Charlotte Bronte wrote Jane Eyre in a white heat of suppressed fury — fury at the poverty that trapped her family, the gender constraints that limited her ambitions, and the unrequited love for a married Belgian professor that had humiliated her. The novel that shocked Victorian England with its passionate, defiant heroine was drawn directly from a life of confinement, loss, and burning resentment that Charlotte channeled into fiction because she had no other outlet.

This episode traces Charlotte from the Haworth parsonage through the deaths that decimated her family, the secret letters to Constantin Heger, and the novel that announced a new kind of female voice in English literature.

• The Bronte childhood at Haworth parsonage and the imaginary worlds that trained three novelists
• The Brussels years, the infatuation with He ...