Critically acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic, Lyndall Gordon’s portrait of Charlotte Bront?looks beyond the insistent image of the modest Victorian lady, the slave to duty in the shadow of tombstones. Instead, she reveals a strong, fiery woman who shaped her own life and transformed it into art. This biography looks at the shared gifts and class ambitions of the Bront?family; at Charlotte’s ally, the active feminist Mary Taylor; her demanding mentor, Constantin Heger; and her publisher, George Smith, as Charlotte strove to possess them in life and in fiction. Drawing on unpublished letters, the Roe Head Journal, early stories, the manuscript of Villette, and her last, unfinished novel, Gordon explores the gaps in Charlotte’s life, taking us into that unseen space in which this woman of genius was able to live and create.