Charlotte bronte biography radio 4 nederland

CHARLOTTE BRONTË: A LIFE

Writing biography is an immersive experience: you read, write, live and breathe the subject for several years, to the exclusion of all others. Writing about Charlotte Brontë has been totally preoccupying for me, both because of the wealth of material that she left behind – lovingly preserved at Haworth and in libraries across the world –  and because of the power of character, the spiritual presence, that pervades both her public and private works.

She intended to haunt her readers, and does.

Brontë poured everything into her books, but lived it first. That’s what makes Jane Eyre’s impassioned speeches so electrifying, Lucy Snowe’s despair so all-pervasive, Caroline Helstone’s mental fragility so alarming.

Even at her most Gothic, she wanted to express true emotions, true behaviour, and created a new kind of heroine to express it; someone whose heroic qualities are scarcely visible to the world at large, but who burns with inner passion and longin