Charlotte Bronte: A Fiery Heart
Charlotte Brontë: A Fiery Heart is a fascinating biography of the author of Jane Eyre, Shirley, and Villette. Author Claire Harman is able to make a life in which frankly not much happened engaging and interesting. The biography spans Charlotte’s life as well as her parents’ background, the lives of her siblings, and Charlotte’s artistic legacy.
Harman places a lot of focus on the unrequited love that Charlotte felt for Constantin Héger, her professor at the school Charlotte attended and then taught at in Brussels. Charlotte based her unpublished novel, The Professor, and her novel, Villette, on her experience in Brussels, and his influence is also felt in Jane Eyre. She also writes about Charlotte’s frustrations at being the oldest of the children after the older of the two died, and her determination to marry for love (she turned down several proposals before being won over by Arthur Nicholls). Harman makes the case that the Brontës didn’t mind isolation – they thrived on it and depended on it. What they minded was their limited options in terms of how to earn a living and how to achieve recognition.
There are some weird gaps in the biography. Harman doesn’t write much about the sisters’ complex relationship to food, even though on at least one occasion they went on a coordinated hunger strike, and despite the fact that many feminist scholars believe that Emily was anorexic (and possibly Charlotte, as well). She also doesn’t dwell on the passionate nature of the friendship between Charlotte and Emily Nussey, a friendship that fascinated another biographer, Deborah Lutz, in The Brontë Cabinet. However, Harman gives a detailed look at the sibling’s relationships to each other and to their eccentric father, Charlotte’s one-sided relationship to Héger, and her tension between wanting recognition and wanting to stay invisible.
This biography is both comprehensive and approachable. It presents Charlotte as a complex person, one who is incredibly sympathetic yet also at times deeply annoying (she had horrible prejudices against Catholics and anyone non-English, and her social anxiety could cause her to appear rude and snobby). This is a powerful and compelling biography that will enhance any Brontë fan’s understanding of Charlotte’s life and fiction.
– Carrie S
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 Brontë 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 Brontë as the heroine of her own story, one as dramatic and triumphant as one of her own novels.
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