Hi, Graham! One of the questions I meant to ask you in our previous author interview has to do with Harriet Martineau. She wrote a negative review of Villette that led to Charlotte’s ending their heretofore friendly correspondence. Do you think Martineau’s critiques were merited? And, beyond that, what did Charlotte’s response reveal about herself? Martineau seemed hurt by the fallout, or at the very least, befuddled. Thanks for your answer!
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Hi Peg! Thanks for this question. Harriet Martineau’s criticism was that Charlotte placed too much importance on love being redemptive - in Villette, and in her fiction generally - and there is some truth to this. Other friends of Charlotte noticed this about her too. In fact Elizabeth Gaskell tried to coach her away from that perspective. Martineau was baffled by Charlotte’s sensitivity to this but what stung Charlotte was the sense that Martineau took an essentially private observation and turned it into a public generalisation about her work. Charlotte sensed a bit of opportunism there, which Harriet Martineau would display again once Charlotte died.
Thanks for this great question!
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Hi Graham. I read Jane Eyre in high school (late 60’s) and was not aware of Charlotte’s life and the tragedies she suffered as a child and the loss of her siblings in such a short period of time.
I am impressed with the intense research about Elizabeth Gaskell and how she wrote *The Life of Charlotte Bronte.*This brought to life the trials Charlotte faced from her father that made her feel socially and mentally inferior. At first I disliked Arthur Nicholls, however my feelings about him softened after they were married and their relationship gave her confidence. It’s devastating that due to her early death she was unable to take advantage of the new found confidence and pursue her talents.
Your writing moved me to the point where I felt present on the scene. This is important because in today’s culture it is difficult to imagine what Elizabeth had to endure when writing the story of Charlotte’s life.
Thank you for enriching my life with a better understanding of the Brontë sisters.
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Hi Graham, Thanks for joining BookBrowse. I just ordered your book and I am looking forward to reading it and learning more about the Brontes.
This might only be a local activity but where I live there are fierce debates, you are either in the Jane Eyre or the Wuthering Heights camp. You cannot be in both. It is based solely on which one you prefer. I am a Jane Eyre camper, how about you? And no, you cannot be in both camps…that is not how it is played. (Ther are lots of drinks based on which camp is bigger on certain nights…there has even been spots in carpool lanes traded to win votes. And if you can imagine how long the carpool lines are for schoo drop off, you can tell this is serious stuff (LOL) But it has encouraged some to read the books….so all is good!
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Hi Dee, how could you do this to me? Don’t make me choose… 
[That said, I’m actually in the Wuthering Heights camp…]
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Hi Lynne, well - I’m blown away by your message. Thank you so much for these kind words. I’m honoured you’ve read my book already and thrilled you felt I took you into the same rooms as Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell. When I was writing it, I felt I was there too.
Sincerely, thank you for this.
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This is a great coincidence….I have had a nagging feeling that I should reread Jane Eyre. So I bought a new copy the other day and now here you are! Knowing about the lives of the sisters before reading/rereading the novels might be a good way of going about it. Agree?
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Absolutely, Holly! My biography starts after Jane Eyre has been published. You know, Jane Eyre is a novel that’s never the same twice. Do you ever get that? I read it as a teenager and most of it went over my head. But when I went back to it a few years it all felt very different. It was dynamite. Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is the same. I had to grow up before I realised how harrowing it was.
I’m curious about how the book came to be. Did you approach a publisher with your idea and then start writing, or did you have a finished draft when you started speaking to people? How long did it take for it to get snatched up by a publisher?
It looks like The Invention of Charlotte Brontë got published in the UK before it was in the USA. Was it a package deal (i.e., did a publicist or agent handle all sales at once) or did you/someone have to approach publishers in each country individually?
Was there a part of the book that was a lot of fun for you to write? And was there a part that was particularly difficult for you?
