than I am: ever more absolutely bone of his bone, and flesh of his flesh."
All these stories and both new biographies testify to the live legacy of an author with her finger on the pulse of our
feelings. The longer I've lived with Charlotte Bronte, the more I've come to admire her honesty, in letters and in novels
that clasp her characters close enough to hear their hearts beat.
Lyndall Gordon's "Charlotte Bronte: a Passionate Life" is published by Virago Tracy Chevalier (9 April) and Claire
Harman (10 April) will be appearing at the Cambridge Literary Festival. Details: cambridgeliteraryfestival.com
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Gordon, Lyndall. "Reader, I stalked him: Charlotte Bronte in Brussels: a study in creative obsession." New Statesman,
18 Mar. 2016, p. 64+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA451939564&it=r&asid=8f31a6ff035187c99d0ee7f73627456a.
Accessed 12 Feb. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A451939564
QUOTED: "Harman's knowledgeable and refreshing new look at a familiar yet largely unknown ... life is a welcome tribute."
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Charlotte Bronte: A Fiery Heart
Margaret Flanagan
Booklist.
112.14 (Mar. 15, 2016): p13.
COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
Charlotte Bronte: A Fiery Heart. By Claire Harman. Mar. 2016.480p. Knopf, $30 (9780307962089). 823.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
While many writers treat the talented and intriguing Bronte sisters (Charlotte, Emily, and Anne) as a unit, awardwinning
literary biographer Harman (Jane's Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World, 2010) extracts the fiery,
feisty Charlotte, perhaps the most wellknown of the talented trio, out of the family cocoon and straight into the hearts
and minds of readers who cut their literary teeth on Jane Eyre. According to Harman, who has unearthed a treasure
trove of correspondence, Charlotte's remarkable fiction was grounded in her own fervent passions. Harman reveals two
episodes of unrequited love which she argues fueled Charlotte's writing, experiences that now serve to humanize a
lionized literary figure who has too often been set in stone and trapped in a narrowly held view of her time, place, and
circumstances. Timed to coincide with the twohundredth anniversary of Bronte's birth, Harman's knowledgeable and
refreshing new look at a familiar yet largely unknown and routinely trivialized life is a welcome tribute to a worthy
subject.Margaret Flanagan
Flanagan, Margaret
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Flanagan, Margaret. "Charlotte Bronte: A Fiery Heart." Booklist, 15 Mar. 2016, p. 13. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA449416910&it=r&asid=6b8ffc3ba44be9db73e7a2cd227aeec9.
Accessed 12 Feb. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A449416910
QUOTED: "Harman is herself a gifted storyteller, writing with a congenial flair and eschewing the syntactical convolutions that many literary biographers employ. The result is a sparkling biography that reads with the ease of a novel."
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Charlotte's passions
Robert Weibezahl
BookPage.
(Mar. 2016): p4.
COPYRIGHT 2016 BookPage
http://bookpage.com/
Full Text:
Does the world need another biography of Charlotte Bronte? The life stories of the genius behind Jane Eyre and her
eccentric siblings have been told many times before, most recently in Juliet Barker's massive The Brontes. In the case of
Claire Harman's Charlotte Bronte: A Fiery Heart (Knopf, $30, 480 pages, ISBN 9780307962089), which arrives in
conjunction with the 200th anniversary of Charlotte's birth, the answer is a resounding yes. Harman has written a lively,
compulsively readable biography that illuminates the eldest surviving Bronte sister in a new light. Humanizing Bronte
by exploring her rich inner life, as well as her interactions with her family and the world, this welcome book recasts the
writer not as "poor Charlotte" but as an intelligent, passionate woman.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Charlotte's story is inseparable from her singular family's, so it is inevitable that her father, Patrick, her brother,
Branwell, and her younger sisters, Emily and Anne, share much of the narrative (her mother died when Charlotte was 5,
and her two older sisters a few years after that, leaving Charlotte the sometimes unenviable role of eldest). Indeed,
Harman suggests that it was the intensely close relationship between the four children, played out in near isolation,
which spurred their imaginative storytelling abilities. Their father, a parson, indulged his children's peculiarities, and
none of them was particularly suited to functioning in the wider world beyond the parsonage. Charlotte would prove the
most adept at making a living, although she seems to have despised every moment spent working as a teacher or a
governess. This disenchantment, of course, would provide much of the narrative fuel for Jane Eyre.
