An intimate insight into Charlotte Bront--euml--;'s life at Haworth Parsonage, her experiences in a Belgian school, and her passionate attraction to Constantin Heger, husband of the school's directress. We learn of the astonishing success of Jane Eyre, Charlotte's agony over the early death of her brother Branwell and of Emily and Anne, and her secret correspondence with and tragically brief happy marriage to Arthur Nicholls, cut short by her death in 1855. - ;These letters give an insight into the life of a writer whose novels continue to be bestsellers. They reveal much about Charlotte Bront--euml--;'s personal life, her family relationships, and the society in which she lived. Many of her early letters are written with vigour, vivacity, and an engaging aptitude for self-mockery. In contrast, her letters to her 'master', the Belgian schoolteacher Constantin Heger, reveal her intense, obsessive longing for some response from him. Other. letters are deeply moving, when Charlotte endures the agony of her brother's and sisters' untimely deaths. We learn also of the progress of her writing, including the astonishing success of Jane Eyre, and of her contacts with her publishers, including the young George Smith; and we recognize in her letters. the life-experiences which are transmuted into the art of her novels. Contemporary society is brilliantly described in her letters from London, when she writes of her encounters with famous writers and with critics of her novels. We hear too of her visits to art galleries, operas, and the Great Exhibition of 1851 at the Crystal Palace. Dramatic letters written in December 1852 convey the 'turbulence of feeling' in the Haworth curate Arthur Nicholls's proposal of marriage to her and in Mr. Bront--euml--;'s violent reaction to it; and we subsequently hear of her secret correspondence with her suitor, her

father's eventual consent, and her tragically brief happy marriage, cut short by her death in March 1855. - ;Margaret Smith's new Selected Letters is extremely welcome...it represents an impressive achievement of choice; it reads remarkably fluently, and gives us almost all of Charlotte's most powerful letters...This scholarly and affordable volume provides vivid access to Charlotte Bront--euml--;'s inner life through an admirably well-chosen core of accurate, annotated texts. - Patsy Stoneman, Review of English Studies;a very welcome selection at an affordable price... Margaret Smith has more than earned the plaudits of Bront--euml--; lovers for her patient and scrupulous work, in establishing reliable texts of Charlotte's letters, and in annotating them so expertly. - Mark Bostridge, Independent on Sunday;enhances her reputation as a woman of wit and imagination - Hannah Hudson, Tribune;a perfect introduction (or re-introduction) to Charlotte Bront--euml--;'s epistolary style, a highly valuable, first-hand source of information on the author who wrote some of the most important novels in English Literature and her siblings. Reading these accurate transcriptions of Charlotte Bront--euml--;'s letters is pure magic - a momentary lapse into what her correspondents might have felt. - BronteBlog.