Claire Harman's Charlotte Brontë biography read on BBC Radio 4

Hattie Morahan

BBC Radio 4's Book of the Week has been devoted this week to Claire Harman's new Charlotte Brontë biography. The five fifteen-minutes part are now available for a month:

Hattie Morahan reads Claire Harman's new and intimate biography of Charlotte Brontë, one of the nation's greatest novelists. This vivid and complex portrait is published ahead of the two hundredth anniversary of the writer's birth in April 2016.
The events of Charlotte Brontë's life - her motherless childhood on the Yorkshire moors, the early and tragic deaths of her beloved siblings and a great and unrequited love - all found their way into her novels. Claire Harman unravels the complexities of Bronte's life to reveal a fiercely passionate and determined woman who gave us some of our best loved novels and heroines, most famously Jane Eyre.
Claire Harman is an acclaimed and award winning biographer. Her books include Sylvia Townsend Warner, Fanny Burney, Robert Louis Stevenson and Jane's Fame which tells the story of Jane Austen's renown.
Hattie Morahan is an award winning actress of the stage and screen and has appeared in television dramas including, Sense and Sensibility, Lark Rise to Candleford and The Outcast. She won Best Actress at the 2012 Evening Standard Awards and the 2012 Critics' Circle Theatre Awards for her performance as Nora in The Doll's House.

Abridged by Julian Wilkinson
Produced by Elizabeth Allard.

Childhood
1/5 Claire Harman's intimate biography of one of Britain's greatest novelists.

Roe Head School
2/5 A decision to write to the poet laureate Robert Southey yields a surprising response.

In a Strange Land
3/5 At school in Brussels, Charlotte is powerfully attracted to her charismatic tutor.

Being Published
4/5 The Bronte sisters set about the business of bringing out their best-known books.

Affairs of the Heart
5/5 Charlotte grieves for her brother Branwell and her sisters Emily and Anne.