Not unexpectedly, Bronte's greatest and most beloved novel, autobiographical in many ways, permeates the life story
that Harman reconstructs here, and she also offers sharp insights into the reallife origins of Emily's Wuthering Heights,
Anne's Agnes Grey and Charlotte's three other novels as well. Harman celebrates the eldest Bronte's achievement as a
writer, pointing out that she was the first novelist to use a firstperson child narrator and to dramatize the injustices of
childhood. Contemporary readers were bowled over by this innovation, Harman says. Readers almost two centuries
later are no less enraptured. The love story at the heart of Jane Eyre has its parallel in Charlotte's own life. While
teaching at a girl's school in Brussels, the 26yearold avowed spinster fell in love with a married professor. It was
unrequited, and certainly nothing on the grand scale of passion that would simmer between the fictional Jane and
Rochester, but Charlotte transformed this raw material into one of the most enduring, complicated love stories of all
time, because that is what geniuses do.
In researching and writing Charlotte Bronte, Harman had access to letters never before available, and she has drawn on
previous scholarship with a fresh eye. Harman is herself a gifted storyteller, writing with a congenial flair and
eschewing the syntactical convolutions that many literary biographers employ. The result is a sparkling biography that
reads with the ease of a novel and will compel the reader to return not only to Charlotte's masterwork, but to those
singular works of genius the other Brontes left us, too.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Weibezahl, Robert. "Charlotte's passions." BookPage, Mar. 2016, p. 4. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA444819267&it=r&asid=9c47115c868da63bd4bab986511a7c27.
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Accessed 12 Feb. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A444819267
QUOTED: "This excellent biography makes a significant contribution to Brontean studies and will attract readers interested in ... British literature in general."
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Harman, Claire. Charlotte Bronte: A Fiery Heart
Erica Swenson Danowitz
Library Journal.
141.3 (Feb. 15, 2016): p104.
COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution
permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
* Harman, Claire. Charlotte Bronte: A Fiery Heart. Knopf. Mar. 2016.480p. photos, notes, bibliog. index. ISBN
9780307962089. $30; ebk. ISBN 9780307962096. LIT
In 2016 several events will celebrate the bicentenary of Charlotte Bronte's birth, including exhibitions hosted by the
Bronte Society. With this biography, Harman (Jane's Fame) contributes to the celebration. Many Brontean memoirs
exist, including one written shortly after the novelist's death by her friend Elizabeth Gaskell. Harman cites a number of
these accounts in her comprehensive notes and bibliographic sections. The author draws heavily on recently published
correspondence that had not been available to earlier biographers. These letters provide a new perspective on the
renowned author of Jane Eyre, especially when Harman depicts her struggles as a teacher/ governess, her unrequited
passion for a Belgian professor (experiences that inspired Villette), and her heartrending descriptions of her siblings' last
days. This work spans more than the 38 years of the writer's brief life, also tracing her parents' beginnings. It concludes
with a passage of the increasing literary celebrity that followed Bronte's difficult death from hyperemesis gravidarum (a
complication of pregnancy). Her father witnessed this fame, having outlived all six of his children. VERDICT This
excellent biography makes a significant contribution to Brontean studies and will attract readers interested in Bronte as
well as British literature in general. [See Prepub Alert, 9/14/15.]Erica Swenson Danowitz, Delaware Cty. Community
Coll. Lib., Media, PA
Danowitz, Erica Swenson
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Danowitz, Erica Swenson. "Harman, Claire. Charlotte Bronte: A Fiery Heart." Library Journal, 15 Feb. 2016, p. 104.
General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
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Accessed 12 Feb. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A442905395
QUOTED: "Harman creates an expert portrait of life at Haworth Parsonage and of its eccentric inhabitants."
"fresh, vigorous, and very readable."
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Charlotte Bronte: A Fiery Heart
Publishers Weekly.
