Charlotte Brontë: Cinderella or ugly sister?

Preparations for next year’s bicentennial celebrations of the birth of Charlotte Brontë haven’t exactly got off to a flying start. At Haworth Parsonage the Brontë Society is in disarray after Bonnie Greer, its resigning president, used one of her Jimmy Choo shoes as a gavel to try to bring the membership to order, and subsequently castigated some members as ‘malevolent lamebrains’.

Three rounds of applause then for Claire Harman’s superb retelling of Charlotte’s story, which focuses anniversary attention where it should be: on the extraordinary creativity of the three sisters who spent most of their short lives in Haworth, that strange, windswept moorland village, and whose tragic destinies possessed all the drama of the plotlines of one of their famous gothic novels. ‘Fiction,’ as G.H. Lewes wrote of the first life of Charlotte, by her friend Mrs Gaskell, ‘has nothing more wild, touching and heart-strengthening to place above it.’