The extraordinary life of Charlotte Brontë needs no romanticizing. In Charlotte Brontë: A Fiery Heart, biographer Claire Harman (Jane's Fame) offers an even-handed, scholarly approach and some fresh insights while maintaining a tense and flowing narrative.
At the center of this biography are Brontë's years at a school in Brussels, and her painful infatuation with her married teacher Constantin Héger. Brontë had grown up isolated in Yorkshire, strictly Protestant, traumatized by a gruesome boarding school and the deaths of her older sisters, immersed in fantasy worlds with her siblings. She was ambitious, brilliant and consumed by a rising "inner turbulence and chronic dissatisfaction," and when she finally found a rigorous encouraging literary mentor in Héger, all her desires flared up and overwhelmed her. In the midst of this turmoil, she put aside her distaste for Catholicism to attend a mass and afterward confess to a priest, which provided some genuine relief. This experience, says Harman, "gave her an idea not just of how to survive or override her most powerful feelings, but of how to transmute them into art." The success of Jane Eyre and Villette gained her money and exposure to the literary world for better and worse, but had little lasting effect on her private life. Harman perceives all sides of even the least sympathetic characters, and she compares the overlapping worlds of Brontë's life and fiction without sentimentality. This is a compassionate and balanced account of the author's life. --Sara Catterall