263.3 (Jan. 18, 2016): p74.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Charlotte Bronte: A Fiery Heart
Claire Harman. Knopf, $30 (480p) ISBN 9780307962089
The story of the Brontes may be welltrod, but in the hands of skilled biographer Harman (Jane's Fame), their
personalities come to life in a fresh, vigorous, and very readable fashion. Drawing on prodigious research, both old and
new, Harman creates an expert portrait of life at Haworth Parsonage and of its eccentric inhabitants. At the center is
Charlotte, whose Jane Eyre became a literary sensation, and who would outlive all of her siblings. It is impossible to
speak of Charlotte without also telling the story of her complicated family members, especially her stern, selfabsorbed
father, Patrick; her talented but dissolute brother, Branwell; and, of course, her sisters and fellow novelists: strongwilled
Emily (Wuthering Heights)', and patient, introverted Anne (The Tenant of Wildfell Hall). But Charlotte and her
remarkable writings remain the focus, as Harman leads her from secluded girlhood and the imaginary world she created
with her siblings to her celebrity upon the thunderclap publication of Jane Eyre ("that intensely interesting novel," as
Queen Victoria called it). In telling Charlotte's story anew, Harman has created a work that will appeal both to readers
meeting the Bronte clan for the first time and to those already steeped in their lore. Illus. Agent: Zoe Waldie, Rogers,
Coleridge & 'White. (Mar.)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Charlotte Bronte: A Fiery Heart." Publishers Weekly, 18 Jan. 2016, p. 74. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA440821840&it=r&asid=16afbbef1cb6ff8b16afe0cbf932216e.
Accessed 12 Feb. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A440821840
QUOTED: "This wonderful biography joins (and updates) earlier masterworks."
Harman, Claire. Charlotte Bronte: a fiery heart
S.A. Parker
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. 53.12 (Aug. 2016): p1785.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
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Harman, Claire. Charlotte Bronte: a fiery heart. Knopf, 2016. 462p bibl index ISBN 9780307962089 cloth, $30.00; ISBN 9780307363213 ebook, contact publisher for price
Published in the bicentennial year of Charlotte Bronte's birth, this approachable and empathetic biography reads like an adventure tale. Harman assembles her historical framework around a classic question surrounding the author: was she a tragic figure? The answer, according to Harman, is both yes and no; Bronte's life was restricted and painful, but her responses to events were transformational, even heroic. For this thoroughly grounded, richly resourced narrative Harman draws on abundant precedents and relies heavily on recently published letters--especially Margaret Smith's three-volume The Letters of Charlotte Brome (CH, Jul'96, 33-6130),(CH, Jan'01, 38-2587),(CH, Jan'05, 42-2642)--plunging the reader into the Haworth, Yorkshire, of Patrick Bronte and his children. The family drama is psychologically compelling, and the author makes Charlotte come alive. The picture that emerges is of a thwarted woman who turns adversity into arresting prose. Bronte's fane Eyre captures her haunting ability to draw on personal facts and mesmerize readers with their implications. This wonderful biography joins (and updates) earlier masterworks, e.g., Winifred Gerin's Charlotte Bronte: The Evolution of a Genius (CH, Jan'68). In addition to a selected bibliography, Harman includes invaluable page notes and photographs of key figures. Summing Up: **** Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.--S. A. Parker, Hiram College
'Charlotte Bronte' is an irresistible biography of 'Jane Eyre' and its author
Elizabeth Toohey
The Christian Science Monitor. (Mar. 22, 2016): Arts and Entertainment:
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 The Christian Science Publishing Society
http://www.csmonitor.com/About/The-Monitor-difference
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Byline: Elizabeth Toohey
The popularity of "Jane Eyre" and mystery surrounding the identity of its author - whose pseudonym was the gender-ambiguous "Currer Bell" - created a sensation in Victorian England when it was published in 1847. The novel still resonates today, testifying to the power of its protagonist's voice, which seethes with frustrated desire, and indignation at the social and economic injustices faced by girls and women. Virginia Woolf criticized these qualities as failings - Bronte's own grievances disrupting her writing - but in fact, they are what give "Jane Eyre" its force. Bronte's publisher famously read the book in one sitting, canceling a friend's visit and impatiently dismissing the servant who interrupted to bring his lunch.
Bronte's life bore little resemblance to Jane's, but was in its own way as gothic, providing fuel for her novels. Literary biographer Claire Harman's retelling of those events in Charlotte Bronte: A Fiery Heart, published to coincide with the bicentennial of Bronte's birth, is an irresistible read even for those familiar with her story.
Charlotte's isolated youth gave her material to draw from and space to hone her craft. The six Bronte children ranged from one to seven when their mother Maria died, leaving them to the care of a remote father (his evolution from Patrick Brunty, son of an Irish farmhand, to Reverend Bronte is where Harman's story begins). Within a few years, Charlotte's older sisters died as well, having contracted tuberculosis at the Cowan Bridge school, which Charlotte later fictionalized, lambasting it for its harsh religious doctrine and unsanitary conditions.
Left to themselves, the remaining siblings - Charlotte, Branwell, Emily, and Anne - did chores and studies, took walks on the moors Emily would immortalize in "Wuthering Heights," and wrote poetry and fiction.
