Brontë Charlotte - Charlotte Brontë: a life

Claire Harman is the award-winning biographer ofSylvia Townsend Warner (1989), Fanny Burney (2000) and Robert Louis Stevenson (2005), and theauthor of the bestselling Janes Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World (2009). Shewrites regularly for the literary press on both sides of the Atlantic and was elected a Fellow ofthe Royal Society of Literature in 2006.

The Bront Parsonage Museum, Haworth, houses thelargest and most important collection of Brontana in the world and has been my frequentdestination during the writing of this book. I would like to thank all the staff of the museumand library for their kindness and help, but especially the Collections Manager, Ann Dinsdale,whose expertise and lively interest in my subject has made every visit to the Parsonage Librarya great pleasure. I would also like to thank Sarah Laycock for her unfailingly prompt andefficient answers to many queries and Linda Proctor-Mackley and Jenna Holmes for help along theway.

For the use of copyright materials andillustrations, and kind permission to quote from manuscripts in their collections, I would liketo thank the Bront Society, British Library, Brotherton Library, University of Leeds, CityArchive of Brussels, Keighley Local Studies Library, National Portrait Gallery, New York PublicLibrary, Pierpont Morgan Library and Royal Library of Belgium. Many individual members of staffat libraries, galleries and other institutions have generously given me their time, attentionand professional expertise during the research for this book, and I would particularly like tothank Maria Molestina and the staff of the Manuscript Reading Room, Pierpont Morgan Library, NewYork City; Isaac Gewirtz, Lyndsi Barnes and Joshua McKeon of the Henry W. and Albert A. BergCollection of New York Public Library; Elizabeth Denlinger of the Pforzheimer Collection, NewYork Public Library; Katie Thornton and Lucy Arnold of the Brotherton Library, University ofLeeds; Rebekah Lunt and Fran Baker of the John Rylands Library, Manchester; Kirsty Gaskin ofCliffe Castle Museum, Keighley; Caroline Brown of Keighley Local Studies Library; Timothy Engelsof Brown University Library; the staff of the Upper Reading Room of the Bodleian Library,Oxford; Dr David Smith of St Annes College Library, Oxford; and the staff of the ManuscriptRoom at the British Library. I am also very grateful to the staff of theHeinz Archive of the National Portrait Gallery, and especially to Tim Moreton, who in September2013 arranged a private viewing for me of George Richmonds portrait of Charlotte Bront, not atthat date on display in the gallery.

My debts to the many Bront scholars andbiographers who have preceded me will be clear from the books notes and bibliography, but Iwould like to pay particular tribute here to the fine biographies of Charlotte Bront by LyndallGordon, Rebecca Fraser and the late Winifred Grin, and to Lucasta Millers seminal study ofBront reception, The Bront Myth. Dr Juliet Barkers magisterial work, TheBronts, which drew together a wealth of primary and secondary material about the familyand their times and established a base of facts about them of unmatchable value and solidity,has been an invaluable resource, and I am also very grateful for Dr Barkers responses to myqueries during the writing of this book. Christine Alexanders extensive research into, andediting of, the Bront juvenilia has been of inestimable value to me, not least for herexpertise in deciphering and interpreting the minuscule handwriting used by the Bront siblingsin their earliest writings. I would also like to express my appreciation of the work ofChristine Alexander and Jane Sellars in their fine edition of The Art of the Brontsand that of Victor A. Neufeldt in The Poems of Charlotte Bront, Sue Lonoff in TheBelgian Essays and, in various other critical and editorial capacities, HerbertRosengarten, Edward Chitham, Patsy Stoneman, Tom Winnifrith, Sally Shuttleworth, Dinah Birch,Dudley Green, Stevie Davies, Marianne Thormhlen and Janet Gezari.

But my greatest debt is to the scholarship ofMargaret Smith, whose three-volume edition of The Letters of Charlotte Bront,published between 1994 and 2004, has opened out to readers the full scope and significance ofCharlotte Bronts correspondence. Smith published many items for the first time, correctedattributions, dates and readings, and set all of the letters in a context of impeccablyresearched annotation and commentary. Her edition has been the essential tool in my biography,as the fullest and most suggestive source to date of Charlotte Bronts behaviour and privateopinions, and I am very grateful for her generous permission to quote from her work.