Press Reviews

• Jan Marsh, New Statesman

  An exemplary biography: brisk but attentive to all nuance; lucid and open in its judgements; wearing its learning lightly but visibly

• Mark Bostridge, TES

  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

• Jan Marsh

  New Statesman

  An exemplary biography: brisk but attentive to all nuance; lucid and open in its judgements; wearing its learning lightly but visibly

• Mark Bostridge

  TES

  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

• Jackie Wullschlager

  Financial Times

  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

• Fiona MacCarthy

  Observer

  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

• Claire Tomalin

  Independent on Sunday

  A book full of brilliant suggestions which do engage our attention and interest from the first page to the last

• Lucasta Miller

  The Times

  Lyndall Gordon approaches her subject with the imagination of the true critic

• Roy Hattersley

  Mail on Sunday

  A classic biography . . . which combines scholarship with popular appeal

• Elizabeth Jane Howard

  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

• Jane Gardam

  Spectator

  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

• Hermione Lee

  Sunday Times

  Vivid, critical, sensitive

• Rebecca Fraser

  Literary Review

  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

• Joan Smith

  Independent on Sunday

  Lyndall Gordon is an inspired and unconventional biographer who convincingly rescues Charlotte from the well-meaning but unimaginative Mrs Gaskell

• Good Book Guide

  Presents a radically new picture of [Charlotte Bronte]...In this revealing new portrait, Charlotte emerges as determined, courageous, and full of "a secret fire"

• Brian Morton

  Scotland on Sunday

  Lyndall Gordon writes almost as vividly as her subject...There's unlikely to be a better book about the author of Jane Eyre

• Newsday

  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

• Elizabeth Buchan

  Daily Express

  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

• Sunday Sun

  A crisp study of a fascinating subject

• Michiko Kakutani

  New York Times

  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

• San Francisco Chronicle

  A breathtaking, energetic and bold work