Includes bibliographical references (pages 169-182) and index.
"Fact is often stranger than fiction": biographers on Charlotte Brontë -- "The world below": Charlotte Brontë's juvenilia -- "Low at my master's knee I bent": The professor -- I know no medium": Jane Eyre -- "How to endure without a sob": Shirley -- "This heretic narrative": Villette -- "All turned up in tumult": the poetry and letters