Harman emphasizes the parallels between Charlotte and Branwell, who were just a year apart, by juxtaposing episodes of their youth. The two collaborated on stories set in the fantastical Angria, and both wrote to renown poets for encouragement - Southey's response taught Charlotte a lifelong lesson in adopting a male persona so as to be judged on her writing, not her gender. Both experimented with opium (at least, Harman makes a convincing case that Charlotte did) and harbored an obsessive unrequited love for someone married. Branwell's privilege as the only son worked against him, however. His father's homeschooling afforded him knowledge of the classics, but deprived him of peers, and his freedom to travel and socialize (which Charlotte desperately longed for) led to opium addiction.
Charlotte, by contrast, learned to navigate socially through her schooling, where she made lifelong friends, despite her oddities and social unease. Even her unreciprocated love for her married teacher, Constantin Heger, and later for the dashing young editor, George Smith, she transmuted successfully into fiction. And these relationships, however painful, had their rewards: the former gave her an intellectual mentorship that was crucial to her growth as a writer, and the latter introduced her to London's social and cultural life.
Harman draws our attention to the radical experimentation in Charlotte's writing throughout her life, including a postmodern moment in her juvenilia when the hero wonders if he is "the mere idea of some other creatures brain." It's a stylistic move worthy of Vonnegut - and Charlotte was just 14. "Jane Eyre," Harman notes, was the first novel ever written in the first-person voice of a child.
Equally new was Bronte's expression of indignation over the exploitation of children, a subject just being explored by Dickens - Harman notes that the two authors "marked a sea-change in how ... writers showed adult psychology being forged from childhood experience."
"Jane Eyre" was radical, too, in questioning social expectations placed on women. Jane's very act of falling in love with Rochester before he declared his affection was a rebellion against the social order. For these reasons the novel was accused of being "half savage & half freethinking," "anti-Christian" in its "tone of ungodly discontent," and its heroine a "hater." This passionate tone generated criticism for "Villette," as well, though it inspired admiration in a yet-to-be-published George Eliot.
By the time Charlotte wrote "Villette," her three remaining siblings had died within the space of a year, and the novelist was haunted by these losses. Charlotte went on to have a happy, albeit short-lived, marriage, due to a condition related to pregnancy that led to an excruciating death.
Her final visit to London had taken her to the Stock Exchange, Bedlam asylum, and the Foundling Hospital, signaling an interest in tackling broader social issues in her future novels than the narrowness of her life had previously allowed her to. It's a loss to us all that she wasn't able to do so.
QUOTED: "Do we need another BrontA' bio, given the dozen or so captivating meditations that have followed Elizabeth Gaskell's brilliant and gossipy pioneer study, published in 1857? Of course we do. Harman's story is about how writers write. Her subjects are not accidental geniuses, rather women with time."
Review: 'Charlotte Bronte: A Fiery Heart'
Laurie Stone
Washingtonpost.com. (Feb. 24, 2016):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 The Washington Post
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Byline: Laurie Stone
In 1847, as Charlotte BrontA''s first novel was bounced yet again to Haworth parsonage, her sisters Emily and Anne made a deal with a London publisher to bring out their novels, "Wuthering Heights" and "Agnes Grey." Charlotte read her sisters' books and took what she needed. Enough with restraint and the unspoken. She would give readers what they wanted-- what she wanted: sex, ambition and Gothic shenanigans. The heroines of her sisters' books were beautiful, however, and Charlotte bristled. They said they did not think the public would embrace a plain woman. In the spirit of a dare, Charlotte wrote "Jane Eyre," in which a plain, orphaned governess wins the heart of a rogue addicted to beautiful women.
When "Jane Eyre" was published later, in 1847, it was an immediate rage. The intimate voice of the storyteller made people feel as though she was speaking directly to them. Charlotte, not Dickens, invented the child narrator who acutely registers pain. Before publication, Charlotte's editors urged her to tone down the harshness of the opening chapters set at Lowood School and the agonizing death of Helen Burns (based on Charlotte's older sister Elizabeth), but she refused.
Contemporary reviewers praised Emily's morally enigmatic novel, but its genius was apparent to few in her time. Her nest of stories within stories, exploring the space between dream and wakefulness, feels postmodern and boasts two unreliable narrators. Sadistic and witty, it issues from a private vision. Charlotte looks out, speaking for everyone ever sold short. She speaks for the right of women, plain or beautiful, to claim love.
