This critically acclaimed portrait of Charlotte Bronte looks beyond the insistent image of the modest Victorian lady, the slave to duty in the shadow of tombstones, to reveal a strong, fiery woman who shaped her own life and transformed it into art. Drawing on Bronte's unpublished letters, journals, early stories, and the manuscript of Villette, her last, unfinished novel, Gordon takes readers into the unseen space in which Bronte was able to live and create.