Charlotte Brontë famously lived her life in a parsonage on a remote English moor with a demanding father and creative siblings. Claire Harman's biography transcends these melancholy facts to reveal a woman for whom duty and piety gave way to rebellion and ambition. Drawing on letters unavailable to previous biographers, Harman depicts Charlotte's inner life with absorbing, novelistic intensity. She seizes upon a moment in Charlotte's adolescence that ignited her determination: while working at .
