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GuardianSynopsis
Penguin presents the unabridged, downloadable, audiobook edition of Charlotte Brontë: A Life, written and read by Claire Harman.
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 the definitive biography of one of Britain's best loved writers.
About Claire Harman
See more books from this AuthorHarman’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.
Read Full Review of Charlotte Brontë: A Life | See more reviews from GuardianHarman’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.
Read Full Review of Charlotte Brontë: A Life | See more reviews from GuardianMs Harman writes with warmth and a fine understanding of Ms Brontë’s literary significance. Above all, she is a storyteller, with a sense of pace and timing, relish for a good scene and a wry sense of humour.
Read Full Review of Charlotte Brontë: A Life | See more reviews from The EconomistAn aggregated and normalized score based on 54 user ratings from iDreamBooks & iTunes