She has found an affectionate champion in British biographer Claire Harman, whose lively and exhaustively researched "Charlotte BrontA': A Fiery Heart" arrives on the 200th anniversary of Charlotte's birth.
Do we need another BrontA' bio, given the dozen or so captivating meditations that have followed Elizabeth Gaskell's brilliant and gossipy pioneer study, published in 1857 ? Of course we do. Harman's story is about how writers write. Her subjects are not accidental geniuses, rather women with time. Yes, the sisters are socially isolated in Haworth. (They don't care, as long as they have each other.) Yes, they are burdened by a pompous, needy father who places his faith in his fragile son. Yes, they endure their brother's drug addiction and craziness -- and use it in their books. Branwell set fire to his bed, and five minutes later, Bertha Mason did the same in the attic of Charlotte's fictional Thornfield Hall.
After her marriage to a minister at 38, Charlotte did not write much and died nine months later from a complicated pregnancy, but until that time and except for harrowing stints as a teacher or a governess, she lived at home with her siblings, and they wrote all the time. No boyfriends, no husbands, no children. Their escape from traditional roles is at the core of their radicalism. It made them scary and thrilling in their time and continues to in ours.
Oddly, Harman skips over Lucasta Miller's startling and convincing charge in "The BrontA' Myth" (2001) that Charlotte was the one who, after her sisters' deaths, destroyed their letters as well as Emily's unpublished second novel. The evidence? Charlotte bowdlerized one of Emily's poems and tried to spin Emily as a primitive in her introduction to the 1850 reissue of her sisters' novels. Why? Wild, tough-minded Emily functioned as Charlotte's id puppet -- standing in for her own appetites for sex and rage -- much the way in "Wuthering Heights" Heathcliff serves as Cathy's id puppet and Rochester as Jane's in "Jane Eyre." Charlotte wanted to get Emily under control.
Harman's Charlotte says yes to life more than no, advancing against all odds. In 1837, she seeks encouragement from Poet Laureate Robert Southey, who tells her women should not write. After the publication of "Jane Eyre," she mentions to her father that she has written a novel, that it has earned praising reviews and that she is making money. Wearily, he says he may consider reading it.
Harman acknowledges her debt to the scholarship of Margaret Smith, who published and annotated more than 900 of Charlotte's letters, and the figure that emerges most indelibly here is lovesick Charlotte. The bulk of Charlotte's extant letters were written to Ellen Nussey, a school friend remarkable only for preserving her mail. Charlotte fell deeply and unrequitedly in love with two men: a married professor at a school she attended in Brussels and her publisher, George Smith, who famously believed she would have traded her literary gifts for beauty.
Charlotte would no doubt have asked, "Why do I have to choose?" She wanted "to be forever known" -- and more. Her outcries of grief over the men break your heart and astound in their dog-with-a-bone tenacity. She understood the way emotion creates altered mind states. The realness of lived experience, pretty or not, is her great contribution to literature. Harriet Martineau tried to slut shame her before the publication of "Villette," saying the book diminished women by representing them as abject slaves to one emotion. Charlotte responded: "I know what love is as I understand it -- & if man or woman shd. feel ashamed of feeling such love -- then there is nothing right, noble, faithful, truthful, unselfish on this earth."
She was always staring out a window, imagining women somewhere else. Thanks in part to Charlotte, we live there now.
Laurie Stone is the author of three books of fiction and nonfiction. Her next book, "My Life as an Animal, Stories" will be published this fall.
QUOTED: "This biography is careful, welljudged, nicely written—perfect if you’ve never read a biography of Charlotte Brontë published after 1857, not quite necessary if you have."
‘Charlotte Brontë: A
Fiery Heart,
’ by Claire
Harman
By DEBORAH FRIEDELL MARCH 18, 2016
CHARLOTTE BRONTË
A Fiery Heart
By Claire Harman
Illustrated. 462 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $30.
No sooner has Jane Eyre discovered that her dear master is a married man than
she gives him up. “I will keep the law given by God; sanctioned by man.” She will not
be Mr. Rochester’s mistress; she nearly becomes a missionary. But the works of the
Lord are great: The wife dies. Jane nurses Mr. Rochester back to health. More
important, she saves his soul. All his life, he had been an “irreligious dog,” but Jane’s
example has swelled his heart “with gratitude to the beneficent God of this earth.”
