Do we need another Brontë bio, given the dozen or so captivating meditations that have followed Elizabeth Gaskell’s brilliant and gossipy pioneer study, published in 1857? Of course we do. Harman’s story is about how writers write. Her subjects are not accidental geniuses, rather women with time.
This biography is careful, well-judged, nicely written — perfect if you’ve never read a biography of Charlotte Brontë published after 1857, not quite necessary if you have.
...a well-researched, wonderfully lucid, pleasingly written treatment of a most extraordinary woman...What makes this biography such a rewarding work is the poise and easy confidence with which Harman summons character and creative imagination, not only Charlotte's, but her sisters' too, showing, most crucially, how Charlotte's reading of their work unleashed a bold, hitherto absent 'emotional force' in her own writing.
[Harman] comes without intellectual agenda other than her own curiosity; her life of Charlotte doesn’t offer a brand-new perspective so much as a subtle shift in our understanding of this 'little woman,' as her contemporary William Thackeray called her. In the process of conjuring up a Charlotte animated by a zeal to write as well as by intense feelings of love and desire for Constantin Heger, the married professor she studied with in Brussels and eventually fictionalized in both Shirley and Villette, Harman infuses her with an intriguingly modernist spirit ... A Fiery Heart is a welcome and clear-sighted addition to a growing literature, one that respects the impenetrable mysteries that still cling to the female scribes of Haworth while offering a plausible perspective on what made them into quiet revolutionaries of the nineteenth-century novel.
In this powerful biography, Claire Harman shows that Charlotte Brontë was probably the first novelist to speak for bottom dogs everywhere...Ms. Harman has an impressive record in literary biography ( Robert Louis Stevenson, Fanny Burney, Sylvia Townsend Warner), and this one reveals the wonderfully mutinous side of Charlotte Brontë. But the tone of the book seems too placid and polite for such a stormy woman. There is much attention to domestic detail (exactly how carnivorous was Charlotte?) when there should be more penetrating literary analysis.
Charlotte Brontë's end seems to have been harrowing. But at least Harman's meticulous, affectionate biography reassures us that her afterlife is in good hands.
Claire Harman pays tribute to her predecessors and manages to refresh a perennial subject for biographers, although not without shortcomings. At her best, she reads the evidence anew, showing, for example, how far ahead of their time Charlotte, her sisters, and their brother, Branwell, were in creating a world of their own, one that can be understood in terms of what children are doing today.
In Charlotte Bronte: A Fiery Heart, Harman argues that Bronte was shaped as a writer by the tension she navigated between her father's parental neglect and her imaginary games with her siblings. Harman spends less time in this imaginary world than Bronte's previous biographers and critics — not dismissing its importance to the creative development of Bronte and her sisters, but giving equal weight to the real world around them.
[J]ust as Jane Eyre happily survives multiple readings (I’ve lost count on how many afternoons I’ve spent revisiting Thornfield Hall), so does the story of Charlotte Brontë — particularly when in the hands of a gifted teller. Just in time for the bicentennial anniversary of Brontë’s birth (April 21, 1816), A Fiery Heart is an engrossing, almost novelistic tale of a woman who since childhood embraced an uncanny ability 'to enter trance-like into her own imaginary world' and find everlasting stories there.
Brontë’s life bore little resemblance to Jane’s, but was in its own way as gothic, providing fuel for her novels. Literary biographer Claire Harman’s retelling of those events in Charlotte Brontë: A Fiery Heart, published to coincide with the bicentennial of Brontë’s birth, is an irresistible read even for those familiar with her story.
