The Annual Brontë Society Lecture this year was delivered by Claire Harman in a venue relatively new to the occasion - the Hall Green Baptist Chapel. The annual church service followed it, in the same place. This was because St Michael's and All Angel's is currently still being reordered and reroofed.Charlotte Brontë - A Life seems to have been read by a large percentage of the appreciative audience, though the queue for signed copies stretched around the church. "Her protagonist is both fervent dreamer and cool realist, imaginative artist and clear-eyed professional," wrote Kathryn Hughes in her Observer review last year, and the clear-eyed Claire Harman showed just why that is an accurate assessment of her work, which moves on significantly from Gaskell (naturally) and also from more recent biographers like Juliet Barker.
In the photo, she is sitting with Audrey Hall, a leading authority on Ellen Nussey, and who recently became one of the Society's Honorary Vice-Presidents.
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