I knew that writing about Charlotte Brontë’s death would be emotionally difficult for me, as someone who loves her. And it was, but I needed to keep my emotions in check and not exploit or sentimentalise what happened. So, yes, that was difficult. Generally though, once all my research was completed it felt like the book was writing itself, or I was trying to keep up with rapid dictation!
No, I didn’t use an agent or a publicist. The Invention of Charlotte Brontë was published first in the UK in the summer of 2024. Someone at my wonderful US publisher, Pegasus, read it immediately and within a few weeks they snapped up the North American rights from the UK publisher. They published it in North America and Canada in August 2025.
Another good question! Often books are pitched to publishers or agents and if they are accepted, the author is commissioned to write it. But like most people, I did it the hard way. I wrote the book first and then tried to get it published. After I finished writing it, I started looking for an agent. Over a period of about 4 months I pitched it to 19 agents and every one of them rejected the idea without asking to see the book, saying it was too niche, not commercial and no-one would be interested in women’s history set before 1900.
Just when I was wondering how to get anyone to interested, a writer friend recommended the UK publisher The History Press, so I took a leap and made an unsolicited pitch to them. To my amazement their commissioning editor emailed back the same day expressing interest and asked if we could speak on the phone. We did, and the editor asked if she could read a 6 page sample. I sent it to her and she signed it on those 6 pages.
(As a footnote, an agent who was interested in the concept but not enough to sign me asked if I could let him know the book’s eventual fate. And one day, not long ago, I was able to tell him it had not only been published but hit No 1 in the Amazon UK biography bestsellers!)
Do you think the book was an easier sell to a US publisher? Or do you feel you just got lucky with Pegasus?
I never really thought about how intimately you had to have gotten to know Charlotte, and how much of what you wrote had to have been like writing about a close friend.
Did you feel that way about her sisters, or was Charlotte special in some way?
Going back to your source material, did you have access to actual letters, or were you limited to copies/computer files? Considering all the tiny bits of info you had to comb through to form a complete picture, how did you organize all that information? As I’m thinking about it this morning my mind is boggles by the immensity of the project.
I’m very lucky with Pegasus - they appreciate great biographies and histories and their list is stellar. So, I’m very honoured to join their ranks.
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Research brought down an avalanche of materials in all formats! Digital editions of manuscripts and books, paper copies, first editions of the Brontës’ and Gaskell’s works, new scholarly editions… The holy grail is always the original manuscripts. And yes, I got to read them in my own hands. It was quite a powerful experience, bringing home the human-ness of these legendary figures. (This aside I prefer to use digital copies, where I don’t have to worry about them being damaged in any way!)
Collecting the information was a task in itself. So much has been written about the Brontës since the 1850s that much of it has become a kind of folklore that’s accepted and repeated without interrogation. While I had to read every book and newspaper article about them published between 1857 and 1920, and all the key biographies from then until the present, I didn’t want to accept them all at face value. I excluded most of them and based my biography solely on the first hand sources - the letters written at the time and the later accounts written by those with first hand memories of events.
To organise all this information, I created a timeline of every day of every year in a 20 year period between 1840 and 1860, listing every verifiable event in the lives of the Brontës and Elizabeth Gaskell for that period, along with citations to the evidence of the documentary sources. I knew my book would only focus on a tiny portion of this - the years 1850 to 1858 - but I wanted to make sure it was planted in a very firm foundation of verifiable facts. I was obsessive about checking details could be authenticated to a source - even checking adjectives I used to ensure I could write with justification that someone, for example, ‘hurried’.
Why did I go to these lengths? I’m fascinated by how we know what we know. Evidence is everything. What can be evidenced can be recovered. And it’s the duty of historians like me to reconstruct as carefully and precisely as is possible.
In some ways, yes, I did feel ‘close’ to Charlotte. But that only means I thought about her a lot: I considered what she’d written in letters, what others had written about her, and then what we can deduce of her motivations. So, in some ways it was like writing about someone I knew. But I never let myself become familiar with her. That’s the downfall of many a biographer. I remembered throughout that she was still a complete stranger and much about her - her voice, her body language, her face - was unknown to me.