And so the novel ends with an acknowledgment that the couple’s happiness falls
short of the bliss they will know in heaven. The last sentence of “Jane Eyre” isn’t
“Reader, I married him” (I always forget this) but “Amen; even so come, Lord
Jesus.”
What fault could the sternest Victorian moralists have found with any of that?
But to the novel’s first critics, Jane was too independent and assertive, “the
personification of an unregenerate and undisciplined spirit.” Her longing for
Rochester was “coarse” (that is, sexual), and as the reviewer for The Christian
Remembrancer averred, the book “burns with moral Jacobinism.” Jane is always
2/12/2017 ‘Charlotte Brontë: A Fiery Heart,’ by Claire Harman The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/20/books/review/charlottebronteafieryheartbyclaireharman.html 2/4
“murmuring against the comforts of the rich and against the privations of the poor,”
and so — since God decides who is born a weaver and who a viscount — the novel
was thought to be criticizing “God’s appointment,” a kind of blasphemy. Never mind
that Queen Victoria stayed up late reading it to Prince Albert. “Jane Eyre” was an
“immoral,” even a “dangerous” book, and whoever was behind the authorial
pseudonym “Currer Bell” was in possession of a sordid mind.
Eight years after the novel’s publication, Charlotte Brontë was dead, and the
novelist Elizabeth Gaskell turned biographer in order to rescue her friend’s
reputation. “The Life of Charlotte Brontë,” published in 1857, is a portrait of a
paragon of Victorian womanhood: humble, passionless, pious, the dutiful daughter
of a difficult father. Even as Brontë wrote her big books (about which Gaskell says
little), she was still “too dainty a housekeeper” not to notice when an old, blind
servant wasn’t perfectly peeling the potatoes. She thought nothing of “breaking off in
the full flow of interest and inspiration in her writing” in order to “steal into the
kitchen,” “carefully cut out the specks in the potatoes, and noiselessly carry them
back to their place” — so as not to hurt the servant’s feelings. For Gaskell, this “little
proceeding” proves “how orderly and fully she accomplished her duties,” much the
most significant thing that could be said about her. As for Brontë’s morbid
imaginings, Gaskell begs us to consider them with “tender humility” because she had
lived in the wilds of Yorkshire and known mostly suffering.
This new biography by Claire Harman (whose previous subjects include Sylvia
Townsend Warner, Fanny Burney and Robert Louis Stevenson), timed to mark the
bicentenary of Brontë’s birth, is necessarily indebted to Gaskell, who had collected
hundreds of Brontë’s letters and traveled to Belgium for interviews — and, of course,
because she had actually known her subject. Harman has made much use of more
recent biographies, particularly Lyndall Gordon’s and Juliet Barker’s, but it is
Gaskell’s Brontë who seems most vital to her, whom she never stops comparing with
her own.
Harman’s Brontë is just as shy as Gaskell’s, just as lonely and frequently as unhappy,
but there is nothing resigned or sweetly decorous, nothing Helen Burnsish, about
her. Harman’s subtitle is “A Fiery Heart”: Her Brontë is full of rage. When Brontë’s
two older sisters died after becoming ill at a grossly mismanaged school for poor
2/12/2017 ‘Charlotte Brontë: A Fiery Heart,’ by Claire Harman The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/20/books/review/charlottebronteafieryheartbyclaireharman.html 3/4
clergymen’s daughters — recreated as the sinister Lowood Institution in “Jane Eyre”
— Harman thinks she forever lost trust in her betters, whoever they were supposed
to be: the clergy, the aristocracy, her employers, her publishers. The Victorian critics
hadn’t been wrong to see Jane’s decidedly unChristian response to unfairness or
cruelty as a reflection of the author’s own: “When we are struck at without a reason,
we should strike back again very hard; I am sure we should — so hard as to teach the
person who struck us never to do it again.”
Although Gaskell’s depiction of Brontë’s father, Patrick, as a pistoltoting
Irishman with a “volcanic” temper (or, as Harman puts it, a “halfcrazed domestic
tyrant”), may have been exaggerated to increase sympathy for Charlotte, it probably
wasn’t wide of the mark. Harman sees him as another of Brontë’s failed authority
figures, another reason for her to turn rebel. Harman shows a widower unable to
cope with his surviving four children, but if he had been more attentive, his three
daughters might not have had such a free run of his large library, which included
works by Byron, whose “Turkish Tales” Charlotte began imitating before she was 10.
Harman does little more than list the authors who mattered most to Brontë, which
seems a missed opportunity, particularly when it comes to Byron and Walter Scott.
