Childhood

Hattie Morahan reads Claire Harman's new and intimate biography of Charlotte Bronte, one of the nation's greatest novelists. This vivid and complex portrait is published ahead of the two hundredth anniversary of the writer's birth in April 2016.

The events of Charlotte Bronte's life - her motherless childhood on the Yorkshire moors, the early and tragic deaths of her beloved siblings and a great and unrequited love - all found their way into her novels. Claire Harman unravels the complexities of Bronte's life to reveal a fiercely passionate and determined woman who gave us some of our best loved novels and heroines, most famously Jane Eyre.

Claire Harman is an acclaimed and award winning biographer. Her books include Sylvia Townsend Warner, Fanny Burney, Robert Louis Stevenson and Jane's Fame which tells the story of Jane Austen's renown.

Hattie Morahan is an award winning actress of the stage and screen and has appeared in television dramas including, Sense and Sensibility, Lark Rise to Candleford and The Outcast. She won Best Actress at the 2012 Evening Standard Awards and the 2012 Critics' Circle Theatre Awards for her performance as Nora in The Doll's House.

Abridged by Julian Wilkinson
Produced by Elizabeth Allard.