Charlotte Brontë famously lived her entire life in an isolated parsonage on a remote English moor with a demanding father and with siblings whose astonishing creativity was a closely held secret. The genius of Claire Harman’s biography is that it transcends these melancholy facts to reveal a woman for whom duty and piety gave way to quiet rebellion and fierce ambition. Drawing on letters unavailable to previous biographers, Harman depicts Charlotte’s inner life with absorbing intensity. Brontë’s blazingly intelligent female characters brimming with hidden passions transformed English literature, even as a heartrending series of personal losses followed the author’s literary success. Charlotte Brontë: A Fiery Heart is a groundbreaking view of the beloved writer as a young woman ahead of her time. Seattle Times, Best Books of 2016 Kirkus Reviews, Best Biographies of 2016 “As intimate and nuanced an account of the writer’s life as we are likely to get.” —Los Angeles Times “An engrossing, almost novelistic tale. . . . Just as Jane Eyre happily survives multiple readings, so does the story of Charlotte Brontë—particularly when in the hands of a gifted teller.” —Seattle Times “A well-researched, wonderfully lucid . . . treatment of a most extraordinary woman. . . . Harman’s tart, understated wit and gift for quotation shine throughout. [Her biography is] perhaps the most engaging of all.” —Chicago Tribune “A masterly biography. . . . Harman leads readers on a precipitous journey through the writer’s interior landscape. . . . Harman’s psychologically astute portrait deftly bridges Charlotte’s world and her work.” —The New Yorker “Harman’s well-paced narrative and keen attention to the tentative and troubled way Charlotte adjusted to sudden fame make this latest version of a literary life all the more modern and captivating.” —San Francisco Chronicle “Excellent. . . . 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 humor.” — The Economist “[Harman] vividly portrays a life of loneliness, anguish, tragedy, and suppressed rage in serene and elegant prose with frequent flashes of ironic humor. . . . A delightfully engaging biography.” — Kirkus Reviews , starred review   CLAIRE HARMAN  is the author of Sylvia Townsend Warner, for which she won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, as well as biographies of Fanny Burney and Robert Louis Stevenson, and Jane’s Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World . She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a frequent reviewer. She divides her time between New York City and Oxford, England. www.claireharman.com Prologue 1 September 1843 It is 1 September 1843 and a 27-year-old Englishwoman is alone at the Pensionnat Heger in Brussels, a girls’ school where she is an unpaid student-teacher. It is halfway through the long vacation and everyone else who has a home or family to go to left weeks ago: the proprietress, Madame Heger, is at the seaside with her husband and children; the other teachers are on holiday or travelling. Miss Brontë’s home is too far away to warrant a return for a mere two months. She can’t afford the cost of the journey back to her father’s Yorkshire parsonage, and, besides, arrangements should be kept to: Charlotte is a scrupulously dutiful person. But she is finding the empty dormitory oppressive, with all the beds covered in white cloths like a morgue; every meal is eaten alone, and the Pensionnat’s beautiful garden, with its old fruit trees and allée défendue of limes, seems more of a prison than a refuge when the rest of the school is abandoned. To escape the heavy solitude, it is Miss Brontë’s habit to go out and walk the city and the surrounding countryside for hours at a time. “I should inevitably fall into the gulf of low spirits if I stayed always by myself here without a human being to speak to,” she writes to her sister Emily, who was her companion at the school the previous year and knows the place well. The truth is, although she doesn’t tell Emily this, she is already in that gulf. She is desperately unhappy. Her return to Brussels for a second year at the Pensionnat Heger Charlotte sees with hindsight to have been a terrible mistake, for she has fallen in love with someone who, it is painfully clear, will never see her in a romantic light. It is the headmistress’s husband, Monsieur Constantin Heger, a man of impressive intellect and spirit, the first person outside her immediate family to take her seriously, the first man to treat her as a potential equal. But the thrill of having his attention in her first year, as a pupil, has been followed by misery in the second, as his junior colleague. The Hegers have become wary of Charlotte’s ardour and eccentricities, and much more formal in their dealings with her. And now the man she considered her soul-mate