(Brontë worried that there was no point writing fiction after Scott, since “all novels
after his are worthless.”)
When Brontë becomes a teacher, Harman doesn’t look away from her “rage
against her occupation, and the lifetime of drudgery it symbolized” — but she also
has some sympathy for the family that later employed Brontë as a governess and
didn’t realize that by asking her to tutor their children they were committing an
outrage against literature. Harman points to the remembrances of a nephew of the
Sidgwicks, who found her impossible to please: Invite her to church, and “she
thought she was being ordered about like a slave; if she was not invited, she
imagined she was excluded from the family cycle.” But why should she have been
pleased? Above all, she craved “mental liberty,” to be left alone.
Harman shows how Brontë’s anger could give way to depression: “One wearies
from day to day of caring nothing, fearing nothing, liking nothing, hating nothing —
being nothing, doing nothing.” She suffered most when she went to Brussels to
improve her French and became infatuated with her teacher, Constantin Heger, who
2/12/2017 ‘Charlotte Brontë: A Fiery Heart,’ by Claire Harman The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/20/books/review/charlottebronteafieryheartbyclaireharman.html 4/4
had encouraged her writing and flirted with her, but remained devoted to his wife.
Gaskell tried to conceal Brontë’s letters about him, and left it to future biographies to
point out how much Mme. Heger resembles the sly, interfering Mme. Beck of
“Villette,” how much Constantin the dark, vain, mercurial Paul Emanuel, who
dazzles Lucy Snowe with his erudition and energy.
This biography is careful, welljudged, nicely written — perfect if you’ve never
read a biography of Charlotte Brontë published after 1857, not quite necessary if you
have. Unlike other newish books about the Brontës, which have experimented with
form — Deborah Lutz’s “The Brontë Cabinet” tries to recover the sisters’ history
through their objects; Lucasta Miller’s phenomenal “The Brontë Myth” is presented
as a “metabiography” — Harman’s narrative is strictly chronological with the
exception of a prologue in which Charlotte, miserable over Heger and missing her
sisters, sought comfort (as she wrote in a letter to Emily) in a confessional at the
Brussels cathedral, despite her horror of “Romanism.” When Lucy, another good
Protestant, goes to confession in “Villette,” she is calmed by “the mere relief of
communication, . . . the mere pouring out of some portion of long accumulating,
long pentup pain.” Harman thinks it was the same for Charlotte, who realized that
“relief of communication” could be achieved outside a church, by writing about other
young women, neither rich nor beautiful, who must make their own way.
Deborah Friedell is an editor at The London Review of Books.
A version of this review appears in print on March 20, 2016, on Page BR18 of the Sunday Book Review
with the headline: Charlotte’s Web.
QUOTED: "Harman’s sane, unshowy retelling is exactly right for the bicentenary next April. It never insults the reader’s intelligence by pretending that it has new, startling truths to impart. Instead it gathers up the best of what has been written before and deals tactfully and decisively with the sillier aspects of Brontë mythology. The result is a retooled classic biographical narrative, shipshape and serviceable for the next 200 years."
Charlotte Brontë: A Life by Claire Harman review – a well-balanced, unshowy biography
Written for the bicentenary of her birth, this is an eminently sane retelling of the author’s fascinating life story
Jane Eyre - 2011
Michael Fassbender and Mia Wasikowska in the film adaptation of Jane Eyre (2011). Photograph: Focus/Everett/Rex Features
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Kathryn Hughes
Saturday 31 October 2015 05.00 EDT Last modified on Monday 6 February 2017 09.45 EST
Some life stories are so canonical that they don’t bear retelling, so much as demand it. That’s why every 20 years or so, we want – and get – a new biography of Charlotte Brontë, that patron saint of every bookish brown mouse who has ever screamed silently to the world “one day you will notice me and be dazzled by my sun”. The tale of how a poor, plain, provincial girl turned a lifetime of material and emotional lack into the thrilling art of Jane Eyre and Villette is so consoling that it is impossible not to ask for it again and again.
Each retelling, of course, gives us a slightly different Charlotte Brontë, one who Janus-like faces back to her own time while also speaking to the biographer’s own. Elizabeth Gaskell writing in 1857, two years after Brontë’s death, was determined to rescue her friend from any suggestion of constitutional “coarseness” – many critics had condemned Jane Eyre as an unladylike book, even a wicked one. Painting in loose, novelistic strokes, Gaskell explained to her readers that if they had been locked away in a remote parsonage with two dead siblings buried virtually in the garden and a father who came down to breakfast with a loaded pistol, then they too might grow up with an imagination warped towards the morbid. That didn’t mean, Gaskell insisted, that Miss Brontë wasn’t unimpeachably wholesome in her everyday, bread-and-butter, life.
