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Charlotte Bronte: A Passionate Life
Lyndall Gordon
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Description for Charlotte Bronte: A Passionate Life
Paperback. * From the highly acclaimed author of Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft comes this extraordinary analysis of Charlotte Bronte Num Pages: 480 pages, Section: 16, b/w pix. BIC Classification: BG. Category: (G) General (US: Trade). Dimension: 198 x 149 x 39. Weight in Grams: 348.
Winner of the Cheltenham Prize for Literature
In this groundbreaking and unconventional biography, Lyndall Gordon dismantles the insistent image of Charlotte Bronte as a modest Victorian lady, the slave to duty in the shadow of tombstones, revealing instead a strong and fiery woman who shaped her own life and transformed it into art.
'An exemplary biography' Jan Marsh, New Statesman
'Brilliant and powerful... Gordon brings us the closest we are ever likely to get to an understanding of the source of Charlotte Bronte's creative genius' Mark Bostridge, TES
'Sensitive, open-minded, vivid, full of psychological insight' ... Read moreJackie Wullschlager, Financial Times
'Magnificent... Gordon's best book and the best thing about Charlotte Bronte yet' Fiona MacCarthy, Observer
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Product Details
Publisher
Little, Brown Book Group
Place of Publication
London, United Kingdom
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 5 to 9 working days
About Lyndall Gordon
Lyndall Gordon was born in Cape Town and studied American Literature at Columbia University in New York. She came to England through the Rhodes Trust in 1973. She is the prize-winning author of biographies including The Imperfect Life of T. S. Eliot; Henry James: His Women and his Art; Charlotte Bronte: A Passionate Life; Virginia Woolf: A Writer's ... Read moreLife; Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft; Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family Feuds and Outsiders: Five Women Writers Who Changed the World. There are also two memoirs, Shared Lives, A Story of Women's Friendship, and Divided Lives, about her mother, whose spiritual journey opened up Eliot's poetry for her. She has written the 'Life' for the Eliot website: tseliot.com. Lyndall Gordon is a fellow of St Hilda's College, Oxford and a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She lives in Oxford. Show Less
Reviews for Charlotte Bronte: A Passionate Life
An exemplary biography: brisk but attentive to all nuance; lucid and open in its judgements; wearing its learning lightly but visibly
Jan Marsh
New Statesman
Brilliant and powerful . . . [Gordon] brings us the closest we are ever likely to get to an understanding of the source of Charlotte Bronte's creative genius . . . Bronte ... Read morebiography has, at last, come of age
Mark Bostridge
TES
Sensitive, open-minded, vivid, full of psychological insight, [Gordon's] book is a brilliant reappraisal of Charlotte Bronte's life, work, and the flow between the two . . . It is also a deeply moving story
Jackie Wullschlager
Financial Times
A magnificent biography focusing on the gaps and silences in Charlotte Brontë's emotionally turbulent life. This is Gordon's best book and the best thing about Charlotte Brontë yet
Fiona MacCarthy
Observer
A book full of brilliant suggestions which do engage our attention and interest from the first page to the last
Claire Tomalin
Independent on Sunday
Lyndall Gordon approaches her subject with the imagination of the true critic
Lucasta Miller
The Times
A classic biography . . . which combines scholarship with popular appeal
Roy Hattersley
Mail on Sunday
This is by far the most interesting portrait of Charlotte that I have read: those who know little of the Brontës will find it riveting; for those who know more, it is compulsive
Elizabeth Jane Howard
Lyndall Gordon has described perfectly - everywhere she has the most dextrous mastery over the masses of material - the long climb that had to be made from the Brontës' elf-lit country of their childhood...to the 'real' world of Charlotte's fiction...found Lyndall Gordon's portraits of [George] Smith [CB's publisher] and his mother...as vivid and masterly as Charlotte's own. She is convincing and deeply interesting about the last phase of Charlotte's life, her marriage
Jane Gardam
Spectator
Vivid, critical, sensitive
Hermione Lee
Sunday Times
What is new and interesting in this book, which is frequently brilliant and insightful and always perceptive in its discussion of the texts themselves, is Lyndall Gordon's view of Charlotte as a secret subversive who...carried on a covert existence of her own
Rebecca Fraser
Literary Review
Lyndall Gordon is an inspired and unconventional biographer who convincingly rescues Charlotte from the well-meaning but unimaginative Mrs Gaskell
Joan Smith
Independent on Sunday
Presents a radically new picture of [Charlotte Bronte]...In this revealing new portrait, Charlotte emerges as determined, courageous, and full of "a secret fire"
Good Book Guide
Lyndall Gordon writes almost as vividly as her subject...There's unlikely to be a better book about the author of Jane Eyre
Brian Morton
Scotland on Sunday
Wonderfully original readings of the work itself and a subtle tracing of the complicated path through which the writer succeeded in transmuting the difficult material of life to art
Newsday
An essential companion...is not intended as the straightforward biographical narrative, but as an interpretation of "the unseen space" in Charlotte's life (and by implication the unseen spaces in all writers)...brilliant and convincing
Elizabeth Buchan
Daily Express
A crisp study of a fascinating subject
Sunday Sun
The contradictions in CB's life are not only fully chronicled in Lyndall Gordon's splendid new biography, but also gracefully explicated to give the reader a vivid and emotionally detailed portrait of the novelist and her work
Michiko Kakutani
New York Times
A breathtaking, energetic and bold work
San Francisco Chronicle
An exemplary biography: brisk but attentive to all nuance; lucid and open in its judgements; wearing its learning lightly but visibly
Jan Marsh, New Statesman
Brilliant and powerful . . . [Gordon] brings us the closest we are ever likely to get to an understanding of the source of Charlotte Bronte's creative genius . . . Bronte biography has, at last, come of age
Mark Bostridge, TES
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