In the pragmatic 1990s, Juliet Barker worked hard to clear away the consequences of Gaskell’s well-meaning gothicisation by rebuilding the Brontës’ story on solid historical grounds. In particular Barker challenged her portrayal of Patrick Brontë as a storybook ogre. Charlotte too was transformed from a sequestered tragic heroine into a chippy spinster who carefully stage-managed her rise to literary fame by persistently pushing herself and her work, even the duff stuff, before the public.
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Writing to celebrate the forthcoming 200th anniversary of Brontë’s birth, Claire Harman pursues a golden mean. Her protagonist is both fervent dreamer and cool realist, imaginative artist and clear-eyed professional. In a bravura opening scene Harman sets out her stall. It is 1 September 1843 and 27-year-old Brontë is close to breakdown, having been left alone during the dragging summer holidays at the Brussels boarding school where she has been working as a student teacher for the past two years. Racked with miserable longing for Constantin Héger, the charismatic married colleague with whom she is desperately in love, Brontë sets out on a feverish walk. Without knowing exactly how, she finds herself entering the city’s cathedral. And there, amid the looming angels and incense fug, Miss Brontë of Haworth Parsonage, raised to repudiate Romanism in all its slavish forms, slides into the confession box and mumbles her sins – her choking desire for a married man, perhaps – to the priest.
We know all this because Brontë, tickled at her own transgressive daring, wrote a letter the next day describing the sequence of events to her sister Emily. But we know it, too, because she gives near enough the same experience to Lucy Snowe, the heroine of her final and perhaps finest novel, Villette. In one of the most memorable scenes in Victorian literature, Lucy, high on her love for Paul Emanuel (not actually married, but so elusive that he might as well be), floats in anguish through the dull city streets before stumbling into “an old solemn church” where she finds herself making a confession to a kind but puzzled priest. Gaskell, usually unshockable, was so stunned by the delirious sensuality of the scene that she asked Brontë whether she’d been on drugs when she wrote it.
Biographically, the cathedral scene is crucial for Harman because it allows her to make a link between Brontë’s spiritual confession and her growing desire to speak her truth to the world at large. Within a year of coming away from the grille rinsed in “solace”, she would be writing her first novel while simultaneously sending out her poetry to publishers. But the scene as rendered in Villette gains extra importance for Harman because it shows Brontë making a new kind of fictional narrative, one that is more concerned with the flutters and surges of the narrator’s inner consciousness than the external demands of the plot.
As a highly experienced biographer, Harman has too much integrity to suggest that this idea of her subject as a proto-modernist is entirely fresh. Nor does she even hint that she has uncovered any new documentary sources about her. Instead, she wisely concentrates on rounding out and deepening aspects of the author’s life that have been previously scanted or skewed. Particularly fine is Harman’s reading of how the tortuous, sexless love affair between Héger and Brontë could ever have been allowed to reach such heights – or depths. Previous biographers have tended either to castigate Héger as a married flirt who led Brontë on, or they have painted her as a disordered spinster, randy with celibacy, quite capable of spitefully destroying a man who refused to make love to her.
Harman, by contrast, suggests that what we may be looking at is primarily a cultural misunderstanding. Héger routinely lavished his pupils with a repertoire of kisses, pats and affectionate glances. Brontë, raised with brisk Yorkshire non-showiness, may simply have misread pseudo-parental tenderness as a special favour. What’s more Mme Héger, far from being as sly and vengeful as her fictional avatar Mme Beck, was simply a sensible businesswoman who realised the damage to her school’s reputation if gossip emerged about a tendresse between her husband and the plain, nervy English governess. Deciding not to respond to the stream of yearning, abasing letters that Brontë wrote once she had returned to Haworth wasn’t a vicious move on the Hegers’ part, but simply self-preservation.
Harman’s sane, unshowy retelling is exactly right for the bicentenary next April. It never insults the reader’s intelligence by pretending that it has new, startling truths to impart. Instead it gathers up the best of what has been written before and deals tactfully and decisively with the sillier aspects of Brontë mythology. The result is a retooled classic biographical narrative, shipshape and serviceable for the next 200 years.
• Charlotte Brontë by Claire Harman (Viking, £25). To order a copy for £20, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.